While the freedom granted in Fallout 3 is quite a strength, it also quickly becomes the game’s greatest weakness. Early on, your character is ill-equipped and brittle as they come, while the Capital Wasteland is chock full of creatures that wish to liberate your head from the rest of your body. Furthermore, ammo and bottlecaps (the game’s form of currency) are in short supply, as are reliable weapons, so you’ll likely find yourself outmatched at every turn. While these issues are somewhat alleviated as you press through the game, they never go away entirely, and the entire experience makes the game feel more like a survival horror title than an RPG. While scarcity of items can make for good strategy in some respects, there’s no worse feeling than being trapped deep in a dungeon with no ammo and no healing items and wondering if you’ll be able to make it back to safety before some angry enemy finishes you off. It’s always nice to have options, but this may be a case where Bethesda would have been well-served to lock off some areas from low level characters so would-be adventurers don’t get in over their heads too soon.

The open-ended nature of the world also hurts the impact of the game’s story, as there’s never any real impetus to keep you on the path of looking for your character’s lost father rather than striking out on your own. Even as the game progresses, the story never really manages to fully captivate the player. Before long, the main storyline becomes just another objective on the list of missions, something to be completed in your own good time when the urge to tackle secondary tasks has subsided. It’s hard to believe that an RPG can have a forgettable story, but sadly that is the case here, as Fallout 3 is driven more heavily by curiosity than by narrative.

Since you’re going to be spending a lot of time wandering the Wasteland, it would probably be good if you know how to fight, huh? The good news is that your character isn’t exactly helpless out there. While you can play the game as a typical first-person shooter, that would miss the point, as the beauty of Fallout 3’s combat comes in the form of VATS or the Vault-Assisted Targeting System. By entering VATS, players can freeze the action and zoom in on their intended target. The creature’s various body parts are displayed, each with their own health bar as well as the percentage chance that a shot on that particular limb will be successful. This system quickly becomes critical as targeting certain parts of an enemy’s body will cripple them, making life much easier on our hero. For example, when faced with a particularly quick enemy, it might be best to take out its legs so it can’t chase you as effectively. By the same token, if you happen to be facing off against a chaingun-wielding super mutant, knocking out his arms will likely cause him to drop his weapon, or at least become less accurate while firing. Of course, if you’d prefer to simply go for the quick kill, shots to the head are always a good way of ending the fight with minimal expended ammo.

VATS could have easily been overpowered, so Bethesda wisely tied it into a system wherein it can only be used so often before it must be recharged. A whole host of factors, from agility rating to weapon type and amount of ammo left in a clip all help determine how many actions a player can take before VATS is exhausted. The whole system is extremely useful and incredibly well-balanced. Indeed, as a testament to how great it is, there were often times in the game where I completely forgot that I could continue shooting in first-person while waiting for VATS to recharge.