Born in a fallout shelter, Vault 101, in the later years of the 23rd century, life seemed fairly cosy. Safe from the aftermath of the nuclear war hundreds of years ago. A disturbing chain of events leave you running from the vault into the unknown looking for answers.
Quickly finding a bloody carnage of evil and beasts, the human race has found itself at the bottom of the food chain. A destroyed world awaits filled with two-headed cows, giant scorpions, fire breathing ants, and radiated ghouls that once resembled humans. The familiar landmarks of Washington DC are fought for hours to achieve inches in this amazing game that is impossibly hard to turn away from.
A first or third person shooter set on a huge map in real time mixed with a role playing game deliver a superb experience that pulls you deep into the game like a cheap addiction. It’s easy to become so intrigued by the action and storyline that you'll be pushing yourself for more and more.
The game is comparable to Bioshock with a retro feel, radio's you find and the music they play put you right into a past era frozen in time.
You first start the game as a child. You select the type of character you will later become in a children’s book that defines each of the characteristics you can build, here you learn the basic movements of the keyboard/mouse. Your memory fades to a ten year old, you meet bullies and friends, you receive a Pip boy 3000 for your birthday, a wrist computer that you will use quite alot later in the game.
Later, as a 16 year old, you find your father has left the vault and you are hunted down to be made an example of. After you escape, you set off to into the outside world, looking for your scientist father, slowly learning about life on the outside, the lead up to the atomic war, its aftermath, and the answers to the questions you seek.
Not for the quaint, there is certainly alot of violence in this game, which gets alot worse as you progress. You'd notice this as your head explodes and rolls down the hill. Limbs and landmines certainly don’t mix to well.
When you come across the enemy, you can shoot to destroy it as you would in a standard shooter, or you can use VATS, the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System. When you enter VATS, the game freezes and gives lets you select which part of the enemy you want to shoot at in slow motion. The clearer the target and body part, the more likely you are to score a hit. It's not guaranteed to kill the enemy, and can’t be used repeatedly, but can change the outcome of larger, fast paced fire fights in your favour.
On your journeys you can find characters that will follow you around, helping you complete your tasks, you can find a dig called Dogmeat that you can interact with and assists you on your journeys.
Inside many building are safes and computer terminals, these need to be picked and hacked before you can open them. As you progress levels, you can build on lock picking skills, hacking and weapon handling skills that let you progress further into the game.
Rewards are given for completing tasks for the various people you meet. Nobody likes to do anything for nothing. Whether you earn money, weapons or information, they are not always necessary for completion of the game, in fact, most aren’t. You do them anyway as the game is so intriguing and addictive.
Choosing what you say to people is important as it can affect the outcome. You can make a deal with the innocent looking person, or turn them into a slave for earn a few dollars. You can nuke an entire town or save it, you can choose weather to help humanity by starting the building blocks of life, or destroy it to allow nature to run its course and start again.
There are a few bugs with the initial release, but these are resolved with downloadable hot fixes. It's quite surprising there aren't any more as the game is huge. A Grand Theft Auto type map with many locations that can be instantly travelled to through the Pip boy 3000's map.
The graphics are incredible for a game of this size. The small details are important as almost everything you see is something to look at or interact with. There are a few faults from time to time, noticeable, but largely ignored as you are more interested in the storyline-gameplay to care.
The sounds change for the environment, the sinister sounds of a dark tunnel with something lurking ready to pounce give you the shakes, the retro songs on the radio are repeated frequently, and get annoying after a while, but listening to some of unexpected lyrics can give you a chuckle or two.
The year is almost out. A few big releases are on the way. This is defiantly the best release so far, and is by far the most likely contender for PC Offensive's 'Game of the Year'. You should have this game already, if you don’t, go buy it now.
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