Fallout 3
I have a copy of Oblivion sitting on my shelf, it has been there since it was released and I have yet to play it. After having completed Fallout 3 (to the degree that one does “complete” it), I think Oblivion will remain unplayed – not that Fallout 3 was particularly bad, but there is enough of a game in it that I do not need a similar one set in a fantasy world.
See, the best part of Fallout 3 is the environments and the world as a whole, it is very enjoyable to just walk around and search the postapocalyptic landscape. The color scheme of the desaturated wastelands are (as far as I explored) never replaced with something else for effect, but it usually looks fairly well. The actual gameplay is okay with some annoying quirks, the worst part being the fighting. As an FPS/3PS Fallout 3 is rather poor, and as if to compensate for this you can break off the action and it gives you a more turn-based approach to shooting. While this offers some interesting opportunities for optimizing stats, I found it annoying that direct firing was too imprecise to work properly but using the other system meant I had to run around and wait for AP to be refilled.
Story-wise the game has a traditional Karma system that determines how you are approached – it works fairly well most of the time but there is the occasional moment were it fails to recognize your deeds and the occasional one where it is really blatant about it. It was also a relatively buggy game that crashed on me several times and got me stuck in the geometry at other times.
The flaws I find in Fallout 3 can be explained by looking at the game’s volume, as mentioned before it is a very large game. The world it takes place in gives a feeling of being a place where you are only scratching the surface of the things that are happening. I suppose I would be willing to overlook the problems if I liked the format of really long open-world games, and I suppose that is what the reviewers have done. As it is now, I merely liked the game.