Fallout 3 – A Bit Disappointing

I basically finished* with Fallout 3 a few weeks ago, which I got from Steam for like $25.  I’m actually glad I didn’t pay full price for it because I didn’t think it was that great.

Back when Fallout 3 first came out, I read somewhere that it was basically Oblivion with guns — it turns out that assessment was 100% accurate.  It felt exactly like playing Oblivion again, which probably contributed to my lackluster response to it.  I was expecting to be blown away, but in fact I found it somewhat uninteresting and sometimes even tedious.

This is coming from a huge fan of the first Fallout, too, which I thought was one of the most innovative RPGs I’d ever seen.  Fallout 3 was definitely a descendant of that game, but it didn’t feel very innovative.  Honestly it felt like they just slapped the Fallout intellectual property into the Oblivion engine and called it a day.

On a side note, a lot of people complained that the gruesome violence was way over-the-top, but I didn’t think it was that bad.  Sometimes it helped to make the game interesting. :) It was a hallmark of the original Fallout, too, if I remember right.  It was just too cartoonish to take seriously.

Anyway, I give it a 3… out of 5.

• It’s a massively open-ended game, so technically I haven’t “finished,” in that I have not been to every single location possible, but I did finish the main quest, which took surprisingly little time.