Fallout 3 - Review @ RPG Codex

A less than positive review of Fallout 3 can be found at the Codex.

More than anything else, Fallout 3 suffers from a lack of cohesion, consistency and craftsmanship. Across the board, the quality of content runs the whole gamut (though moments of brilliance are particularly rare.) The game's highest "achievement" is the quantity of content and to this end, I feel like Bethesda have achieved absolutely very little. There's nothing in Fallout 3 that couldn't have been accomplished in four years by a hundred enthusiastic kids with rich parents.

There's really no critical justification for something that prides quantity over all else. Nobody lauds a movie that runs for 8 hours just for the sake of it. Nobody takes a ruler to a library and judges books by the width of their spine. Nobody pretends a gallon of waffle-house coffee has any worth beyond the caffeine it contains. Same goes for a four litre box of cheap wine. Fallout 3 shares the same metaphorical space as fast-food, bulk buys, movie marathons. If the only thing you care about is having a metric fuckton of something, then it's probably worth getting. But even then, there are far superior products in the form of MMORPGs and games with "unlimited" procedural content.