Some games aren’t for everyone, even if the game in question is an enormous, free-roaming, achingly detailed, non-linear role-playing romp through a wonderfully thought-out alternate reality future. Some games are either too hardcore in their focus on certain game elements and mechanics, leading to an inaccessible experience for most, while other games try to focus on too many elements at once and end up diluted, leading to an indecisive, washed out experience.

Other games, still, attempt the impossible, focussing on all elements, trying to provide an experience of stunning quality in all areas; Fallout 3 is such a game, and manages to provide an experience to which players must completely surrender their attention, or they will miss out on the opportunity to become truly lost in the narrative and the world that has been so pain-stakingly created for them.

Genre classification for Fallout 3 is easier than it would have you believe - it’s a role-playing game, in the truest sense of the terminology. Participants, or players, in the world of Fallout 3 play a role in the events of that world, and affect the lives of as many or as little of the other inhabitants as you choose, with your actions within this world. Viewing the environments from a first-person perspective (and third-person if you really have to…) and the appearance of weapons in the first-person shouldn’t confuse the issue - this is no first-person shooter.

Traditional RPG elements also reveal themselves in the appearance of character and item statistics, levelling your character, collecting items and gradually improving sets of skills that will ultimately help you move through the hostile environment with progressing ease. This aids the role-playing aspect of Fallout 3 as you are able to decide how you want to interact with the world and how to tackle specific challenges, be those challenges in the social realm of people and politics, or the anti-social realm of guns and gore.

As mentioned, the primary view-point used in Fallout 3 is first-person, allowing you to more effectively speak with other characters in the world, with the tried and tested dialogue trees that help you choose whether to be polite and move through the conversation to gain a person’s trust, or insult and demean your current fellow conversationalist and gain their scorn. It’s up to you, and further cements your involvement in the world as you effectively play the role of courteous adventurer or offensive brigand, or anything in-between.

As you move through the environments, travelling from villages, cities and complexes scattered throughout the world, you’re sure to encounter resistance to your very presence, as the post-apocalyptic setting lends itself to aggressive mutated animals, mutated humans and other scavengers living out the outlaw life of kill or be killed. Dealing with enemies in Fallout 3 is achieved in two ways; either in real-time first-person combat, or by using a turn-based combat system. In either case, the result of each enemy encounter is governed by statistics and the resulting probability.

Variables such as your distance from the enemy, line of sight, and your current weapon’s power and accuracy all determine how much damage you will incur, while your weapon’s reload or cool down speed will determine how quickly you deal out the damage. For these reasons, attacking enemies in real-time isn’t really recommended because, not only does the shooting mechanic feel loose and weak, but the real-time probability calculations will result in some frustrating shoot-outs; point-blank fire fights are able to result in little to no damage dealt to an encroaching adversary. Maybe ’realistic’, but hardly satisfying.

A solution to the unsatisfying real-time combat is provided in the implementation of turn-based combat, allowing you to easily and strategically target and execute attack commands from the comfort of a pause in the action. Once you’ve inputted your chosen set of attacks, the action resumes with satisfyingly crunchy and forceful feedback, ironically more so than the real-time combat. Turn-based combat comes at the expense of an available amount of actions per turn (so you can’t simply continue to attack an enemy into infinity), so a combination of real-time and turn-based combat is largely necessary, although even this combination can be avoided depending on your chosen skills and statistics, allowing players to express themselves to a larger degree and flesh out the role that they play in the game - strategic planner or all out action maniac… or anything in-between.

In terms of your surroundings in Fallout 3, it can’t be overstated how large and expansive the post-apocalyptic wastelands of a proposed future Washington D.C. really are. As you set out on your own to find your father, the main quest in the game, you are soon tempted to stray off of this mission by the sheer vastness of the landscape stretching out before you. Countless (well, not infinite, but many) quests and side-quests have been baked into the world and story of Fallout 3, at times feeling like infinite regression, which can lead to tedium if you’re not committed to every minor story arc. If you set yourself on this path, however, you only have your own human curiosity to blame, and your eagerness to discover everything that developers Bethesda have constructed to satisfy your unquenchable thirst for adventure.

Fallout 3 successfully culminates in an experience that represents one of gaming’s truest attempts at providing players with an enormous amount of freedom, allowing any given player to either play the role of a protagonist of any personality type, ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ or to simply react to in-game decisions and consequences as they would in real life, leading to true self-expression in an interactive environment. Fallout 3’s open-world, free-form structure enables players to explore the landscape on a whim, or strictly stick to the main quest line as they choose. Exploration is definitely rewarded and some of the most amazing events in Fallout 3 will play out as a direct result of your curiosity. While Fallout 3 may not be for everyone due to its non-linear progression and dauntingly vast landscapes, if you’re looking for a game to get lost in, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better experience than this.

Pros: Enormous world; amazing freedom; seemingly endless side-quests and areas to explore

Cons: Minor graphical glitches; non-player character scripts can get lost amongst each other; some areas start looking ‘samey’ after a while; gloomy atmosphere and colour palette can get a bit heavy; weak first-person real-time combat

Purchase: