Oh boy, this is one hell of a game and I'm glad I finally got around to
playing it proper. Fallout 3 is the third installment in the Fallout
game series and the first one made by Bethesda. Now, Bethesda is a
rubbish company, but they do know how to make at-least some good games
-and this is definitely one of them. It takes place in the scenario of
"what if society collapsed due to nuclear Armageddon in the 1950s?" I've
yet to play any of the other Fallouts, but even playing this game
alone, it has a great world with a lot of story to uncover. driving the
player as they explore the wastelands is a main story-line to follow -
finding out why your father suddenly left the vault one day. In addition
to that, the world is populated by all sorts of colorful (well, pale
green mostly) characters with their own stories and quests for you go on
as well. You're also given a great deal of freedom in how you interact
with your world. You can be a sweetheart - you can be a piece of shit-
and you can be something more gray and nuanced than either of those, as
well. All of these will affect the game-play, from the type of
followers you can have join you in your adventures, to the quests you
can get - possibly other things as well. Fallout 3 is such a *huge* game
that even after putting in well over 100 hours into it there's still so
much of the game I've not seen.
The visuals are bleak in
a way that I enjoy, although some people have suffered a depressive
effect from the game's atmosphere, so do bear that in mind if you plan
to try the game. Exploration in the wastelands is fun and adventurous,
and while interior areas often are, too, they can get a bit samey and
maze-like at times, making it easy to get lost. Your pip boys map system
is fairly helpful, but it does have some issues, such as not showing
the multiple floors of an area separate from one another, or showing
strange directions when trying to access certain parts of the DC Ruins.
The character models are a nice improvement from some of the ones in
Oblivion who had silly plastic-looking hair and such. 
The
combat is great fun. There are ton of weapons you can find as you
explore, including special unique ones that are one of a kind. You can
fight in a more tradition first person shooter/melee style, but you also
have a neat tool called "V.A.T.S." which lets you freeze time and
target specific body parts on your foes. The game doesn't skimp on the
gore and you can satisfyingly splatter your foes all over the place with
the right perks and weapons, which is pretty cathartic when they're a
slave owner or the like.
The sound design is very
well done. The music is very atmospheric, and using radios or your pip
boy, you can listen to classic 50s tunes as well. Almost every lien of
dialogue is voice acted, which makes the world feel that much more
alive.
And if I haven't emphasized it enough, there's
tons of customization you can do with your character that adds tons of
replay value. Right from the go you can fiddle with their appearance,
and like any good RPG, there's all sorts of abilities and stats to build
on as you level up. You start with a “S.P.E.C.I.A.L." system which
gives you some base stats, and then as you level up through game-play
you can add points to all sorts of abilities (most of which will affect
how you can interact with people and objects) and a plethora of perks
that give you special abilities.
Now, I stand by my
statement that this is one of the coolest games I've ever played, but
that doesn't mean it's without flaw. I've got a few beefs with this
game, as great as it is, and we're going to get into that now. 
Look
up the "Jim Sterling Bethesda dance" video on YouTube if you want to
set the mood for the critique part of my review *chuckles*
Well....Bethesda, Bethesda...where do I start with you?
I'll
first touch on something related to the voice acting that I praised
earlier. It is very well done and immersive, but I noticed a frequent
problem in the game. I made my character base don myself, a woman-type
meat-Popsicle sort of vault dweller hero. Despite this fact, there were
*MANY* instances of my character being mis-gendered by others through
the game. Is this result of an "innocent" mistake of shoddy programming?
Or is this another symptom of casual sexism in the gaming industry
where female player characters were treated as less of a priority and
poorly implemented into the code, causing characters to use the wrong
dialogue lines throughout the game? I don't really have way of knowing
if it's one, the other or both - , but it's a pretty bad flaw either
way, considering it even occurs during main story-line quest dialogue.
It's the sort of thing that can be especially uncomfortable if you're a
trans person playing the game. This game is 12 years old and I played it
on Xbox One, hardware that is still being supported, so for this and
all the other games problems, I have to ask - is Bethesda ever going to
fix these bugs?
On the topic of "uncomfortable stuff"
I'll also lead into some of the game's questionable design choices, as
well. This is a game world where people get tortured, mutilated and sold
into slavery, where people eat their own families and can choose to
nuke entire towns just for "being unsightly" or having "undesirables"
living in them - but Bethesda made kids in the game invincible. It's a
break in the immersion and shows serious inconsistency. If you're going
to make a games world a genuinely dark and bleak one, please don't then
backpedal in an attempt to pander to Americas creepy child
worship/fetishization. In a real apocalyptic wasteland, kids would be
just as at risk as anyone else. 
Another thematic thing
int he game that rubbed me the wrong way is another example of that
subconscious christian bias that tends to seep into every form of
popular media. Now before you get pissy and start throwing around stupid
buzzwords like "SJW" on your angry little gamerboy blog, I understand
the world *around* the player having a creepy christian conservative
mentality - it is a world where society broke down during the 1950s,
after all. People focuses would shift to simply trying to survive, and
their social outlooks would likely remain based in the bible-thumping
"father knows best" mentality of that era. However, there are parts of
the game where other characters attempt to impose christian ideology on
you, and in a world where the player is given so many options to express
themselves, there never seemed to be any dialogue options (that I
encountered, anyway) for opposing this particular form of evil. At most,
you get to either ignore or endorse it. The game's karma system even
depicts the player as resembling jesus if they have good karma, and a
stereotypical devil if they have bad karma. Not the most comfortable
symbolism for a player like me who is both LGBT and a Satanist, having
spent most of my life having to defend myself from this religion.
I
know that Bethesda games are notorious for being buggy, but I
thankfully only encountered a few others during my first play-through.
The game did crash twice, and I'm told by my family (long-time players
of the Fallout series) that this is likely to happen more often the more
you explore of the world. That's....pretty bad. I've also had enemy
rag-dolls do bizarre things like fly up into the sky, or turn into
flailing stretchy polygon garbage during emotional cut-scene, ruining
the moment. Follower AI can be a bit troubling at times, too. I had
instances where I would ask Star Paladin Cross to stick to using ranged
weapons for her own safety, only to have her disregard the order and try
to fight Yogwais with her super-sledge, getting herself killed in the
process.
Some good news in terms of bugs and design flaws
is that there appears to be a good-sized modding community for the PC
version of Fallout 3, and there are likely fixes for many, maybe even
all, of these problems. Still, Bethesda should be fixing the bugs
themselves, not leaving them for the fans to take care of.
Despite my
complaints here, I still maintain that is a fantastic title, more than
worth checking out. Some of the problems I mentioned, while bothersome
to me, may be less so for others and things like the invincible monster
children and creepy christian characters are only present in specific
areas, so if they're the sort of thing to bother you as much as they did
me, you thankfully won't need to deal with them too terribly often - or
even at all, depending on how you play the game. The good definitely
outweighs the bad in this game, but always remember - while Fallout is
awesome, Bethesda is naughty ;)
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