It’s time to take 100 hours out of your day and $60 out of your wallet. It’s time for Fallout.
I was looking forward to getting this game for a long, long time. I was hoping for another Oblivion, and I got almost that, considering I get nostalgic when I think Of Oblivion, that’s saying something (Seriously, I do get nostalgic… who doesn’t?). Fallout is awesome, I mean, who doesn’t love destroying a town of nice people with a Nuclear Bomb that the people worship? Or maybe you want to disable the bomb. And that brings me to my first point. This will make more sense after you read the later parts.
There is a large system of Goodness and Badness that Bethesda (the developer) calls Karma. You gain Karma for doing nice things, and you lose Karma for doing bad things. You can become a mass-murdering Devil, or a “I wipe the water off the floor when I take a shower so you don’t slip” person, or you could just be a hobo of the wastes that does cool things. It’s a very complicated system that changes from very subtle things, like… like stealing I guess. That doesn’t sound subtle but you need to steal to survive.
As you would expect, Bethesda makes being good hard, and being bad a lot easier than being good. It’s like in real life. You can either save up enough Bottle Caps (the currency) to buy some schematics for a rock-it launcher, or you could just kill the merchant and take it. So take your pick and play your game.
The story goes like this: You get born and live for nineteen years in an underground vault. You wake up and find your beloved dad has left the vault, Vault 101, which “No one ever leaves, and No one ever enters”, you escape the vault as well, and emerge into The Capital Wasteland, which is the destroyed ruins of Washington DC and the surrounding area. You then go on an epic quest to find your father and complete his life’s work for him. I don’t wanna give away too much. Also, there are the 20 other quests you can do. That’s right, i just said 20. Not a hundred thousand? Nope. Only twenty other side quests. That was the one big disappointment for me. I was hoping for an endless amount of quests that just keep getting thrown at you. Oh well, it’s still a great game. The quests range from getting a violin for an old lady, to convincing a landlord to let ghouls stay at his place, to finding a boy’s father and in the process killing a giant fire ant. Just FYI, fire ants breathe fire. And Giant means like 20 feet long. Have fun.
At the beginning of Fallout you get born. That’s right. As a baby. You play through your character’s life. You look into the DNA reader to see what you’ll look like as a 19 year old and then you choose your sex, race, and appearance. During your birth you hear your mother start to die and they wheel you off. You see “SIX MONTHS LATER” on your screen and you have to walk to your dad as a baby. Then your dad puts you in a pen and leaves to go to a meeting. You have to get out of your pen then and choose your attributes. You know, Strength, Charisma, Endurance, that stuff. Next, you have your 6th birthday party and get your Pip-Boy, which acts as your menu. Then you take the GOAT test, you’re sixteen, and pick answers that will recommend skills for you based on your answers. That’s one of the great parts of the game, their is so much character customization. You can even make a Joker Girl!
The combat is awesome. You can play either FPS style, or you can use VATS! The Vault-Tec-Assisted-Targetting-System! Which lets you freeze time, select an enemy, choose a body part, see your chances of hitting the body part and then blow the enemies brains out in a cinematic. Golly, I sure do use a lot of pictures!
I personally like VATS, I think the reticule is too small. The combat works fantastically and it is amazingly fun.
The speech is also a huge part of the game. You’ll spend at least as much time talking to people as you will shooting other people. The speech skill works almost exactly the same as it does in Oblivion, except it seems a lot more useful.
Overall, this game is kicks some serious gaming butt and deserves to be played by everyone who has played Oblivion or has ever enjoyed an RPG or FPS. So go buy Fallout. It’s waiting for you.
PS: I really can’t do this game justice. But just saying that it is almost as good as Oblivion should make you go and pick up a copy.
Pwn First, Ask Questions Later 