Fallout 3

Apocalyptic wasteland: 1. David Hollingworth. 0.

Over the weekend we finally got a chance to fire up Fallout 3. After all the hype over drug-taking and the game getting refused classification, it was easy to forget that beyond all that there was an actual game to enjoy. So when the opening credits rolled, and we started getting drawn in to the irradiated future, we were very impressed to find out that the game behind the hype was well worth the wait.

So far we’re only about four levels into the game, and we’re still very much finding our feet and getting used to some of the game’s features, but so far Fallout 3’s looking to be just about the most rich and rewarding action RPG we’ve ever played.

Like Oblivion before it, character creation in F3 happens in-game, and it starts at your birth – which is quite possibly the most interesting use of first person perspective ever in a game. At this stage you meet your Father, a respected doctor in the underground community of Vault 101, and he conducts a gene scan to find out what you’re going to grow up to look like. This segues into a screen to choose your appearance; the options are all that large, but it does guarantee a certain familial resemblance.

Though there are some really rad ‘taches. Awesome.

After your birth – and the death of your mother moments later – you next get to experience life as a one year old taking its first steps, then as a ten year old being given your first BB gun, and then a few iterations of your teenage years and you finding your place in the workforce of Vault 101. Things go... awry, and you’re forced to flee the Vault to find your father, who has in turn run off into the wastes.

As you leave, you get a warning screen that you’re about to finalise your character, and you can review the skills you’ve generated and tweaked with throughout the ‘growing up’ phase. But, frankly, it does a pretty good job of giving you the skills you’re going to need or that you want to take advantage of.

And it certainly makes you feel very attached to your character from the outset.

Of course, you quickly discover that while the Vault may have been boring, at least it was relatively safe. From the glare that nearly blinds you the first time you step into natural sunlight, to the mutated denizens of a devastated Washington DC, the world above ground is a dangerous place. Very dangerous, in fact, as some early exploring showed us...

Unlike Oblivion, which matched the power of NPCs and monsters to your own level no matter what order you explore the world, F3 makes sure you know just how nasty everything else is, including the environment itself. Your rad meter constantly pings off the scale, and if untreated radiation sickness is just around the corner. Enemies can cripple your limbs, slowing you down until you can rest or heal, and if you get ambushed by tougher opponents, simply running away is often more dangerous than standing and fighting, simply because it’s so easy to blunder into ever tougher enemies in your blind headlong flight.

Ammunition and the weapons that use it are quite easy to find, but going in guns blazing will see you chew through ammo fast. Often, it's best to sneak around, kill only when you have to, and conserve those stimp-packs!

Of course, there’s also a simple joy to be had from kiting a super-mutant into a small town, letting it tear up a few bodies before getting killed, and then looting all the corpses.

Did we mention it's hard to play nice?

Like in many RPGs, it’s possible to steer conversations in many directions. F3 isn’t quite as flawless in this regard as a game like Mass Effect, but you always have a minimum of three choices when talking to NPCs, and certain skills and perks often give you more options, like lying outright or possibly trying to charm someone. So far, we’re trying to play things pretty nice, but already the bleakness of life above ground is making that a tough call – which is a nice touch in and of itself. When you start to feel that possibly the Raiders simply killing and looting their way around the wastes have the right idea, it’s a testament to the designer’s efforts at verisimilitude in F3’s world design.

As we said, it’s early days yet, and we’re still finding our way in this new blasted world. But we’re having a helluva time so far. Expect a full review in an upcoming issue of the magazine, and then online. We'll also look to take a mess of screenshots over the next day or two, so expect an image gallery of our (mis)adventures, too!