Fallout 3 Magazine Review

Each country seems to be getting its turn for an exclusive Fallout 3 review, next up being action-oriented PC Action from Germany. NMA translates the 90%-score review.

With this particular quest, both solutions lead to the same reward: some money, equipment, good or bad karma and, as the main prize, your own apartment. Here you can store items, rest to regenerate and even practice your Ikea-skills. You even get your own robot butler, who, on request, will tell you a lot of bad jokes. It is at this point, that you realize who the real stars in this game are: lots and lots of details, built into game with love. They put life into the twisted world. Part of this is the excellent dialogue [keep in mind, they have the German localization here, which, quite uncommon, seems to be excellent], the detailed, believable characters and the funny illustrations with the vault-boy, just to name a few. In only 15 hours of testing we experienced so much of the post-apocalyptic world, and everything fit together and made sense. This goes for secondary quests, too, and although they won’t have so far reaching consequences like Megaton, they will almost always put you, the player, in front of decisions with moral implications. Re-playability is high.

Just one question remains: How good is Fallout 3 in direct comparison with Oblivion? Localization is excellent, and there are no unnerving abbreviations. Usability of the inventory is good, although the pip-boy-screen could have been bigger. You cannot quick-bind certain functions of the pip-boy, so you always have to go through the pip-screen, which gets boring after a while. Visually speaking, Fallout 3 is not quite up to Oblivion. Washed-out textures, and low-detail characters are a bit disappointing. What looks really good though are weapons and weapon effects, especially the Fat Man. Throughout the review, the game ran smoothly under Vista in a resolution of 1600×1200 with maximum details. The machine was 2.66Ghz quadcore with 4GB of ram and a GeForce 9800GT.