Nobody knows who dropped the first bomb, and nobody cares. 200 years have passed since a nuclear war between the U.S. and China reduced the planet to cinders, and ✱humanity🍨 has only one concern: survival. The fallout not only destroyed civilisation, but twisted and distorted it. Humans mutated into feral monsters, water and plants were irradiated and animals grew in ferocity. But for you, life is peachy. For the past 19 years you’ve been living with your dad in Vault 101, a nuclear fallout shelter buried deep underground on the outskirts of Washington DC.

Fallout’s one of the bi♑ggest, deepest RPGs out there. Not a role-playing fan? It’s also a brutal and accomplished FPS. It tells an incredible story across 100+ hours, but it’s also packed with Call of Duty-style set-pieces. As we type, we’re 29 hours in and have finished the main story, but the volume of worthy remaining side quests is boggling. It’s a measure of Fallout’s depth that it begins with your birth – you emerge from the womb in first-person view, with squealing and crying that you control yourself. Your vision’s blurred, but you can just about see your dad (Liam Neeson), his face obscured by a surgical mask. “Let’s see what you’ll look like when you’re all grown up”, he whispers as a nearby monitor flickers to life, displaying the game’s character creation tool.

The editor is flexible, but no matter how much you adjust the sliders your character will always look vaguely the same; handsome, slim ✅and youthful – mercifully, your appearance has no bearing on the plot. It’s in your character’s stats and abilities that the depth of customisation lies. As you go through your youth and teenage years, you’ll shape your character via a series of clever interactive ‘minigames’. In one you flick through a toddler’s book called ‘You’re SPECIAL!’ which determines your core stats: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, i🍷ntelligence, agility and luck. In another, you take an exam called the GOAT (Generalised Occupational Aptitude Test) that judges how good you’ll be at things like sneaking, using weapons, picking locks and bartering with merchants.

You’ll spend about an hour and a half in Vault 101, making friends, fighting bullies, struggling with moral decisi♛ons and completing tutorials. We won’t say exactly what happens as it’s one of the most compelling, intriguing parts of the game, but eventually you leave the confines of your lead-lined tomb and emerge blinking into the outside world. This is where Fallout 3 really begi💫ns. You’ll prickle with relief at escaping the claustrophobia of the Vault – the sun’s blinding – only for icy trepidation to take hold as your eyes adjust to the numbing desolation outside. This isn’t a game of rich forests, and lush spires, but cruel, brown open wasteland and haunting symbols of times past.

The Capital Wasteland stretches for miles in every direction, and what you do now is your choice. The game nudges you toward Megatoꦗn, a nearby shanty town constructed from the remains of a crashed jumbo jet, but you needn’t bother. The main ‘quest’ features the game’s best set-pieces, but if you want to build stats, and gather weapons and money to buy supplies, it’s wise to attempt one of the game’s myriad side quests. The wastes look barren and empty, but every few miles you’ll bump into someone looking for help or an offer of work. Problem is, the side quests aren’t that satisfying. You can spend an hour traipsing through a subway tunnel fighting giant ants, only to find some low-level loot and a handful of bottle caps (the game’s currency) at the end. Quests that offer up moral quandaries result in little more than raised or lowered karma (your character’s good/evil meter) and an underwhelming reward. In Oblivion you felt as if your choices were affecting communit🤡ies, but the scope of your actions in Fallout is disappointingly limited.

By any other standards, the game’s ripe with highlights. In a town called Canterbury Commons, two rival superheroes (the Antagoniser and The Mechanist) are at battle, turning the streets into a warzone and te⛎rrorising its residents. The mayor asks for your help, and you end up battling through each hero’s secret underground lair to end their reign of terror. You even get their ridiculous costumes as a reward if you finish the quest a certain way. And working for the slavers (human slavery is rife in the world of Fallout) is deliciously evil; especially when you’re tricking hapless eight year-old kids into a life of eternal, thankless servitude. “Here, try on this necklace, kid…” you say before explaining that it’s designed to make their head explode if they run away.

The first two Fallouts let characters with high charisma and intelligence finish the game without killing anyone, but Fallout 3 is action-packed like Call of Duty. Your VATS skill (Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System) lets you pause the action during real-time combat, then target an enemy’s specific body parts for tactical takedowns. The ability is limited by a finite allocation of Action Points (AP) that recharge over time. Your percentage of success is relative to your position and stats, so it’s no cheap fix. Do you go for a sure-fire shot to disable the enemy’s weapon? Or a risky one-kill head shot? It’s great fun, but the game’s confusing mix of familiar FPSing and RPG-style combat grates. If you fire at an enemy manually and unload ten rounds into their head, the damage you do will still be part✃ly determined by your weapon stats, not your accuracy. And despite early promises that you’d be able to talk or sneak your way out of most situations, far too many missions leav𝓀e you no option but to murder everyone with VATS, especially toward the end of the main story.

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