It's irrational, but I was always terrified of the day the bomb would drop. That ghastly dream scene in "Terminator 2" is still burned into the reptilian part of my brain. I spent my sleepless 6-year-old nights shivering in my bed, but I wasn't listening for bumps in the night - I was straining my ears for the Russian bombers.
If only I'd known how much fun the apocalypse would be.
In "Fallout 3's" nightmarish vision of the future, human civilization implodes in nuclear fire in the year 2077. After 200 years, the survivors have emerged from their shelter to rebuild among a radioactive wasteland of mutants, barbarians and beasts. After your father leaves under mysterious circumstances, you find yourself unceremoniously booted from your comfy vault with only a baseball bat, pistol and futuristic PDA to your name.
Immediately, the variety of character options is impressive: with five combat skill categories and a multitude of non-combat abilities, plus myriad "perks," it's easy to make a character that supports your preferred play style (though unfortunately, in a change from previous "Fallout" titles, you're unable to play a pacifist).
Despite your fresh, baby-faced innocence, it doesn't take long before you're embroiled in plenty of nasty encounters. Firefights happen early and often, and use a hybrid system: you move and aim through a first-person interface, but a feature called VATS lets you pause the action at any time and direct shots to particular parts of enemies' bodies (series purists will note, regretfully, that "groin shot" is no longer an option).
The pause-release mechanism does slow combats a bit, but it saves lots of ammo - a precious commodity in the Capitol wasteland - and besides, the giddy, terrified rush of adrenaline you get the first time you whack a slaver's head off with the hydraulic power fist is well worth it.
Bloody though it may be, this violence isn't pointless. The main storyline of the game focuses on your journey to find your father, and potentially follow in his footsteps. But a few hours of play will reveal one of this game's greatest strengths: there's an enormous amount of other content available, and if you're not really interested in chasing your daddy around the ruined D.C. metro area, it's quite possible (and lucrative, both in playtime and in-game loot) to spend the majority of your playtime doing other things.
Side quests are abundant and are generally both long-lasting and wide-ranging. Some are mundane (deliver this letter to a nearby settlement), some are charming (go get your legs broken so I can study some broken legs) and some are simply fantastic (go to the National Archives and retrieve the Declaration of Independence. Yes, really).
Each quest can be completed in a variety of ways, based on your character's skills and moral bent: if you're smart, sneaky or charismatic enough, you can hack, lock-pick or fast-talk your way into alternate quest paths and rewards. And if you're just mean, you can end quests in plenty of despicable ways - going as far as detonating a nuclear warhead inside a peaceful town.
It's easy to pan "Fallout 3's" lavishly rendered gore and tumbling, slow-motion ragdoll corpses as gratuitous, but you can't fault the game's art design in general. Bethesda has done some incredible things with brown and gray. Many recent games have billed themselves as 'scary,' but it's been a long time since I've seen anything as bone-chilling as the blasted National Mall, complete with museums and scarred Washington Monument.
It's clearly a fantasy - no conspiracy worries here - but the recognizable landmarks (and the all-too-familiar metro maps) give the fiction an unnerving immediacy. The scenery is littered with elegant touches of horror: a Reservist's journal detailing the grisly death of her unit from radiation sickness, a hedonist's personal Bacchanalia amid the carnage, burned-out houses with skeletons left spooning on the bed.
The soundtrack, which appears mostly in the form of in-game radio stations, is at turns adorable and eerie: it's done in a scratchy, post-Second World War style, in keeping with the game's "duck and cover" aesthetic. Battling slave traders and rogue security robots through bloodstained supermarkets to the Ink Spots has an absurd charm.
It's a shame, unfortunately, that many of the characters you meet in 'Fallout 3' don't have the same appeal as the environment. The dialog is only serviceable at best, and the fair-to-middling voice acting ensures that only rarely do the characters' emotions feel genuine. Liam Neeson's phone-in performance as the voice of your father in particular is tepid, especially for such a central character.
Some of the game's attempts at humor work - the conclusion of the National Archives quest in particular is brilliant - and some, like the bubbly, off-beat mechanic Moira, simply serve as painful holes in the game's verisimilitude. And some of the dialogue hasn't been completely gender-corrected - despite playing a female character, I found myself being called 'sir' or 'boy' more than a few times.
Additionally, while the graphics are generally strong, facial animations are even flatter than the voice acting. When "Oh my God, they're killing everyone" and "Care to sell that scrap metal?" are spoken with the same blank, furrowed-brow stare, it's hard to feel any reaction to even the most emotionally charged parts of the game.
If you've never played the other "Fallout" games, you're in good hands: "Fallout 3's" enormous range of character choices, compelling world and wealth of content will keep you entertained and sleepless for weeks.
If you're a fan of the series and you've got a chip on your shoulder about the switch from isometric to first-person, withhold your judgment - no, "Fallout 3" is not exactly the same as the earlier games.
But whether you love the Bomb or hate the Bomb, "Fallout 3" is a deep, engrossing piece of entertainment.
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