Fallout 3: Quests and gallery

A day in the life of a wastelander scavenger.

Fallout 3, even after only a few days of gametime, is turning out to be one helluva of a game.

As we said earlier in the week, one of the strengths of the game is the fact that tough monster are always tough, unlike the odd auto-levelling seen in Oblivion. What this means is that early on, as you are going about questing, you have to be super careful about how to cross the landscape.

And the quests, the ones we've completed so far, can be pretty in depth, leading to lots of searching about and travelling. The last thing you want is to finally show up at a villain's lair only to be half dead and limping.

Case in the point is an early quest that sees you delivering a letter to someone's parents in a nearby town. Just getting from the hub of Megaton to the township of Arefu is an adventure, seeing you cross paths with a number of raiders and mutants. Even when you get to Arefu, the guy guarding the ramp leading up to the ruined overpass the town squats on shoots at you before realising you're not a bandit or worse!

From there, you discover the nefarious activity of a group calling itself The Family. They've been attacking and slaughtering livestock; what's worse, it looks as though they've snuck in and killed the family you were looking for, and taken their son. With three possible locations to search, and the advice that they only travel by night, you set out.

Of course, this time, we set out a little more circumspectly. Crouching makes you 'hidden', so that's to be taken advantage of. The game's outstanding draw distance also means you can spot trouble coming, and take appropriate action - which you will need to do, as a lot of nasties have a very long spot radius.

For all of Fallout 3's much vaunted humour (and it's there, trust me), the grimly realistic physics, damage and combat model make it nonetheless one of the more realistic games of its type.

Anyway, the three possible locations turned out to be useless, but we did pick up some good info from a ghoul running an underground drug lab producing ghoul-strength pharms.

Did we mention the humour? So, of we went in search of the Meresti Metro station...