Fallout 3 Reviews
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First up is PluggedIn, where no score is given:
As you level up, a wide variety of special perks are offered which can muck things up all the more. A perk called Bloody Mess, for example, causes your victims to explode into what the game describes as a "red, gut-ridden, eyeball-strewn mess." The Cannibal perk, as you might imagine without any further description, takes things into even darker realms.
It can all get pretty radioactively ugly. So much so that the abundant profane language spoken by young and old alike feels like little more than foul glow-in-the-dark icing. And that's not even mentioning the sexual innuendo-laden conversations that are sprinkled throughout.
And then we have GameShout, where they've given the game a score of 9.8/10:
I've heard a lot of people complain about the end of the game. And, after finishing it, I think I understand their claim. It's not so much that the ending is bad, but that it's unsatisfying.
It's like this: remember the movie The Truman Show? Where, after living in this incredibly realistic re-creation of the world in a dome, he sails off, endures the worst the weather system can throw at him, and then, right at the end, his boat just bumps into the edge of the dome and he walks out a service door? In the case of the Truman Show, it's a satisfying ending because you want him to leave the dome. The problem with Fallout 3 is that what's in the dome is so good that you don't want to go out. You want to stay in the dome.
But ultimately, Fallout 3 is a limited game. Eventually, you'll have seen every sight to see, killed every foe, gathered every treasure, and completed every quest. It'll take a long time, mind you, and probably more than one guide, but it's possible. Still, until you reach that point, the game feels endless. You just want to keep going. I suppose there was a certain point in the game's design, where the designers were asking themselves if they should let the player keep playing after finishing the storyline. Honestly, the answer that they picked was the right one. There was no good way to keep playing without making the game get old really fast. By drawing everything to a close, by putting a definite terminating point, the story wraps up, however painful it is to say good-bye.
