I know hyperbole like that is bound to get me in trouble.  Any kind of hyperbole requires a whole lot of backup, otherwise its utterer comes off looking like a rabble-rouser, pointless fanboy, or, worst of all, a politician.

As someone who becomes more convinced with every passing title that Bethesda cannot turn out a BAD game (let’s not bring horse armor into this), Fallout 3 for me rapidly proved to be a whole lot more than “Oblivion with Guns”, as the skeptics protest.

Fallout 3, in case you don’t know, puts you several decades into the future–somewhere around the 2200s–and smack in the middle of a heavily nuked Washington DC and environs, now referred to as the Capital Wasteland.  Filled with mutants, Super Mutants, random thugs known as Raiders, and a whole slew of other baddies, you roam the land, doing good or ill as you see fit, helping the survivors to reclaim forgotten civilization or trashing it all for your own personal profit.  Either way.

With features like the oft-maligned VATS system allowing you to target specific body parts of your attackers and the multi-function Pip Boy on your wrist, Fallout 3 gives you an extraordinarily immersive game with a vast array of downloadables on the way.  In fact, one such downloadable, Operation: Anchorage, has already been covered here.

Oh, sure…it’s not perfect.  The game has the nerve to actually cut you off after beating the main quest instead of allowing you to continue, and you’d think that Bethesda learned enough from Oblivion to just let Fallout 3 work similarly.  And indeed, overuse of the VATS system can make the game a lot duller than it could be.  But I remind those reading that the VATS system is totally optional, and not necessary for gameplay.  Indeed, there’s a lot to be said for the fun of plinking Raiders with a sniper rifle from up on a cliff, and you can’t do that in VATS mode.

But these fairly small troubles aside, Fallout 3 remains a highly immersive experience with lots of great plot and plenty of fun things to do and see.  Try the Lincoln Memorial sometime–it’s still there.  Just watch out for the fifty pounds of irony waiting inside; a bunch of slavers live there now.