Fallout 3

Bethesda Softworks has a monopoly on hunting ten-foot-tall green mutants with a scoped magnum in a radioactive badlands while wearing a polka-dot sundress and singing along to the greatest hits of Bing Crosby and Billie Holiday, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Therein lies the artistic wonder of Fallout 3, a deliciously ironic look into a science fiction world as envisioned by the speculative fiction of 1950s America. Though it shared a release month with Bioshock, another game that banked on the revival of the eerily cheerful 50s visual and musical culture, Fallout is nevertheless an excellent example of well-executed originality that stands alone in a sea of generic shooters and hack n’ slashes.

Despite the occasional dreariness of walking for hours through largely similar brown-and-black landscapes, one cannot argue that the visual style of Fallout is special – both in rendering mundane background scenery and in expressing the ethos of the destroyed world through preserved artifacts from the 20th century. Wherever one goes, one is bound to find something both unique and visually interesting – something this reviewer, a hater of monotony above all other video game vices, values greatly in a gaming experience.

Regrettably, Fallout’s impressive visuals do not quite extend to rendering people convincingly. Bethesda Game Studios was able to create human-shaped objects with facial features positioned relatively where they should be, but that’s about it – the uncanny valley has come to visit Fallout 3, and its dead-fish eyes and rigid body animations are here to stay. An unfortunate and jarring flaw that abounds in many of Bethesda’s free-roam RPGs (see The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion), the robotic faces of the people you meet can sometimes downright jar you out of the pleasurable immersion-trance you’ve fallen into while hunting mutants in the wasteland.

If you click with the rest of the game as I did, you soon learn to look upon these unnatural people as an endearing flaw that simply adds to the its character. However, I found the issue harder to reconcile when I found that it extended to one of the most important parts of an RPG: the main character design. Not for lack of trying, I was never able to get my waifish, awkward Lone Wanderer to look anything like the harbinger of justice her deeds suggested she was. Admittedly, this speaks to the haphazard and cobbled-together feel of the world Fallout 3 so skillfully builds, but I couldn’t help feeling dissatisfied with the thoroughly unimpressive person I was forced to be. When I play a game long enough to become the legendary, omni-talented last hope of humanity, I feel that my avatar should deliver.

One last gripe: playing Fallout 3 for a few hours will make you wish that Bethesda had invested a little more time and money in bug-testing. Odd glitches abound in this game, but it’s only when they become gamebreaking that they pose a real threat to enjoyment – which, unfortunately, happens much more often than one often expects from a commercial release. I still vividly remember the day I permanently lost my traveling companion because his sprite did not load when I changed zones, causing him to slowly lose health until he died and took a hundred and seventy pounds of my equipment with him. Another time, I was outright barred from completing a vital storyline quest because the NPC I needed to speak to had simply vanished from the game. There are very technically tricky ways to get around the latter, but this type of enjoyment-ruining experience has turned many a gamer away in sheer frustration, and it takes a dedicated fan to work past the really nasty ones.

Fallout 3's sound design is good but unsurprising: rifles sound like rifles, laser pistols go pew pew, and your rocky footsteps create a pleasing, melancholy echo across the soundscape. Depending on the quality of your personal setup, the aural ambience really comes through during certain horror sections, where the chilling shrieks of zombielike feral ghouls will make your spine ramrod-straight as you look behind yourself in real life to make sure you aren’t about to be ambushed from behind your couch. Voice acting is similarly well delivered; even though you do have to look straight at those terrible dead-eyed people puppets while listening to it, most lines come naturally and don’t make you think twice about them, which goes a long way to making the player feel comfortable – and minimizing those awkward moments playing a badly acted game in front of family or friends.

 The music, on the other hand, is the real star of Fallout 3 is where that special brand of Bethesda genius comes into play. Played through the Capital Wasteland’s very own Galaxy News Radio Station (available at first in certain locations on your Pip-Boy, and across the entire map after certain quests), Fallout 3 boasts a veritable treasure trove of easy-listening classics from the vault of lost American culture. It’s nearly impossible to explain the emotions evoked by this distinctive soundtrack, so I’ll say only this: if nothing else, the perfect dissonance between hyperviolent gun-and-fist gameplay and the alternately soothing and hyperactive sounds of 50s crooner culture will stick in your mind long, long after you put this game away.

The controls will initially strike most gamers as finicky and difficult. The Pip-Boy menu system, for example, operates through numerous layers of input, each of which requires a separate set of buttons to operate (shoulder buttons to switch between major categories, thumbsticks to switch within those, and further combinations of the Y and A buttons to perform tasks within the individual categories), often leading one to spend a lot of time fiddling with menus and generally doing things slowly and wrong until one’s fingers learn how to maneuver properly.

The heads-up display and general mechanisms of play are in no way forgiving to beginners, and may well scare away those unwilling to put in the effort to learn them. In my first few rounds with the game I struggled to find my way through simplest objectives, and managed to end up running around in the nude during the entire first hour-long escape sequence (many of my acquaintances never even made it out of the Vault). Fighting is equally difficult to jump into for beginners, as it involves a specialized brand of equipment micromanagement that many casual players may not pick up on right away.

These problems don’t last long, however; though the learning curve is steep, once you get to your figurative feet and started picking up the tricks of the trade, playing Fallout 3 becomes smooth and instinctive – better yet if you're on the 360, as the iconic V.A.T.S. aim-assist feature effectively reduces the headaches involved with FPS aiming on the cumbersome Xbox 360 controller. Just make sure you know what you’re doing out of the start gate, and I’m willing to bet you’ll have picked up one of the better gaming experiences of this generation.

Whether or not you’ll get your money’s worth of playtime out of Fallout 3 is dependent wholly on how invested you personally become in its apocalyptic sandbox. I never leave the game on when I’m not there, haven’t let others play on my file, and play in easily controlled bursts of 1 or 2 hours, and yet I am fairly certain I’ve clocked upwards of 60 hours in this game.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that Fallout 3 is fun in a unique and addictive way – at times, it seems to very realistically represent the visual and political state of a post-apocalyptic America, but most of the time it is very clearly a world of fantasy, and it was the constant sense of discovery and intrigue that kept me coming back. There is simply so much to do, so much to see and uncover, that achieving the coveted RPG standard of 100% completion may seem like a pipe dream to even experienced players. If you are easily sucked in, come into this game expecting to spend ridiculous amounts of time with it, and then to do it again a second and third time just to experiment with alternate builds and character types.

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