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Holy Dialog Tree!
Dialog is handled similar to Oblivion with a number of dialog trees you can select with each NPC you encounter. Your character doesn’t have an actual voice besides the text that you highlight so conversations will be played out in an answer and respond system. The way you treat people in physical actions and conversations has an impact on your karma and how you are treated in the world. This approach is getting a little stale after putting up with it for hours on end in Oblivion and now transferred over to Fallout. It’s a hard area to address and even though a lot of developers are struggling with interaction in role-playing games it seems like we have hit the wall on this one. I can’t see another route Fallout 3 could have taken, so take this criticism with a grain of salt. With the amount of content we are dealing with, we should really be satisfied with more than one or two opens in each conversation.

The Good, the Bad, and the Neutral
The Karma system in Fallout 3 will have you on your best or worst behaviour. In Fallout 3 you will can fluctuate between good, neutral and evil. Depending on how you handle certain situations you can receive a hefty dosage of Karma in either direction. Fallout 3 rewards players for staying in any alignment through the game and some special NPCs and areas can only accessed depending on your Karma. It’s easy to be the good guy in Fallout which is a change from most games, if you are evil you’ll need to dig deep and do some down right disturbing things. One of the first major alignment tests is deciding weather to detonate an atomic bomb that sits in the middle of a thriving town, leave it alone, or deactivate it. Depending on your actions in handling this lethal choice, you immediately start playing "the karma game" in Fallout 3.

Open World, Well Mostly
Navigation in Fallout 3 is fairly standard with the idealism that whatever you see you can get to in the game. While this isn’t entirely true the game world is huge and open for your enjoyment. At times you might be a little taken back by the amount of choice and then you might be perplexed when you can’t climb over a simple pile of rubble. Fallout 3 is on the massive side, however I still felt a bit directed down city paths and unable to go and do whatever I pleased. A fast travel system is also implemented for locations you have already been to in the game. Fast traveling picks up the pace of the game and does away with a lot of random wandering. However if you want to level up your character and find new alluring spots on the map exploration is encouraged.

Gamebryo in the House
In the graphics department Fallout 3 uses a version of the Gamebyro engine which is the same engine used to power Oblivion. This makes both games comparable to Oblivion even though each game has a distinct atmosphere. Fallout 3 is rich in detail, however this is best seen from afar. When you get close to objects they loose their sharpness and can be awfully bland. On the bad side of Oblivion, Fallout 3 also carries over the stale expressionless look from the NPCs along with poor animations in the inhabitants of the Fallout world. Luckily, Fallout 3 has a lot more to offer than graphics. Compared to another sandbox games like Far Cry 2, GTAIV or Fable II, Fallout 3 simply can't compare. This doesn’t mean Fallout 3 is ugly, or bad, it’s just not advanced past the non-flashy style that inhabited Cyrodiil.

For the good, and there is a lots of that, Fallout 3 load times are brisk and kept to minimal pop up, usually happens when you go through certain doors. The draw distance is also impressive showcasing some great optimization to get the eerie level of detail processed through quickly in the game. The creativity of the game remains close to Black Isles original look and feel. Important characters like the mutants and Brotherhood of Steel resemble their old counterparts. The biggest nod towards Bethesda's work is the creation of the atmosphere and scale of the world. When Bethesda starts working on their next project, hopefully they can spice it up a bit making another leap like they did from Morrowind to Oblivion.

Hey, It's Liam Neeson
The sound in Fallout 3 achieves our high standards that we had for this title. Besides the celebrity voice work from Liam Neeson and Ron Perlman, Fallout 3 has a rich cast of characters that you will meet and hear in your wasteland travels. In terms of quality balanced with quantity Bethesda does an excellent job delivering on both sides. The new additions of the radio stations can get repetitive, although the quality of the music (mainly 1930s-40s Jazz) is priceless. Without your Pipboy music player on you will mainly be listing to the blank space of emptiness. Less is more, this defiantly applies to Fallout 3.

Fallout 3 couldn’t have been achieved with a modern touch and I was more than happy to see Bethesda fully involved with keeping the art and sound of close to the original. The dilapidated 1950s science-fiction vibe that balances finds its harmony in between campy humour and brain splattering realism. Fallout 3 has a lot of personality that is scattered through every inch of this fictional wasteland. The original Fallout was a very instrumental game in PC development and I think Fallout 3 has done an keeps the tradition alive with an admirable job returning to the Vault.

This holocaust holiday into the wasteland of Fallout 3 is a brutal take on a post-apocalyptic action. Fallout is back and dare I say, better than ever. Fallout 3 has the ability to draw in both audiences who enjoy role-playing games, and the others who like a good shooter. Bethesda provides all the tools leaving it up to you to shape and enjoy your incredible journey in Fallout 3. Fallout 3 is one of the best games to be released this year and I’m glad Bethesda took their time making Fallout 3 the best it could be. The Fallout legacy continues....