Fallout 3 - Previews @ RPS, Telegraph

Kieron Gillen has whipped up a piece on Fallout 3 for Rock, Paper, Shotgun after an hour's play.  It's a positive piece but I'm going to take this quote, because I'm really interested in how VATS will work out:

Perhaps oddly, my biggest reservation was what Mat liked a lot. That is, the VATS system. I’m not sure what may have changed - certainly in some demonstrations people have noted it seems to cause fatalities more often than would be reasonable (and lots more gore too). That certainly wasn’t true when I played, making my experience - the gore was extreme, but not comic extreme, and the killing power wasn’t absolute. Talking to another Journalist there, he couldn’t see why anyone would use it when just shooting does the job well enough. I’m not sure I agree - when it works, it’s agreeably cinematic, and it has its own flavour.

The problem is, when it doesn’t work, it just takes you out of the game entirely. Case in point is one of the most common enemies, the Mole Rats. These rodents charge at you and - rather than other creatures which do a back and forth sort of pattern - just repeatedly throw themselves against you at point blank range. You see one approaching and go to VATS. After getting off one shot, the bugger’s on you and you’re unloading at point blank range as it scurries against your legs. Which looks openly silly, as if you were trying to chastise an over-friendly house-pet.

...and a general preview from Telegraph.co.uk:

'Destroyed beauty' is a term we hear a lot these days, the dark grit and grime a popular choice of art style for a nuclear generation. Fallout 3, however, offers a sense of poignancy to go with the hollowed out buildings, with the leftover remnants of a 1950s civilization preparing for a nuclear disaster in vain. "Part of what makes Fallout great is the juxtaposition of this very happy, optimistic 1950s-esque view of life, pre-war, and then seeing it after things went horribly wrong." says Bethesda's Vice President of PR and Marketing, Pete Hines, "It's seeing those two things against one another that adds a lot to it. That everything is blown up but you still see this happy optimism and idealistic view of the world beforehand"

As I walked among the debris and the civilization that has risen from it in the 200 years since the disaster, it's easy to see what he means. Signs jovially inform the naïve population what to do in the event of a nuclear disaster and so-called bomb shelters house charred bones, becoming coffins. And while the world may change, humanity, it seems, doesn't. Among the people I encountered, familiar human traits of greed, violence, discrimination and religious fanaticism loomed large.