Fallout 3 Review (PC)

Vault Dweller's Survival Guide to Combat

While avoiding combat may be a good approach when overmatched and under-armed, you'll soon discover that learning the ropes of combat will be essential to your survival in the Capital Wasteland. Throughout the game you'll come across a wide variety of weapons that include small arms, big guns, energy weapons and more. Fallout 3 can be played in either first or third person perspective. This makes the basic combat element of the game fairly straight forward and similar to that of an action shooter, aim the crosshairs and fire.

The Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System or V.A.T.S. is a more advanced form of combat that allows you to target specific body parts and limbs of your enemies. Players begin with a certain number of action points which are used during V.A.T.S. combat. The maximum number of action points can be increased by leveling up or through items found during play. Once the your action points have been diminished you'll have to wait for them to recharge before being able to take further actions with V.A.T.S. This system works excellent as it allows you to pause the game as you assess the situation and review your combat options. It's particularly helpful when you're low on ammunition and you need to make sure you get off precise shots.

While this isn't an action shooter one aspect of combat and weapons that takes a little away from the gameplay is the inability to lob a grenade when needed. Instead you'll need to go into the Pip-Boy 3000 and manually equip the grenade before your albe to thorw it. You can assign hot keys to weapons but it still does not allow you to toss a grenade and then immediately go back to your primary weapon.

RPG Elements of Fallout 3

As with most role-playing games, Fallout 3 has a system for earning experience and leveling up. Upon leveling up, characters are awarded skill points and perks. Skill points are used to increase your ability to perform certain tasks. Hacking into a computer will require a good Science skill, while picking the lock on a door will requie a high skill level in lockpicking. Simliar to skills, perks are earnd with each level advancement and give you more options for character development such as enhancing ability scores, skills groups, combat situations and many more. How you assign your skills, perks and develop your character is entirely up to you. In addition Fallout 3 allows for NPCs, enabling you to have a party of up to three characters.

Fallout 3 system requirements

While my review was performed on a relatively high-end system (Intel Quad Core Extreme Q8650, nVidia 8800GTS, Vista 64-bit w/ 6GB RAM) the system requirements for Fallout 3 are not out of reach, although at a minimum, I would recommend a dual core processor and graphics card with at least 256MB of memory. During my review I did experience a number of game crashes, most often when I needed to alt-tab to another program (to jot down review notes) but there were also a couple crashes while no other apps were running. Hopefully this is something that will be addressed in the first patch.

Bottom Line

Fallout 3 offers so many great things worth mentioning, that it's almost too difficult to summarize in the few final sentances of a review. It's just something you simply have to go out and experience for yourself.