In fact, it’s only when it begins shooting that the game comes awry a little. The VATS system – where you use a pause-time system to call shots at different areas of the body of your targets, spending a regenerating pool of action points – isn’t quite all we hoped for. When it works, its cinematic shots show the slightly camp ultraviolence off to its best, with heads dissolving into red mist. When it doesn’t work, it leads to unfortunately silly-looking shots. Sadly, this is mostly showcased by one of the most common of the early enemies. While a wolf’s attack sequence involves backing off before leaping, the hulking mole rats simply charge and leap at you insistently – in other words, at close range they’re very close, meaning that when you select VATS you’re shown the unfortunate sight of your character bending over and unloading round after round into a beast running against his legs. And even when it works there’s the nagging sense, at least with an unskilled and therefore inaccurate character, that you’d be better off just pointing the gun at your target and pulling the trigger yourself.

There are other mixed signals. While it’s far too early to make a call on the quality of its writing, the character voice-acting is considerably better than the often disturbingly stiff inhabitants of Oblivion. There’s still a sense that the characters don’t quite act enough, however. Compared to what Vampire: Bloodlines did some years ago in terms of physical performance in a similar straight-headshot game, this is somewhat lacking. While, inevitably, the density of the original Fallouts’ text will be lost, a fully voiced game should make the most of what it’s got. Fallout 3 doesn’t quite do that.

However, as a mechanic, the conversation system appears to be working well. While there are many examples of the traditional RPG triptych of “Yes, I’ll do it”/”Yes, I’ll do it for money”/”I WILL KILL YOU!” there are generally more options, which seem to respond sensitively to your character’s make-up. For example, playing someone with the Lady-Killer perk can exploit more amorous routes to success (or its cousin, embarrassment). Similarly, stealth is firmly integrated as an alternative approach, as well as various technical options. Special mention must be made of the hacking system, whose password guessing is one of the more impressively naturalistic attempts to make a hacking ‘sim’ that is neither trivial (as in System Shock 2) or clearly a transplanted mechanism from another game (as in BioShock).



An hour of Fallout only scratches the surface, of course. This is an epic game, and the real measure will be seeing how those initial choices develop into the game proper. While reservations apply to some of the details, there’s certainly a structure that should support an appealing adventure. Will it truly live up to its lineage? For some, that is the killer question.