Fallout 3 - any good?

[barcelonic]

Am thinking of getting fallout 3 for the Xbox 360 and have never played the series before. i dont really like FPS games but the rpg side of this looks quite good.

if you have this game, can u pls tell me how much percent is RPG? and how much percent FPS? roughly just so i have an idea.

also is the game easy or hard and does it have different difficulty settings?

cheers in advance!

[MacAttack]

Excellent game well worth getting, i too was dubious about the fps element but it's integrated very well with the rpg side of things (also you can switch between first and 3rd person whenever you want).

The fighting is a lot more strategic than other fps's, with the VATS system you can pause the action and select individual body parts to target which have accuracy percentages, or you can just blast away. different enemies / weapons are suited best to either vats or manual aiming and it's quite fun inventing your own strategies to taking them down.

There is a MASSIVE range of weapons, clothes, and armour to find, build, steal or quest for, and as well as the customization of character (i managed to make my character look scarily like myself), and the personalisation of 'perks' and skills to give you different advantages - it makes the game feel very personal and immersive. My fear with rpg's is that there is some non-existant 'goal' that exists to do everything, get all skills, level up into infinity and it just becomes a boring points game but fallout3 stops that happening because once you get to level 20 that's it, no more levelling or skill aquiring, so you can only choose a few of the unique skills per game and it makes you choose very carefully what kind of player you want to be to survive.

The atmosphere is incredible - forget all the crappy post-apocalyptic films like mad max or waterworld. once you're wandering around a decimated washington dc and it's outskirts with free reign to go anywhere, genuinely engaging quests (the main one is about following your father who is modelled each game to reflect what you made yourself look like, the game's creation of him also looked scarily like my real dad) and cool little features and diaries to discover, it really paints a bleak and convincing picture of society completing knocked sideways by nuclear war.

It's quite a difficult game (i died a lot on normal difficulty) but you can change difficulty at any time in the menu, although i avoided that as it feels a bit too much like cheating going down to easy whenever you come across a hard enemy, and it makes it more satisfying when you overcome a really difficult situation. There are multiple ways to complete each quest e.g:

A wants you to kill B, once meeting B you can either kill them or;
go back and kill A for B or:
find out what each of their agendas really is and come to a peaceful solution for both (usually the longest and hardest to do but really, really satisfying especially because sometimes this can lead to places you wouldn't have gone otherwise and find cool items or people on the way)

anyway i feel i've been going on a bit but i'd highly reccomend it and now just talking about it makes me want to go play it again so i'm off!

[Mac-d]

it has quite a few FPS elements to it but there's loads of RPG to it as well, plenty of decisions, collecting things, exploring, talking, storyline, strategy, etc... It's hard to put a percentage on it but id say maybe 65% RPG.
Its fairly difficult, you wont be getting through this game in a hurry, but be warned there are plenty of tedious parts, and it gets repetitive quite a lot (kill, search bodies, take items, look in draws, etc)

Overall id say this game is a good one, with many good ideas, great freedom to do what you want in a big environment, lots of ways to get things done, but its also a fairly drab, gloomy place. (post apocalyptic world, so that's what they were going for..)

Id give it a score of 82%
Ive played more appealing games for me, but its down to personal preference really and if the whole setting and environment is your cup of tea, then the score could well deserve higher.

By the way, if your into RPG's, have you tried Mass Effect? Came out last year but id say it has a better story line and is more rewarding to play.