Fallout 3 is an interesting game. I've never seen a title so flawlessly combine the best aspects of a role-playing game and an action game into one package. Because truthfully, by doing so you are attempting to appease two very differents types of gamers. You have those RPG players who live for creating their character, tweaking it, making choices that will make and shape that character, and basically spend hundreds of hours exploring, deciding, building, changing, etc. Then you have the action game players who just want to shoot stuff. But this game works, and it works very, very well.


This screenshot gives you a little bit of an idea of the graphics. They are superb. People look like people, cockroaches look like cockroaches, etc. And the UI is almost nonexistent, which is a good thing because it makes you feel ever more part of the game rather than the guy behind the keyboard controlling the character.

The first "level" took place fully within the confines of the "vault", which was basically your introduction to everything -- movement, combat, story, skills, etc. You start out being born, leap ahead to one year old, then ten years told, then sixteen, then finally nineteen when you escape. To see this:


Needless to say, the world is fucked.