Fallout 3 Review

Fallout 3's opening, childhood in Vault 101 compressed into a tutorial, then the blinding walk out into the Capital Wasteland, is still one of the great reveals in games, and the ruined D.C. mood it establishes never fully fades. Bethesda's gamble of dragging an isometric RPG into first person was enormous and mostly paid off: VATS turned clunky real-time shooting into a queasy slow-motion signature, and the environmental storytelling, skeletons arranged mid-tragedy in a hundred ruined bathrooms, became the studio's defining craft.

The B ceiling comes from the writing. The main quest's water-purifier plot is thin, the karma system reads good and evil off a meter, Little Lamplight strains belief, and the original ending was so misjudged that Broken Steel had to patch it into sense. Megaton's bomb decision is iconic precisely because so few choices after it carry that weight. A hugely important B, but a B.