Video Game

Fallout 3

Lastly, the choices matter. There are a ton of choices that play parts of conversations and in general the overall story. Some choices are small, such as your character's intelligence level or skill level, mean you can do certain missions or task without extra help or having to come back later.

Garrett

May 30, 2026 — 5 min read

Overly Dramatic Review in One Sentence

An in-depth storyline driven game that expects you to understand more than it explains.

The Actual Review

Game time:

PC: 37 hours
Xbox: 3 hours

Gameplay

We have to start by saying two things. One, this game came out in 2008 and no amount of mods are going to make it look good. I am sure there are some, but none are worth it since the game play would still be a bit clunky. Two, I played this with the Begin Again - Tale of Two Wastelands mod collection. I did this for a couple of reasons, the main one being patches for the game. The second being that I have played Fallout New Vegas multiple times on Xbox, but never Fallout 3 so this was a fun way to play them both.

This is very much like The Elder Scrolls IV - Oblivion Remastered but the old version. Not terribly surprising since it is the same developers, but that means that what I don't like or was frustrated with in that game will be similar in this. One of the main things that bothered me was the rate in which weapon conditions would fall apart, and how that affected the weapon damage. Let me explain that a bit more. So in the game each weapon breaks more as you use it. This is very cool and in the weapons shows up as jams during reloads at times (This could be from the mods, I am not sure). What I don't like about it is that the damage goes down. That doesn't make sense to me for the guns, but for the melee weapons it does. If you have a broken sight on a gun, the bullet will still hurt you, but you'll just have a harder time aiming. So reducing accuracy would be a better thing to deteriorate than damage. Either way, it does require you to keep searching for weapons of the same type or repairing them to keep them useful. Very cool.

The fast travel system is great. You get to a place, and then you can fast travel there.

The actual gun fighting is fun. The fact that you have the Fat Man, a nuke shooter, is hilarious. It also is the best weapon for some big baddies like the Goliaths and the Deathclaws.

That might be one of the best parts of the game for me is the diversity of the bad guys. You have Ghouls, Super Mutants, Centaurs (not the horse type), bandits, vampires, organizations like the Enclave/Brotherhood of Steel (depending on your choices), and very large critters since they have mutated with the nuclear explosions.

Graphics and Sound

As I mentioned above, this game came out in 2008. So the graphics feel dated and that adds to a bit of the clunkiness with aiming and interacting.

The sound is iconic. That Pip-Boy and VATS noise are just immediately recallable and that is due to good sound design. There are some issues to the sounds with the guns in my opinion, but this is almost a 20-year-old game so it might have been the best they had at the time. I.e., repeating the sound for most rifles. The Fat Man has a solid sound though.

Story and Characters

The story for this one is a bit different depending on how you play it. You can very quickly go off in the wrong direction and pick up the story halfway through making it very confusing when you get told what is going on. While that is cool from replayability perspective, but since this was my first time, I picked up the story skipping probably 3 steps. The only reason I didn't go straight to him by accident is that I had a general idea of where he was from seeing an old roommate play this game over and over again.

The characters I am not sure if I can honestly speak to. I don't feel that I interacted with any of them very often to get a big understanding of who they are.

My Rating

It was a fun game, but the story feels light. I really like the alternate DC area as it brings back a lot of nostalgia, but it is so confusing to move through. I know it plays a point, but it just adds so much frustration when the game gets lost on its own directions. Quickly, I wanted to talk about my roommate who used to play this game. In the first 3 years of my time in the Marines, he probably played the story like 4 times. Maybe more. I'd come in, and he'd be in a new spot. From that I knew roughly where Dad was the whole time, so I actively avoided that area because I had accidentally already skipped so much of the story. It is "Worth a Playthrough", but Fallout in general is one of those games that gets better with each new version.

Parental Rating

There are a lot of body parts flying around. There is a crazy amount of language and outright racism. And there is a dude running a harem, which you can save one of the girls from. They generally wouldn't be a fan.