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Fallout 3

All Those Annoying Bits

Okay, as is customary with our reviews, it's time for the negative bits...

V.A.T.S. Isn't Perfect

V.A.T.S. is a strange hybrid between true turn-based combat and real time combat. It's a fair compromise but it has it's flaws. If you aim at an enemy and there is an obstacle in the way, the hit percentages do not always take this into account. You may have 95% chance to hit and still end up shooting all your rounds into a corner of a table.

Some guns also behave oddly in V.A.T.S., doing extremely low damage per "combat round". Same guns chew through enemies effortlessly if used in real time - the Minigun and the Flamer come into mind as the most obvious offenders.

V.A.T.S. also makes you nearly invulnerable during the "playback" of combat - any enemy shots that land during the time you fire off your rounds do almost no damage to you. In a way this is a "quick hack" to avoid deaths while you are not actually in control of your character and it doesn't really matter that much, but in theory it's a bit unrealistic - as is the whole V.A.T.S. combat to begin with. Personally I can live with the flaws, but they are there.

Combat Oddities

Combat also has some other oddities. Enemies (and friendly NPCs) can hit from extreme distances with weapons that won't hit a broad side of a barn in your hands. A good example is a friendly NPC you find in the Washington D.C. ruins packing a Combat Shotgun. Good weapon at short ranges, but if you recruit this NPC to help you, you'll notice that in NPC hands it mows down mutants at any range. Displayed weapon stats are limited - you only get a damage number - even if there is obviously also a stat for range (and accuracy at different ranges depend on that). Mostly you can just make a guess - if the weapon logically should be able to hit things at range, it probably will. The major exception is probably the assault rifle and it's chinese counterpart as they seem woefully underpowered at range. Thankfully you can carry around a full arsenal and switch weapons instantly as needed, but due to ammo issues you often have to fall back to more sub-optimal weapons.

Oh and the blast radius of the Mini-Nuke is laughably small. You can actually use it in enclosed spaces without too much risk - just make sure there's about ten feet between you and the target or fire it in real time and duck behind cover before the boom. Fun but silly.

Deaf Mutants

Stealthy movement and surprise attacks also have some issues. Whenever you crouch, it is assumed that you are sneaking around. A simple indicator will show if you are hidden from any nearby enemies and attacks made while hidden get major bonuses. The problem is that enemies stay completely unware of you even if you kill one of them. This is somewhat logical if you stealth behind a robot and disable it using a special perk ability while others have their backs turned at you. It's quite illogical when you blow off a head of a Super Mutant with one shot of a big gun from "hidden" status - the other two standing next to him will completely ignore the fact that the head of their buddy just flew across the room unless they actually see you. So it can get a bit easy to kill piles of enemies - just sneak around and kill them one by one, abusing the bonuses given by killing from stealth. It should be noted that this flaw happens only when moving stealthily - if you shoot someone from standing up, everyone around him will notice it and attack you normally.

Gamebryo Fails With Animation

Then there is the animation... just like in Oblivion, Fallout 3 has major issues with character animation. Everyone moves like a bad puppet and even the dreaded skating effect raises it's head - while walking, characters can end up sliding off-sync with the actual movement. This is mostly visible when friendly NPCs walk slowly on uneven surfaces, but sometimes it also becomes noticeable in combat when a big hulking Super Mutant slides towards you while swinging his club. On a related note, Bethesda still hasn't learned how to make human faces and while the animation problems are most likely caused by the engine, human NPC faces just look creepy. Of course you will be shooting non-humans most of the time.

But... all this is here just for the sake of completeness. I don't think any of these flaws really matter in when you look at the big picture. Fallout 3 is still great, even if it's not 100% perfect.

Crash, Crash, Fail

PC version of Fallout 3 also tends to crash a lot. At random times the game just decides to dump you to the desktop and send a report to Microsoft. Thankfully there is a working autosave that saves your progress every time you proceed in a quest or move - either between indoors and outdoors or between separate indoor areas. Personally I experienced 3-4 crashes per play session and sometimes ended up losing quite bit of progress because I had spent time roaming outdoors without saving manually. Hopefully the already announced patch that should appear soon will fix the crashes - otherwise the game feels fairly polished and I personally encountered no content-related bugs.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Story and SettingPage 3: Combat and VisualsPage 4: Performance, Visual SettingsPage 5: The Annoying BitsPage 6: Summary and Scoring

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