Screenshots courtesy of me. Go me!

So. Fallout 3. Given that the audience that are reading this are no older than 4 I'm not going to review this game.

HOWEVER. Out of my sheer love for this game like brown bread dipped in chocolate custard with sugar cubes I will review this game anyway, oh god I love that stuff. Fallout 3 is a game developed by Bethesda Softworks, a company which you'll probably never have heard of (I sure as hell haven't heard of them anyway) and they have amazed me with this astounding piece of game that makes me want to jump off the nearest camel in joy. 

Fallout 3 is set around 200 years in the future in the Capital Wasteland (thats America folks) where the world has been devastated by nuclear war, which has caused much of the life and surroundings to become irradiated (turned bad for those who don't know what that means), with nuclear 'Fallout' everywhere, hence the name. You play a character which has been born and brought up in Vault 101, a vault which protects human life from the outside by trapping them inside. Sorta like a hamster in a cage. A cage made of SALT. Which the hamster is allergic to... Anyway. 

Your character can be male or female and there is a wealth of customisation available for those who LOVE to make characters look like them in real life or some famous person which they wish to be, you can choose skin colour, facial structure such as chin size, and even eye colour to make your character just like you want it to be. Of course for those who are too lazy (like me) there are preset looks that have been put together in case of emergency, so for the lazy people out there (I'm looking at YOU!) who don't want to spend 1 hour molding your character's face into a beautiful mess of makeup and manliness, you don't have to.

The game's tutorial is your life in the vault, done with great subtlety showing you all the controls and skills you will need for your journey into the Capital Wasteland, like your 7 primary attributes which are neatly bundled into one word: S.P.E.C.I.A.L. S.P.E.C.I.A.L indicates your primary attributes which are: 

Strength - This affects your physical strength, more means you cna carry more and do more melee damage.

Perception - This affects your ability to 'sense' enemies on your compass and increases perception abilities like lockpicking.

Endurance - Endurance affects your total HP, more means you can take more hits without dying (which you don't want to do).

Charisma - This increases your speech and barter skills, skills which include a lot of talking, so if oyu like to talk a lot, get this skill.

Intelligence - Big word isn't it? Intelligence affects how many skill points you get when you level up and increases skills like Medicine and Science, because you need a big brain to do them. Oh yes. You can never be too smart, unless your brain gets too heavy and your neck gets crooked, nasty thought.

Agility - This increases your action points in V.A.T.S slightly and increases Agility based skills like Sneak.

Luck - Luck! Lucky lucky luck! Lucky lucky luck luck! Luck increases ALL of your skills a bit and makes you every so slightly more lucky. But only ever so slightly. Lucky. You will be. More lucky. Just a bit.

Also in the vault you learn how to use the battle system which the game has become famous for: V.A.T.S, the Vault-Tec Auto Targetting System. V.A.T.S is a battle system where you choose which body part that you want to shoot/clobber, where you then watch your character perform in true turn based style.

Now, you may be thinking "Turn based? I hate turn based games!" but the way this game uses it, you'll never get tired of it. Don't believe me? When you execute your actions, you perform it all in super cool slow motion, when you kill something in V.A.T.S you get to see its brains fly off in several different directions and trust me - that never gets old. V.A.T.S uses action points, which determine how many 'moves' you can make during one use of V.A.T.S and is affected by Agility, one of your S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats. Your action points quickly recover while not in V.A.T.S so you'll nearly always be able to blow someone's head off using V.A.T.S. Perfect for those who want to kill someone but can't, you can imagine their head on Fallout 3! .......Just don't go killing them in real life though, thats just sick.

One of the most defining points about this game is a system called the 'Karma' system, where anything and everything you do affects what people think of you and how they react to you. You can be a complete badass and kill everything and everyone, which in most games you couldn't do, but in this game is perfectly acceptable, your karma will reflect your actions and your actions will either increase or decrease your karma level. There are three different karma levels in this game: Good, Neutral and Evil, with the good and evil karmas also have a very good or very evil level of karma as well. Good or Neutral NPC's (non-player characters) are normally friendly to good characters and not so friendly to evil characters, while Evil NPC's are vice versa.

Skills wise there are many, many skills to choose from and when you level up you can distribute your points anywhere and everywhere. There are combat skills like Small Guns, which increases your damage with - guess what - Small Guns, utility skills like Lockpicking which allows you to open locked doors and containers and the medicinal skill which allows you to heal yourself for more than someone with low Medicine skill. It's all up to you as to what skills you want to use, you can go for the ninja like skills like Sneak and Small Guns or go in favor of Big Guns and Explosives, there are no limits as to how this game can be played so allows for much replay value, sort of like making a snowman out of clay and then smashing it up, yeah, lets go with that.

Along with skills are special abilities called 'perks' which grant your character special abilities, some perks grant small benefits like +5 to Lockipicking and +5 to Sneak while some skills are very powerful like Death's Sprint, which restores ALL of your action points if you kill something in V.A.T.S, which lets you go on forever if you can keep killing things, oh the fun!

There is a huge number of quests available in this game, but its almost impossible to do them all on your first run through the game, the world map is so large it would take you at least 30 minutes to go from one side to another, even longer if you stop to meet the locals along the way. Bring your shotgun though, because the locals might only be able to speak shotgun. To the face. The range of buildings and scenery in this game keeps it all very interesting, as will the different types of enemies, ranging from simple raiders, to buckets of bolts (thats a robot) or the deadly and infamous DEATHCLAW OMGz0RZ.

Another nifty factor about this game is the inclusion of companions and partners, including an unnamed but VERY COOL dog! Who doesn't want a dog to keep them company in the lonely wastes? The range of companions available to you differs based on your karma levels, which is awesome because it gives another reason to play through the game more than once, maybe not just to see what companions you could get, but to experience how the game treats you based on your karma level that you weren't the first run through.

There's so much to do and see in this game that its VERY hard to give it a bad rating, with only a few minor flaws, one being the combat system outside of V.A.T.S kind of clunky, like a rusty spoon with another spoon stuck to it with rust, and some glitches that cause certain things to go through walls and stuff, though this isn't very common, this game deserves not one, not two, but three, thats right... three.... pats on the back. You thought I was gonna say thumbs up weren't you? Don't lie, I'm on to you. This game offers so much that its hard not to return to this game every now and then just to shoot things for the fun of it. It doesn't even ask for anything in return.... apart from maybe a few months of your LIFE. Months? Yeah, thats right.

On that note, I'm off to play some Fallout. See you later. Keep it real.... and full of penguins.

Stingray out.