Fallout 3 - Review @ The Edge

The Edge staff give a more critical review of Fallout 3 than most though I disagree that it's really impossible to find your way around the map with the Pipboy & compass. I don't think the breadcrumbs idea from Fable 2 would really be fitting a Fallout game. The score is 7/10.

As wastelands go, Washington’s is a surprisingly busy place, and the game contrives to distract you with meaty side-quests at every opportunity. The broad strokes are well considered, and the best recall the ingenious freedom that marked earlier Fallout games: an encounter with some slavers can find its resolution through complicity, violence, stealth or a fluid combination of all three; a group of cannibals prove to be much more open to reason than their grisly pursuits would suggest; mediating a land dispute between some over-privileged humans and their ghoulish neighbours gives the player several delightful avenues of self-expression.

The writing isn’t quite as consistent as the ideas that underpin it, however, and though dialogue trees rarely collapse into total logical failure, they do sometimes assume knowledge the player has yet to gain, and often have an unreal quality to them – as if human emotions had been explained to the writer secondhand.