Fallin’ Out
Fallout 3 is on sale this weekend on Steam, so I finally picked it up. Been meaning to play that for a long time, but I like when stuff is half-price, and Steam has frequent sales, so I waited.
My first impression of the game was that it’s a lot like Bioshock — it contrasted an old-timey look, complete with period music, against scenes of destruction and devastation, and then it gives me the same sort of almost steampunk nanotech that Bioshock had. My second impression of the game wasn’t so good; the intro cutscene and then the bit in the hospital were both stupid and predictable. But then character creation starts up, and that’s a good time. There’s a lot of stuff you can customise about your character, both visually and stat-wise, and the mechanism for doing so is pretty interesting and well-paced. The bit in the nursery is really annoying, though, since it makes baby noises non-stop; it’s like playing Yoshi’s Island, but there’s no bubble to catch to make him shut up.
The rest of the intro stuff is pretty fun; I enjoyed my time in vault 101. Once I got out of the vault, though, I started liking the game a bit less, which is probably because I don’t know what I’m doing. Fallout 3 is very much an open-world game, and I find myself wanting a bit more structure than it provides. Right now I don’t really know where I am or what I’m doing, and I get a bit frustrated with that. I prefer to have more direction along the main quest than I’m getting, but still have the "other" places to go to explore and quest. Right now, I’m fighting giant ants in the subway because it’s really the only thing I’ve found to do so far — lord knows if there’s one thing I like more than fighting rats in a sewer, it’s fighting giant ants in a ruined subway tunnel.
But it’s decent overall. If the cohesion picks up a bit and the subway tunnels full of ants get somewhat less pronounced, I’ll probably like it quite a lot.
