After the wizards and wolves of Oblivion, comes a blood-drenched exercise in survival
Now, it isn't everyday that I get to slip an unpinned grenade into the pocket of a defenceless old woman while she's asleep. Let alone an old woman who spends her daylight hours worshipping an unexploded nuclear bomb in the town of Megaton in the year 2247.
Then again, Fallout 3 isn't your average game - something I easily remarked upon while watching said geriatric cult member frantically patting down her frilly looking undergarments in the seconds before her inevitable explosion.
Going beyond her makeshift church, past the taverns and hovels of Megaton and out of the robot-guarded gates and I'm back into the wastes. An endless brown vista that stretches miles in every direction. To the South lies Vault 101, the stark metal confines my character grew up in before tumbling out into the daylight in pursuit of his errant father.
To the North lies what remains of Washington DC; the towering and decrepit Washington monument serving as a waypoint wherever I choose to roam, the Pentagon taken over by a chapter of warriors known as the Brotherhood Of Steel, the White House nothing but a pile of ash and rubble. And everywhere else? Well, that's for me (and YOU come September) to explore.
Waste management
It's a lonesome business, walking the wastes of DC. The wind whistles past
me, and cheery music from the Fifties leaks from radio stations I tune my wrist-mounted PipBoy PDA into - but aside from the occasional wandering mole-rat or wild dog, it's a pretty lonesome business. Following the indicators that appear on my compass, I know the rough direction of somewhere that'll turn out to be interesting and, in all probability, extremely violent.
Springvale School, for example, was once a seat of learning, but it's now occupied by a bunch of Mad Max-style Raiders. Bodies are strung up on chains from the ceilings, and there are some sinister goings-on in the basement. It's a perfect spot for a some ultra-violence.
While making my way around the piles of charred books in the school I took
pot-shots at the spiky-haired Raiders in the traditional FPS way - pointing and shooting as I would in Resistance or any other blaster. The more enjoyable way, however, is to enter VATS (the Vault- Assisted Targeting System.
This freezes the action and allows me a certain number of shots (depending on the skills and stats that I chose at the start of the game and have developed every time I levelled up Oblivion-style) to the various bodyparts of my post-apocalyptic enemies. After this, shots are let fly in slow-motion - one to the arm might mean someone drops their weapon, a crippling shot to the leg will slow an approaching enemy down to a crawl and a point-blank shotgun blast to the head will end up with a brutal decapitation and eyeballs and brain gathering muck as they roll around on the floor.
This is a gritty, tactical and smart way of handling action in a quasi turn-based style - and more than makes up for the fact that the traditional RPG stats and probabilities mean that non-VATS combat in Fallout doesn't feel quite as precise as it does in other shooters, although this is only a small downside.
It isn't all about randomly moseying on up to an abandoned Vault or Slaver hideout either, as there are plenty of people that need the help of a stranger with a gun for hire.
Insider dealing
One trader is writing a book about the best ways to survive the wasteland - and as such had me foraging for food in a nearby bombed-out Super Duper Market and learning how to defuse mines - or simply lying to her that you have been
out beavering away at her behest, and making it all up in exchange for money and a less accurate book.
Other characters, meanwhile, want you to investigate the whereabouts of long-distant relatives - which then leads you on the trail of some Brahmin-killing (that is, two-headed cow-killing) hoodlums known as The Family. Some people, meanwhile, have issues that don't even appear as marked-up quests in your handy PipBoy.
For example, after a chat with his doctor and after hacking into his family's computer while attempting to steal all their worldly goods from a hidden safe, I discovered that a guy called Leo Stahl had a serious problem with substance abuse - and could often be found loitering around the Megaton water-treatment plant with a can of Jet in his hand. Sure enough, having waited until midnight, I discovered Leo and, despite giving me an option to buy drugs from him (I don't), I decided to give him a stern talking to.
My stats were clearly high enough to persuade him to think of his family and say no to drugs, after which he thankfully gave me the remains of his stash. Half of which I took myself, and the other half I later sold on for profit. The wasteland is a topsy-turvy, and immoral, place. You have to fend for yourself.
The big bang query
Drugs are bad, in that there's no question; but guzzling a pack of brain-boosting Mentats did give me the smarts to defuse the nuclear bomb nestling within the town of Megaton - even if a certain shadowy figure was doing his best to persuade me that it would be worth my while to light its atomic fuse and stand well back while all my new friends were reduced to ashes.
As it was, I was instead presented with my very own shack in the heights of the crater-town - complete with Wadsworth the Robo Butler who could not only dish out pleasantries, but cut my hair whenever I felt unkempt from a hard day of shooting dogs' heads off.
The overarching quest of Fallout 3, discovering where your Liam Neeson-voiced dad has disappeared to, seems to be merely the tip of the iceberg. As well as the behemoth Super Mutants that perpetually wage war with human-kind and the misunderstood Ghouls who occupy a place called Underworld (with shrivelled bodies and little skin) the faction calling a lot of the shots are the Enclave - a corrupt governmental body led by President John Henry Eden. He's voiced by Malcolm McDowell (the bad guy in Heroes) and his barbed triumphal rhetoric is pumped across the nuclear wasteland through hovering propaganda eyebots and government-controlled radio signals.
The Enclave appear to be villains of the piece, dropping off troops from flying VertiBirds should they have spotted me somewhere they deem inappropriate, and it's likely that good ol' dad has become embroiled with their desire for order over the land's various bickering sides.
Five hours in and it's already evident that this is a deep, enthralling and often shocking game. The feeling of walking the wastes with tinny upbeat Fifties' music being pumped out by your PIPboy and just stopping to admire the terrifying, forlorn view is incomparable. Roll on the apocalypse.