The Fallout world has changed quite a bit since the last game; a remarkable 10 years have passed since Fallout 2 was released. In that time, Bethesda has taken the reigns of the Fallout franchise and completely changed the gameplay style for Fallout 3, but I’m still not sure if I like what they did.

Fallout 3, like its predecessors, is a single-player role-playing game, centered on the post-apocalyptic United States. Unlike the first two games, Fallout 3 can quite often seem more like a first-person shooter than an RPG; since the combat is all real-time, your statistics are often thrown right out the window in favor of pumping as many bullets out as possible. Your character is given a set of initial statistics, which are more or less permanent; however, they can be increased by finding bobbleheads and using level-up perks. With each new level, you also gain skill points to put into skills from different weapon styles — stealth, science and barter skills. Additionally you can pick a single perk at each level to give your character a little flair or skill focus, from more skill or statistic points to something as crazy as being a cannibal.

Your character starts in Fallout 3 by being born. Scene by scene, you advance in age while defining your character and developing your skills inside Vault 101. One day, your father will leave the vault and abandon you without warning. The chaos of his actions forces you to also leave and chase after him. Once on the outside, you can continue to track him down, or just explore the massive world (set in the Washington, D.C., area), creating a path of safety or destruction behind you, whichever you want.

My favorite thing about Fallout 3 has to be the level of detail put into what the game calls “The Capital Wasteland.” The area is massive, with a large number of buildings and other detailed areas to explore and fight your way through. The odd part is you might never find some areas even if you go wandering around for hours, and few have quests associated with them. Each square meter of the Wasteland appears hand-sculpted and detailed with small items thrown around everywhere, from weapon caches to piles of garbage.

One of larger beefs I have with the game is that despite the details, there seems to be one major theme that is overlooked time and again: The bombs dropped 200 years ago, and in most areas you visit, things are happening right now for the first time. Factories are often protected by an automated security force that is under attack, and of course, the robots get destroyed just now as you show up, after years and years of supermutant plundering, that moment was their failing. Similarly, there is food on store shelves and buildings everywhere while people go hungry. How did that last for 200 years? At times, the world feels awesomely hopeless and desolate, just like it should, but then there are a few obvious oversights that also make it feel fake.

The beginning of Fallout 3 felt quite challenging, as I think it should be, but I don’t think it should be tough because of bad game mechanics. I expect to find myself in a rough world, with few resources and even fewer skills, all of which is true! On expeditions and while completing quests, you are going to run into a whole lot of hostile creatures, from human raiders, to ghouls, to supermutants and mutated animals; all of them will be able to drop items you can bring back and sell. The problem is, you can fill your inventory in minutes and have to constantly make trips back and forth to sell your loot. At the start of the game, you need every bit of cash you can get. I have to admit I got really bored with the constant trips, gathering and selling of loot just to make ends meet. Each new area you explore you expend more ammo and have to loot even more! I ended up cheating and giving myself cash to buy enough bullets at the start of the game instead of wasting endless boring hours picking up and hauling trash to sell.

Combat at times can feel like a first-person shooter; this is especially true at the start of the game, despite the sluggish controls. I found it far easier to fight stealthily, get critical hits and take care of the rest by force if needed, then rely on the combat mode called V.A.T.S. (Vault Assisted Targeting System). The V.A.T.S. is a real-time combat pause that allows you to scroll through targets and aim for specific body parts or objects, each having different percentages to hit, based on your skill and position. You have limited action points, which govern how much you can use the V.A.T.S., so with low skills, its use early on is limited. In the later parts of the game, it is an amazing tool, capable of ultra-quick headshots or disarming enemies, and it can be constantly reused as action points get regenerated by perks.

From a technical point, V.A.T.S. does bug me somewhat; the combat mechanics are completely messed up; your weapons become damaged fast; they do a lot more damage per shot and are more intense in critical shots along with you taking very little damage from enemies. This is just one set of Fallout 3 bugs. There are lots. In fact, there are too many to list.

Fallout 3 introduces a morale system that influences how some characters react to you. Do good deeds, and you’ll be heralded as a messiah. Blow up a city, and people might think differently. The problem I have with morale is that doing secretive things like stealing while nobody is looking affects it; people judge you on your internal morale statistic, not just on what you have done publicly. It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. On the other hand, most of the other mechanics in the game are fantastic. Lock-picking is skillful and requires a very light touch; hacking the computers requires guessing of passwords; and there are numerous skill and speech checks while interacting with other people. Your weapons and armor degrade with use and need to be repaired from spare parts of other weapons, though I would argue that most weapons degrade just way too fast.

The user interface is quite unique. Everything is run through your PIP boy, and while it is unique, it is also really annoying. You can’t press “I” for inventory; you need to call up your PIP boy and click the inventory buttons or the map button or whatever you need. It is a slow process. The lack of shortcuts isn’t something you get used to even after a crazy amount of hours playing. The graphics are gorgeously detailed and in the junk-retro style you expect from a Fallout game, while the music blends right in the same era.

The voice acting is pretty solid, but the voices are quite heavily recycled; you are going to hear the same voices numerous times from characters all over the Wasteland. The game crashed on me a quite a bit. It happens randomly all the time, and apparently, it is an accepted thing in the Fallout community. Even more buggy than crashing is the horrible implementation of a physics engine in Fallout 3. Tapping objects can send them hurling through the air, killing someone. I was sneaking and watching some Deathclaws off a ledge one day only to see one go flying straight up in the air; who knows what happened to it. Another glitchy physics issue is the use of traps around the Wasteland that use tripwires to trigger heavy objects to swing down and hit you. These almost never work; they just bounce off you. This stuff isn’t uncommon. In fact, the physics bugs are so frequent they are the norm rather than the exception, and it just isn’t forgivable.

Like previous Fallout games, you can find and recruit companions to help you on your journey. The infamous dog can be found to join you, along with up to one more of the six other companions. The companions you can recruit depend on your current morale level, but to be honest, the whole companion system feels like it was hastily thrown together. There are no quests to gain companions, and you really don’t have to do anything to get them. They’ll just sort of join you once you find them. They also lack any extensive backgrounds or stories.

What the companions do introduce, though, is a high level of frustration. Issuing orders to companions is slow, and changing their fighting style, armor and weapons is beyond frustrating. They’ll constantly pick up new weapons and change them randomly. Many will get stuck on terrain, and none can follow you around on any terrain the slightest bit rugged. They’ll often decide to turn back and run around the long way. This attracts every enemy you wanted to avoid or sneak up on, and it also will get your companion killed. Oh, and we are completely lacking resurrection scrolls in this universe. Similarly, when you enter a door, your companion will often spawn somewhere else, being shot up and killed before you can even find them.

The Game of the Year Edition of Fallout 3 includes five additional modules (or expansions) of the game. Operation: Anchorage recreates the United States’ take-back of occupied Alaska from China. It is relatively short and hardly feels like Fallout 3 since you are in a simulator for the whole mission. Your weapons are given to you by the simulator, and you reload at ammo and health dispensers. Forget feeling like Fallout 3; this is a whole other game!

The Pitt brings you to a radiation-filled Pittsburgh run by slavers. Choosing to side with the slaves or slavers and save the town is your choice. The Pitt has a decent play-time and introduces new weapons, armor, and the less-than-rewarding experience of being a slave. The Pitt is definitely one of my favorites! The whole place feels very post-apocalyptic.

The Broken Steel module is a huge addition to Fallout 3, extending your level cap to 30 (from 20) and continuing the main quest after its natural completion. The quests continue as you resume your offensive against the Enclave. It introduces new ultra-tough monsters along with lots of weapons and armor, but the largest change is (spoiler) how the Wasteland is transformed with clean water and caravans supplying settlements on a regular basis.

Point Lookout is another large add-on, increasing your land area by nearly a third! The isolated, abandoned, amusement park island is definitely creepy combined with mysterious. There is a lot of content to move through on the main quest and side quests. A large inconstancy comes up, though: How are overall-wearing hicks able to take far, far more damage than power-armor-wearing trained soldiers? Point Lookout is a long, tough addition to Fallout 3 but hardly feels much like the original game — a pattern I’m seeing with the new content.

Mothership Zeta is the final add-on, which takes you captive aboard an alien spaceship. The entire add-on is held here. Like Operation: Anchorage, this hardly feels Fallout 3, but this one feels even less realistic than any of the others. While you can get a few alien weapons, they aren’t all that hot, especially since you slaughter the aliens with regular weapons and are quite limited on ammo. Quite honestly, this add-on feels like a poor money-grab.

Despite how things might sound, there are a couple of really awesome points to Fallout 3. The Wasteland, created by Bethesda, is just incredible. It brings up feelings of isolation, hopelessness and desolation that you just can’t create or find anywhere else. The whole atmosphere is a piece of art and is just legendary in the gaming world for its size and feeling. I would go so far as to say that Fallout 3 is primarily a world and less a game. However, the endless stream of bugs and odd design choices really pick away at the gameplay over time. The game has such an awesome immersion potential only to be ruined over and over again. I liked playing Fallout 3, and I could have absolutely loved playing it, but the bugs ate away at me. Right now, I’m left with the feeling that it was just a good game and not much beyond that.