It's hard to call Fallout 3 just an RPG. Players still roam around, grab quests, and level up after they've gained enough experience, but it's so much more about the experience and downtime rather than the linear goal that drives you forward. You see, Fallout 3 isn't just an RPG, but rather a life simulator of what it must be like if the world actually did suffer an apocalypse. I've too often found myself slowly shuffling towards a nearby city, my bag packed with so many items I can't run anymore, and a crippled leg holding me back. It's not an easy way of life outside the Vault, having to survive fights with mutants and scrounging all the items I can. I walk towards the salvation of a walled city and must remind myself it's just a game, because if I don't the bleakness starts to eat away at me and I feel the sense of hopelessness that surely plagues the citizens of this new world. It's hard not to be moved by the game. Throughout it all, however, it's still a phenomenal achievement as both an excellent game and benchmark in the history of gaming.

Fallout 3 starts out with one of the most ingenious character creation systems I've ever seen. The game actually starts with your birth, as the first thing you'll witness as your character is your loving father doting over you. He talks to his wife about checking to see if it's a boy or a girl, which suddenly translates into you deciding your character's sex. Daddy will then ask what you think of your new name, which then moves to you deciding what to name your character. The beginning choices as a baby are only superficial, as the sex you choose, name, and personal look (the third step) only help define you as a person once the game proper really gets started.

Once the events of your birth unfold, you're soon jumped ahead a couple years to teach you how to walk and interact with the objects in your environment. You'll press the button to talk, hear yourself as a baby in its various goo-goos, and you'll have a hard time keeping your heart from melting. Players will then read a children's book to help define what kind of character they'll be, which is the first real game affecting decision you make. You'll age some more, experience more of the life the Vault has to offer you, and then you'll soon be taking your GOATS to see what kind of citizen you'll be. You aren't required to take the results of the multiple-choice personality test, but it does do a good job at showing what kind of character you might be.

I Guess That Car Is Going Nowhere

Your life of relative safety is soon destroyed, however, as you learn that your father is the first person to leave the Vault, and his disappearance has caused an uproar among the people. After a daring escape to flee the people who believe you surely must know what's going on, you take your first steps into the world and are blinded by the brightness of it all. Slowly your eyes adjust, allowing you to see the real world for the first time in your life.

Welcome to Fallout 3. The real game begins now.

The opening tutorial does a wonderful job at introducing you to all the nuances of Fallout 3, but it pales in comparison to the scope that awaits you out in the real world. A scientifically clean and preserved habitat is soon torn away to reveal a ravaged wasteland where bridges are destroyed, water is radiated, and the only human survivors are either marauding raiders, deformed mutants, or civilians banding together to form some semblance of a community. It's hard not to just stare at the world and take it all in, letting the hopelessness wash over you and invade your persona. It doesn't matter if it's your first step or one of your countless ones many hours later, there is always a new view to behold, a hidden away place you've never seen before, or one more little intimate area off the beaten path that will surprise and dazzle you.

Much like Bethesda's most recent release – Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – the game has a finale, which you can reach by plowing through the central story and mission of the game, which is learning why your father left the Vault in the first place and finding out what happened to him. If you want to tackle only this part of the game you can, but you'd be missing out on the greater picture, which is the world of Fallout 3. You'll see a ton of the world by following the main story, but you won't see it all. For that matter, you probably won't see all the game anyways, as there is so much to do and the world is so amazingly expansive. Besides doing the main quest, players can also take on one of the many quests given out by other NPCs existing in the world, doing everything from finding a lost family member to choosing the whole destruction of a town. Simply playing the game, however, is a quest enough on its own, as exploring the world at your leisure, going where you please, can result in little mini-quests you never expected, such as coming across a group of Super Mutants and finding a man being held captive.

The game will also constantly test your morality level, as you can play the game as a saint, devil, or some mixture of the two. An early quest – and one of the worst kept secrets in gaming – has you heading to Megaton, a haphazardly thrown together city built around an atom bomb that dropped and never went off. Some of the patrons worship the bomb as a god, but one fellow in town knows better and wants you to arm the thing so the town will blow sky high. The sheriff, on the other hand, wants you to disarm the thing so no harm will ever come to his town. The kind person will want to preserve the town, while the evil will giggle at the potential of seeing the town completely obliterated, which will indeed happen and you'll get to witness should you go down that path.

The decision is a clear choice between good and evil. While it's good to have these moments, I was much more engaged and surprised by the events that happened when the black and white merged into a single shade of gray. Helping out someone might lead to the death of another, while doing harm to one person might ultimately lead to something positive happening later on. It's like the old philosophical question about would you go back in time to kill Hitler if you could. Killing Hitler would certainly save a ton of people, but could you pull that trigger and live with that death on your conscience? Fallout 3 will constantly have you questioning your decisions and whether you are doing the right or wrong thing.

I Love VATS

Beyond the immersive quests that hinge on your own personal morality and decisions, the character themselves is also a direct outward expression of yourself. In games like the Final Fantasy series, players are stuck experiencing the life and personality that the developers want you to experience and feel. If you don't like Squall being a self-absorbed loner…tough, you can't change him. Instead of millions of people experiencing the exact same character as long as they play the game, it's hard to imagine any two people having the same character when playing Fallout 3.

Fallout 3 is built around the fundamentals of its stats, which allow you to specialize in as few things as possible to maximize your potential, or spreading the wealth and being a jack-of-all-trades by being able to do a little of everything, but not being a savant one way or another. If someone wants to focus on being a weapon wielding badass, a player can go in there and improve nothing but the stats to help them wield weapons better than anyone else. If you want to charm the pants off people and get the best deals for your money, you'll have to focus on improving your speech skills. Players can also improve their lock picking skills to open every door and locked container, improve their science abilities to hack all sorts of computer terminals with ease, and be able to give your character any other possible ability you'd want to survive in the world.

Players will also define their character by choosing Perks, which can be grabbed by leveling up (killing enemies, completing quests, and using skills will all net you experience). Much like the skills you can improve to define your character, Perks also go a long way in developing your character and the type of gameplay experience you'll have. Perks affect everything from speech skills (Lady Killer opens up some new opportunities with women) to sneak skills (be a better pickpocket) to gaining more points to allot to your different skills or giving yourself the ability to do damage against specific enemies or when wielding specific weapons. Some of the Perks seem pretty worthless, but that's only if you're not developing a character who cares about that certain ability. In actuality, however, all the Perks serve a purpose in helping players throughout the game.

Most of the skills are used automatically, such as being able to disarm bombs or repair stuff like broken pipes. Two exceptions are lock picking and hacking, which have their own minigames. Lock picking is pretty easy to do, as you'll adjust the position of the left and right thumbsticks to adjust the bobby pin and screwdriver. Turn enough to unlock and if you feel a rumble readjust and try again before a pin breaks. The hacking game is a bit harder, as you'll only have a handful of tries to find the right password. Players will be given a list of words and random characters, which are all possibilities in making up the password. Players will then pick possibilities – like the word "tree" for example – and then be told how many letters are correct. Players will then take how many characters are correct and then pick another option to see if they have more or less characters right now. Slowly, by taking educated guesses, players will find the correct password and unlock a terminal (fail, however, and it shuts down until you provide an override).

If you're looking at screenshots or firing the game up for the first time, you'd think the game was a first-person shooter given the perspective and the fact that weapons are held on the screen just like that genre. While it is possible to manually point a gun at an enemy and pull the trigger to do damage, you'll be wasting a lot of ammo and doing the least amount of damage possible (though handheld melee weapons work far better on a quick reflex system). The reason players will do so little damage is because Fallout 3 isn't a FPS…it's an RPG. Let me repeat: Fallout 3 isn't a FPS…it's an RPG. Since it's a given now that Fallout 3 is an RPG, players will benefit by using the game's VATS system, which gives you action points to use and target specific parts of an enemy to do the maximum amount of damage as possible based on the player's stats.

By pressing the Right Bumper, players will temporarily pause the game to pull the VATS system up, which displays the enemies you are fighting dead center in the middle of your screen. With the enemy in your crosshairs now lined up, player can use the left thumbstick to flick between body parts, each offering up their own hit percentage ratios and benefits. Hitting a chest might be an easier target, but blasting someone in the head will lead to more damage (also, very bloody decapitations a lot of the time). Each body part offers up its own side effects when a proper hit is registered, which can help ease the frustrations of battle. Shooting someone in the legs will reduce their movement speed, shooting arms will reduce aiming ability and make them drop weapons, and other such body parts will have their own specialized effects. Players must also keep up the condition of their weapons and armor by repairing them, or else they will do less damage, provide less defense, and guns will have a higher likelihood of jamming during the middle of a gun fight.

Another important factor to keep an eye on is the condition of your character's health. Using the game's wait feature, sleeping, visiting a doctor, or eating and drinking can heal health. A problem, however, comes from the fact that many of the healing items have a negative principle – radiation poisoning. Since the world is tainted, almost everything you find will give your character a slight dose of radiation. Drinking water will help heal you up nicely, but it will also cause more radiation poisoning. Eating some radiated ant meat will help a little, but at least it features a smaller dose of radiation. A little radiation isn't a problem, but the higher the gauge goes the more effects you'll suffer. A player can reset their radiation level, however, by going to visit a doctor or using chemicals to drive away the radiation. Players will also have to worry about healing crippled limbs to stay in tip-top shape.

Ewww

In terms of technical prowess, it's hard to want much more from a videogame. I've already talked about how great the game looks, though the game is far from pretty (in a good way). If you're expecting sweeping vistas filled with lush foliage, you'll be letdown. Fallout 3 is all about providing the dirtiest and most ruined world the developers could possibly muster. You might not like the fact that the world has much of the same color palette, but the fact is that if a nuclear apocalypse happened like depicted in the game, this honestly feels like what it would look like, and so it helps keep the realistic feel of the game. The character models are also improved over Bethesda's last offering. The only slight downfall graphically is there is some object fade-in when the game is rendering a lot on the screen at once. On the audio side of things, the voice work is great, featuring a few big names like Ron Perlman and Liam Neeson to play the game's major characters. The sound effects are also excellent, as everything from the shuffling of a cockroach to the yell of a mutant all sound great, and will send shivers down your spine in the right situation. The real standout, however, is the game's music, which is amazing. The music will swell when engaged in an enemy fight, but it's the more contemplative moments that use the best tracks. Simply strolling through the destroyed countryside, for instance, will be filled with light melodies, punctuated by the depressing single plink of a piano here or there. The music does a great job of not only intensifying a tough fight, but really driving out the emotions in a player, as it is very touching when put in the context you hear it used.

Fallout 3 is a remarkable game…one that deserves a place in any Xbox 360 owner's gaming library. Many years from now, when the Xbox 360 is as obsolete as the original Nintendo is today, I'll still remember fondly my time spent with the game, and regard it as one of the great landmarks in gaming history. The scope is so immensely vast that it's almost unfathomable that Bethesda was able to pull it off. As a final selling point, the game is highly replayable, as there are so many possible hours of enjoyment to be had, whether it's simply playing through the main game for the first time, trying out a new character type, or playing through once good and then a second time as bad.

Fallout 3 gets my highest level of recommendation, while also thrusting itself to the top of my list for Best Game of the Year.

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