It appears that Blogger and Firefox have decided I'm making this post wether I want to or not, so here goes.
The 10/10, 95%, 5 star reviews would have you believe that Fallout is perfect, but its not. (yes, I said it). Its good, VERY good, but like all good games (especially rpgs), it has some dumb problems. The trick here is that the parts that are good are SO good, the sub par parts are easily forgotten or ignored. This sort of review / reception dichotomy is usually reserved for painfully average games that try desperately to achieve greatness with a few innovative ideas (can't wait to write this Conan review!), but somehow Fallout 3 is this kind of magnificent game that inexplicably makes a half-hearted effort to be mediocre.
For instance, from first person view you can run, jump, fight, talk, and everything just fine, but they also included a clunky pointless 3rd person camera. It's obvious the gameplay was designed with first person in mind, but somewhere along the lines a 3rd person view was shoehorned in, probably to make the clothing guys stop cutting themselves. Seriously. If all you want to do is stand there in the sun, pan the camera 'round, and check out the clever hats and shirts you pick up off of corpses, fine. Otherwise, leave the Left Bumper alone. In third person, jumping, manipulating objects, and (realtime) combat are horrendous. The camera could give a damn what you want to look at (much less what you're shooting or swinging at) and all your animations are just terrible. By constrast, playing this game in first person (like Bioshock) gives you the impression you're actually there, in the wasteland, fighting hell and high water for your survival. Third person reminds you constantly that this is just a video game, and your character is just some blue screened puppet on a map, barely responding to your button presses.
Then there's the Pipboy 3000 / menuing system (and this probably has a lot to do with trimming keyboard PC controls down to joystick face buttons and triggers). The Pipboy 3k is a one stop shop for mapping, questing, equipping, you name it. But you wouldn't believe the number of times I've dropped a gun or important food because the buttons are stupid, or how many times I've accidentally rested for an hour instead of reading my map because its press B, then Right Trigger twice, then left analog once, then right analog stick to zoom out just to see where you're at in the wasteland.
Last but not least, there's the whole "this is still a c rpg underneath all the console fluff" learning curve. All the boring character creation stuff is presented during the games opening chapter, with a nice little narrative and some interesting sequences wrapped around it to keep you entertained, but all the stuff you really want to know (how to converse, get quests, equip things, heal yourself, read maps) is presented by cold text crawls that pop up one time when circumstance happens upon them, then never return. The reality is, you're going to have 20 opportunities (experience levels) to undo your poor understanding of the Agility or Perception attributes, but if you weren't paying attention to the random on screen text during that one radroach segment in the vault basement, may god have mercy on your soul because they are never going to explain how to use a gun again.
That said, it is a safe estimation (even at only a couple hours in) that a shitty third person cam, crappy menus, and a constant need for the instruction manual are the worst sins this game is going to commit. The design of the thing is dynamite, the aesthetic appeal is immaculate, and outside of its throw you to the wolves tutorial mentality, the gameplay systems work like charms once you wrap your head around them. Last night I wasted 3 or 4 hours of my life, just wandering around the desolation, shooting people in the face and hitting dogs with a baseball bat. There were some quests done here and there, some small purposes to all the wandering, but it all boiled down to one trepidatious man, one hostile untapped world, and a ton of bullets. At this point, I wouldn't have it any other way.
-F.
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