Just to clarify with you, I have been playing Fallout 3 ever since I was ten years old (yes, a ten year old played this game). I remember begging my mom for it day after day ever since the first day it was released. When I saw that lunchbox (collector's edition) shaped present under my tree, I opened it instantaneously and saw my dream present. I ran up to my room, launched it on my Xbox 360, and experienced one of the best things I had ever seen/played in my life. I think that overall, I have accumulated over 1200 hours playing this one game, so now you know that I have some experience with it. Moving on to the review...

*By the way, I wrote this review as a huge piece, but I decided to divide it up with headers if you want to learn about a specific aspect only.


INTRO and CHARACTER CREATION
Fallout 3 is set in a post-apocalyptic version of Washington, DC. You are a resident living in Vault 101, one of the many underground shelters built by a company named 'Vault-Tec' before the bombs dropped in America on October 23, 2077. About 200 years later, the game starts you off with a thirty minute prologue. You begin right at birth where you create your character's appearance and eventually set his/her's S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes and your TAG skills. If you played the original Fallout or Wasteland games, you will be very familiar with the character creation system. Basically, you have 33 points to work around with that can be placed in Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck and you will excel or be weaker in certain areas depending on where you allocate these points. TAG skills on the other hand raise three of your skills by +15 to give you boosts in certain areas when you start off.


PLOT/STORY and QUESTS
In the beginning of your life, everything is fairly normal in the vault. You are raised by your single-dad, James (voiced by Liam Neeson), and deal with the usual experiences of childhood such as birthday parties, friendships, bullies, and school. Once you reach the segment when you are nineteen years old (five segments at ages 0, 1, 10, 16, and 19), things start to go wild when your dad leaves Vault 101 without you. Naturally, you decide to escape the vault yourself to find dear old Dad and discover why he left and where you can find him. Along the way, you will run into extremely diverse characters ranging from a grizzled man who is the sheriff of a town centered on an undetonated atomic bomb, a ghoul-hating, deceptive old geezer who owns a refurbished hotel, a psychotic, Russian pimp who is willing to sell his women's "services" to anyone who has enough caps (currency), and even aliens. I won't say anything more about the plot, but in my opinion, Fallout 3 has a very personal main quest that will pull your heart strings on numerous occasions.

Accompanied by the main quests are an insane amount of side quests that will lead you to the many interesting settlements across the Capital Wasteland. They range from simple assassination and extortion missions all the way to solving a crisis between two "superheroes" disrupting a town or managing a cannibal situation. Whenever you play Fallout 3, your quest tab in the Pip-Boy 3000 will always have at least something in it for you to complete and you will never be left empty handed - especially with the amazing mods out there (I will get into that later).


USER INTERFACE
Speaking of the Pip-Boy, it is your main user-interface while playing. With the press of a button, your status, karma, missions, map, items, notes, and radio will all be easily accessible to you. It is a great, clean interface that makes everything very manageble for the player.


SOUNDTRACK
One thing that is easily overlooked with Fallout 3 is its incredible soundtrack. All of the music is from the early-mid 20th century and it perfectly fits the atmosphere of the game. Eventually, you will know many of the songs note for note and for some reason, I have not gotten tired of the music six years later. However, the ambient soundtrack is another huge strength for the game. When you are exploring the Capital Wasteland without the radio playing on your Pip-Boy, you will get to hear the creepy atmospheric music play in the background. It will build up the suspense in you and keep you always on the lookout for any nearby threats. The combat music is good too and it will make encounters feel more deadly and action-packed.


GAMEPLAY
As for the gameplay, the shooting mechanics are ok, but not the best. There is no iron-sights capability without mods, so if you are playing this on console or without the Fallout Script Extender, FOSE for short, then you are going to have to aim with a tiny UI crosshair. This is a bad system, but it is managable due to slight auto-aim. I think that the auto-aim was added with the intention to correct this flaw, but once again it can be removed using mods (we are getting there :P) and it is not a big deal. There are a variety of guns in the game that range from the categories of small guns (pistols, rifles, etc.), big guns (miniguns, rocket launchers, FAT-MAN's, etc.), energy weapons (laser and plasma pistols and rifles), and explosives. Melee combat is basically the exact same as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion so if you liked it in that game, you will enjoy it in Fallout 3. You can go unarmed or use a bladed or blunt weapon.

Weapons are not the only things to consider in Fallout 3. Secondary skills like repair, medicine, and speech all carry just as much weight as the combat skills. It is even possible to make characters that focus exclusively on non-combat skills and have hireable companions do all the killing for you. This is the beauty of the Fallout games, any character build can be viable as long as you do what is necessary to make it work.

As you progress throughout the game your character gains xp by completing tasks like killing, discovering new locations, lockpicking, hacking, passing speech checks, completing quests, and more. When you reach the xp requirement to advance in level, you can allocate your skill points (amount of skill points determined by intelligence) to any of the thirteen skills accessible to you. This does not follow the "practice makes perfect" levelling module that The Elder Scrolls uses.


MODS
This is the big one that you have been waiting for! The Fallout 3 nexus (fallout3.nexusmods.com) at this moment contains 13 526 files available to download for free to enhance your Fallout 3 experience, and the number grows daily. Just about anything can be tweaked or created by using the Garden of Eden Creation Kit, or G.E.C.K. for short, and can be uploaded to the nexus for others to try out. You have probably heard of mods that are commonly used like Fallout Wanderer's Edition, Energy Visuals Enhanced, RH_Ironsights, and Weapon Mod Kits, which can greatly add to the experience. These mods are excellent and add many things that should have been in the game to begin with. Just be warned, mods can cause instability with the game, save corruption, constant CTD's, and can be incompatibile with other mods. For your first playthrough I would highly recommend downloading strictly fixes and tweaks like the Updated Unofficial Fallout 3 Patch, the Fallout Stutter Remover, Fallout 3 - Enhanced Camera, the 4GB Patch, and texture mods. You could even download FWE, but I would 100% go to the preset options once you exit the vault in the FWE control panel and use the 'I Love Vanilla' preset to keep the original feel of the game. When you are done with your first playthrough of the vanilla game, go ahead and add in all the mods you want! Just make sure you know what you are doing and if you don't, follow Gopher's EXCEPTIONAL 'Fallout 3 Modding Guide' on Youtube.



CONCLUSION

War, War Never Changes... but in this case that's good.

Follow this guide - http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/22370/discussions/0/828937546147175081/