Sports Legends - Gamers Welcome: Fallout 3 Exclusive Review

Sports Legends features reviews from our panel of experts, including our editors as well as editors from our sister sites. We rate games on a scale of A+ through F. Anything we score in the A+ through A- range is considered excellent, B+ through B- is good, C+ through C- is average, D+ through D- is bad, and F is terrible. At long last, here is our exclusive Fallout 3 Xbox 360 review.

The team behind Oblivion reinvents the postapocalyptic Fallout world for a new generation.

He might be big, green, and mean, but even he can't take too many shotgun blasts to the face.

Fallout 3 begins with your character's literal birth and ends with...well, that's up to you. It might never end, should you opt to hit the (metaphorical) pause button on the role-playing game's main quest.

What happens in between, from your formative years in the shelter of Vault 101 and well beyond your eventual escape into the irradiated, postapocalyptic Wild West outside, evolves via a nice mix of guided narrative and player choice. Help a townsperson kick his drug habit and you'll earn good karma; feast on the corpses of your enemies in broad daylight, on the other hand, and people might think you're a little weird. How you deal with the challenges of the Capital Wasteland affects what nonplayer characters will fight by your side, where your early quest-hub town is, and also some details about the game's final chapter.

But it's not just wanderlust and the search for your on-the-run scientist dad that compels you forward in Fallout. Like any RPG, character advancement is both a means and an end. While the leveling system in developer Bethesda's previous game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, was built on an arcane combination of attributes, skills, skill perks, specializations, and multiple class templates, Fallout 3's mechanics are far simpler and far improved. You allot your attribute points at the beginning of the game, and when you gain a level, you earn a certain amount of points to spend on skills (Speech, Lockpick, Energy Weapons, etc.) and one perk of your choice. Perks range from practical stuff such as Life Giver (+30 hit points) to oddly whimsical abilities. Mysterious Stranger, for example, occasionally summons a trenchcoated, .44 Magnum-armed dude who kills your target and disappears, spaghetti Western guitar riff resonating in his wake. Spend skill points and pick perks accordingly and it's easy to create anything from a plasma-rifle-slinging do-gooder to a computer-whiz cannibal.

Whatever path you take, peace and love have no place in the Fallout universe; a whole lot of mutants are gonna die. The Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.) -- pause time, target specific body parts -- is fun and works well despite the severed limbs and decapitations served up in horror-porn slow-mo (and that's without the aptly named Bloody Mess perk). And of course, assuming you don't sink all of your skill points into Science and Barter, you'll see real improvement in weapon accuracy and effectiveness as you level up.

You'd think unloading dozens of high-powered rounds into a radscorpion would put it down quick, but it all depends on how skilled you are with the hardware.

You can only carry out so many actions at once in V.A.T.S., though, so some real-time combat in between V.A.T.S. attacks is inevitable. Here, Fallout 3 feels very much like Oblivion; it's less precise and polished than a dedicated first-person shooter such as Call of Duty 4. Distractingly bad character animations -- I'm talking man-on-the-moon jumps and running that looks suspiciously like ice skating -- and occasional camera problems, especially when you have an A.I. companion, make third-person view an option for Fallout series-nostalgia fetishists only (of which exist plenty).

Fallout's heavy emphasis on wholesale slaughter combined with a relatively small variety of enemies makes for combat that can get a wee bit predictable at times. The ubiquitous Super Mutants and Feral Ghouls both suffer from the same brand of chemo brain and love to charge into melee range. Until I picked up a plasma rifle and became a one-shot headshot machine, I'd start most indoor battles with some long-range plinking and then duck down a corridor, kicking in V.A.T.S. again for a point-blank shotgun blast or three at whatever bumbled around the corner. But then it does depend on who's holding the controller, too -- I watched other players around our office adopt a more Rambo-esque attitude, and while they lived and died from health pack to health pack, at least their finishing moves were more varied than my signature shotgun-to-the-face.

The closer you are to an enemy when you fire, the more likely you are to hit, and the more damage you're likely to do.

But it's best not to get too hung up on the intricacies of gunslinging. It's the world of Fallout that sticks in your mind when you turn off the game. The Atomic Age educational film iconography and paranoia-humor (see also: BioShock). Your first step into the big world, that seminal Oblivion moment when your irises adjust to the glare and you look out to the horizon and understand that you can go there, or there, or over there. And especially the quests, which sometimes push against the "that's just too f***ed up; I'm not doing that" boundary and can shock and surprise you with unexpected or uncomfortable outcomes.

Fallout 3's world can be a lonely world, too -- and not just when you crest a hill and look out over a shattered, hardscrabble vista of sun-baked rock and burned-out cars. Sometimes you feel it when you're the one pushing the boundaries and get an unwanted glimpse behind the curtain, like when I headshotted an NPC not just to watch him die but also to see what his bodyguard would do. The bodyguard continued standing there as though nothing happened. I had to shoot him, too.

If you seek to break the world, you'll occasionally find a way -- which is understandable, given the limits of time and tech -- but it does pull you out of the otherwise broad and engrossing experience. Faults be damned, though; this is the kind of hugely ambitious game that doesn't come around very often, and when it does, you'd be a fool not to play it and enjoy the hell out of it and look forward to the day (next-next-gen?) when the fidelity of open-world RPGs takes another big step closer to the uncanny valley's far side.

PROS:
Deep character development options; huge open world with tons of quests; satisfying combat; dangerously addictive.
CONS:
Poor partner path-finding; many characters share the same voice; third-person view is useless; some perks of questionable value.

There's no shortage of conversation in Fallout 3. Just mind your tone if you want to stay on somebody's good side.

There's just no way you're getting through this game without soaking up a bunch of radiation. Deal with it.

This Enclave Eyebot isn't too tough, but he'll explode when he dies.

You don't have to use the VATS system to do big damage to your enemies, but you'll find your health dwindles much faster.

The third-person view might look nice in a screenshot, but your character's movements look awkward, real-time combat is crippled, and line-of-sight becomes nearly impossible to judge.