I agree with most criticisms in the review and *some* of the good stuff. I find 4/5 is to high a score though and it didn't really mirror the review (of course, the reviewer pretty much points this out).
With Fallout 3, a fairly big part of my first playthrough was the "high" for me. While there were a thousand things I could complain about, I had fun with it and found the exploration addictive enough.
But when I decided to test out the replayability, I was very disappointed despite the fact that I made a character that was almost the opposite of my first one. I firmly believed that this game had many choices & consequences, but after replaying it (or trying to, I never finished it the second time) I found the experience to be *very* samey which is really unfortunate.
A lot of these problems comes down to character building because it is really easy to design a character that gets to access almost everything the game has to offer. Much of the importance of character creation is really played down from the previous Fallouts, especially the SPECIAL stats (incredibly unbalanced, with a few useful ones and the rest downright useless, which is reflected in how much you can raise them during the actual game), the removal of traits, the decreased importance of tagging skills and the fact that we get perks on every level up now.
Even on my first character I ended up with a pretty much "jack of all trades" character, or as much as you can in the game. I could access most stuff, while still being really strong in combat.
Upon my second playthrough, I did an "evil" character which I even designed with no combat skills. And even so I had absolutely no problems on the difficulty above normal (called hard? can't remember), and the "evil choices" often doesn't have any good effect on them. For Megaton, you get absolutely nothing for being evil and blowing it up. You get the suite at Tenpennys (which has the same functionality as the Megaton house) but nothing more of any weight (you can still do the Tenpenny quests if you decide to save Megaton for example). Instead of bounty hunters, you get the Ranger dudes after you.
The game is filled with stuff like that, where you may get an option on how to solve something but it doesn't really come back to you in an interesting way at all. An obvious solution to this would've been to have the classic ending slide, but
there isn't even that.
I don't *need* strong reactions from every choice I make, it's not that. But I felt like I barely got anything from Fallout 3. And it's a shame, because I really felt there would be based upon my first playthrough.
As such, while I felt the game was a huge step up from Oblivion in terms of roleplaying, I was left with a really strong feeling that whatever choices I made didn't really have a big effect as I'd like them to be. Once that set in, I put the game down and I haven't played the game since. To bad.