Fallout 3, one of the best games ever made?

Are people who review video games the most easily impressed people on earth? Having logged a fair few hours in the game world of Fallout 3, venturing from location to location, being generally impressed by Bethesda's offering, is it really a 9.0, or even a 10?

Combat Woes

The first thing that strikes me as being a full point off is the combat. It jams together a first person perspective with a stats system that served its purpose in a turn based combat engine. In real-time, it's frustrating and clunky. VATs itself is an interesting system, but for me, it's not enough.

They needed to go one way or the other in this respect. Combining stats with what is effectively a first-person shooter is a barmy decision as far as I'm concerned.

Down to 9.0 for me already.

Staying with combat for a moment: aiming for body parts. I have not yet found the purpose of this system. What on earth is it for? Crippling an opponent's head seems to have no noticeable effect. They still run 3 times as fast as my own character when I cripple their legs, and they go about shooting me just fine when I shoot their arms. Is this system set up entirely just to do more damage to an enemy? If so, then everything but head and chest may as well be removed, as the head is the only place that seems to do more damage at all.

If there's anything deeper than more damage to this system, then it has escaped my perception.

I remember in the original Fallouts that the system was not just about dealing immediate damage. It was about strategically stopping a stronger set of opponents from annihilating you. Up against 6 super mutants? Take out a couple of their eyes and hope that you can withstand the assaults of the rest. Or: shoot them in the crotch and hope they don't get up again!

8.8 now. Whether that system has any effect is irrelevant. It's not enough for me to notice an advantage.

If they leave a system in place, then it should serve a purpose other than a little extra damage.

Feeling A Bit Simple

While most of the game world feels like Fallout, the weapons themselves feel incredibly generic and look so too. 10mm Pistol? Okay, I'll give them that. Sniper Rifle? Yeah ok, that too. That's fine. Assault Rifle? Oh no you didn't! To take the varied and interesting weapons of Fallout and combining pretty much all the shotguns and rifles into just “Assault Rifle†is a bit disappointing, really.

That's not the main thing about this point though; it's that the weapons and armors in the game don't feel very Fallout. Most of the time I don't even notice what an opponent is wearing when they come at me, as honestly, it doesn't seem to matter anyway. I think the main problem is the incredible dumbing down of the games systems and weapons so that people don't have to think.

8.6

Good Game, Bad Critics

I could probably go on and nitpick it down to around an 8, but I don't want to. It doesn't leave me feeling the need to destroy it through tiny problems. I think I've highlighted the main issues for me that stop it from being the messiah that game reviewers  have proclaimed it. It's a decent game, and Bethesda have retained a lot of the atmosphere and feel of the old games while updating it for the rapidly evolving taste of modern gamers. And modern games reviewers are incredibly forgiving, it seems.

Oh just one final thing I remembered that's quite a biggie for me. What's with the Raiders and their fascination for hanging bodies everywhere?

There was a farm in Fallout 2 where a group of … I can't remember what they were, but they wanted to scare people away. They put fake bodies (I think they were fake anyway) up on stakes outside their farm. That was really effective on me. The game was shouting “Woah there, these people are serious!†to me. When there were bodies in the original Fallouts you knew something was up. Something incredibly bad was going to happen to you, etc.

In Fallout 3 it just makes me think that there's probably some Raiders around.

Again, the game is alright, there's some very enjoyable parts of it, but the hype from Bethesda has made it another blockbuster with the reviewers.

I'll write a full review when I'm done with it, highlighting the good and the bad, but for now, I feel I had to express my disbelief at games reviewers and their incredibly forgiving views.

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