Ah, Fallout. The post-apocalyptic RPG, with guns. Guns are always good. The first game in the series was released in 1997 for the PC, developed by Black Isle Studios (called Black Isle at the time) and published by Interplay. The game had an isometric view (think Diablo), a dark sense of humour and some interesting ideas, like shooting things in the crotch. Fallout was followed by Fallout 2 just a year later, set 80 years after the original.

Both games were set in the 22^nd century, but the art and the storylines were based around the post war culture of the 1950s and the fear of nuclear annihilation.

Naturally, the Fallout purists were a little up in arms when Bethesda, the creator of the fantastic Elderscrolls IV: Oblivion, were to take over, and that it would be first person. Obviously, this kind of turned the series on it's head. Fallout had always been an isometric game, so it's fans took up a prescriptivist attitude, which his understandable, really. They said it would be 'Oblivion with guns' which, in all fairness, it almost is. But that isn't a bad thing.

Now, enough back story or we won't get anywhere. Fallout 3, the third game in the series will, if nothing else, make you wince. Why? It'll make you wince because, the first time you shoot someone's head off in a shower of blood, you won't be able to help it and – provided you're into that kind of thing, you'll also think 'holy crap that was awesome!'. Then you'll do it again.

The game looks good. Running on Oblivion's Gamebryo engine, it's not so much the graphical horsepower that gives it the graphical oomph, but it's the art design, which is stunning. Considering the setting, there's no healthy vegetation at all throughout the game, but there are a lot of mutated everything – from the Brahmin (two headed cows with swollen udders) to the Deathclaw (essentially Professor Lupin's werewolf from the Prisoner of Azkaban, but wolfier and scarier and trying to swipe your head off. You will jump out of your skin at least once whilst you're wandering the wasteland, probably at your first encounter with the Deathclaw. Some creature designs will creep you out, too – the Centaur, a strange creature that looks part human and part...something else has three two foot long tongues that wave around in front of it's face and spit at you, got to me a little bit.

Then there's the raiders, the slavers, the settlements and the wondering traders to find. The graphics aren't going to wow you, but the art design will, with outfits, armour, guns and other equipment looking suitably broken down, as it should be in a post-apocalyptic word, and the destroyed bridges will still make you 'wow' if only for the look of them. Even the robots are 1950s scifi-inspired.

The sounds are good, with voice acting that is patchy in rare cases but otherwise good. Enemies mean make the usual sounds, growls from dog-like creatures, scuttling from bug-like creatures, and antagonistic phrases from raiders and super-mutants (more on those later).

You start the game by a quite clever introduction that starts at your birth, where you choose what you'll look like when you're older(I wish we had this ability in real life). Then it fast forwards to 1 year old, where you learn small interactions, like open doors (pressing X on the play pen gate), picking things up in the environment (press R3), jumping (triangle), then you read a book (quite a feat at 1 year old). It then goes through a few select ages, where you're taught to shoot (with a BB gun), until the end. Where your father has buggered off out of the vault you've spent your life in and, unfortunately left you behind with the vengeful head of the vault who fully intends to kill you after killing the guy who helped your father get out. So you escape. I also killed a few people for no reason. Why the hell not? These stages before the main game starts is similar to the cave in Oblivion, it is a mix of character creation and exposition that is very well done. Better, even, than in Oblivion.

During this section, you also pick your SPECIALs at some point, which are your ability points, essentially:

• Strength – which is how much you can carry and how much melee damage you do.

• Perception - how well you see at night, and when enemies appear on your compass.

• Endurance – stamina and physical toughness, controls health, radiation resistance, etc.

• Charisma – modifies character reactions to you, your charm and appearance, and barter prices.

• Intelligence – modifies how many skill points you gain when you level up, medicine, repair. and science skills,

• Agility – Modifies your action points, which is equal to 65 + two times your Agility.

• Luck – Adds just below half a point to all other SPECIALs, and affects how likely you are to get a critical hit.

(They spell SPECIAL – genius!)

It'll probably come as no surprise to you that I ended up with a character that the karma system defined as 'Very Evil'. I don't know how that happened. Honestly, all I did was steal everything I could, go on a few rampages, wiped out a village or two. Oh well. The karma system gets all the bad things you do and subtracts them from the good, deciding how evil or good you are. Kill too many people and you'll be evil, save too many people and you run the risk of being good. Scary.

The combat's not quite so turn based, now. You can play FPS (of sorts), or you can use the Vaultech-Assisted Targeting System (VATS). What? Oh, well I'll tell you: You press R2 when there's an enemy (or friendly, as long as it's not a child) and you enter VATS mode. The game pauses and you can target any part of the enemy (usually consisting of arms, legs, torso and head, though if it's, for example, a centaur, you can target the extra parts – like tongues), it'll show you the probability of hitting that part you're highlighting (decided by distance, how much of it you can see, how big it is, the skill with whatever type of gun you're using, be it small arms, big guns, etc), R1 will then shoot and either hit or miss. If you kill whatever you're shooting at with VATS, there's a decent chance a part will come off and you'll get to watch it happen in slowmotion. Lovely. Using VATS uses action points (AP), which is displayed in bar form in the bottom right, along with how much will be used. Using it with certain weapons will change how much AP you use, like a pistol may leave room for 3 or 4 shots in VATS, but a missile launcher will only shoot once before you need to wait for it to regenerate, which happens mercifully quickly.

Shooting normally, however, feels a little awkward, and the guns don't have a real solidity or kick to them, but this is Fallout 3, not Call of Duty 4, so it's not what's expected from the game. It would've been nice to have, though.

You gain experience for killing, of course, and you level up. When you level up you can upgrade your skills, which consists of things like Big Guns (increases skill with big guns, predictably, like the missile launcher), Medicine (affects how much health you get from Stimpak's – Fallout's equivalent of medikits), Science (for hacking certain difficulty computer terminals, you must have a certain Science level, like Medium difficulty requires 50 science skill points), Lockpicking (the same as Science, but for picking locks), etc.

Then you pick a perk. Perks are numerous and their effects various. For example, some instantly increase some skills (like Daddy's Boy, right at the top of the list, increases both your Science and Medicine skills), some raise a SPECIAL stat of your choice , whilst others are more...interesting, like Bloody Mess (raises the damage you deal slightly, and whenever you kill something it has a small chance of spontaneously exploding into a bloody mess).

The structure is Oblivion with guns. You can either follow the main quest (find your dad) or you can wander around and take side quests, go exploring or, if you're like me, exploit everyone for everything you can get from them, then shoot them in the head in slow motion and watch their brains meet the wall behind them. Niiice.

You have a compass in the bottom bottom left corner which will point you to nearby locations you've visited (small, filled triangles), nearby locations you haven't visited (small, non-filled triangles) and the objective of your active quest (a large, filled triangle). Enemies show up as red lines, and friendly NPCs show up as white lines. Also, if you've placed a user-marker on the map, it'll appear as a a big, non-filled triangle. Just like Oblivion.

The world isn't as big as it was in Bethesda's previous game, but it's just as packed full of secrets, with places like Little Lamplight (a settlement in a cave populated entirely by children, where, when the children get to 16 years of age, they are forced to leave). The problem with a place like this is, because the game was censored slightly by the idiots that censor games, you can't kill children. So if you 'accidentally' shoot someone you could run into a few invincible children with rifles. Bad times. However, it's strange place, and just the kind of odd place you'd expect in a Fallout game. There's also the Republic of Dave (a place ran by a man called Dave, where he is the president and everyone worships him. You can get his wife to run for presidency, or you can kill them all. Do you even have to ask what I did?), Megaton (likely to be the first place you find, it's a city made of scraps of metal and such. Oh, and it's built around an unexploded atom bomb, too).

Then there's some even stranger places, like the Ant Antagonizer and the Mechanist, two self-proclaimed super heroes with appropriate minions, who fight each other, terrorising a village full of people that really don't appreciate it. You're get given a quest to resolve the conflict – talk to them, or kill one of them. Or both. So there are many easter eggs dotted around the landscape around DC, secret little hideaways and the traditional Fallout dark humour, whilst less plentiful, still rings true, as evidenced by the previously mentioned battle of insect and metal.

There are less attractive places too, the subways are full of creatures and raiders who are equally willing to hurt you in some unpleasant ways, whilst the wastes are equally full of various enemies, possibly the most annoying are the Super-Mutants, who are large, red and likely to eat the corpses of their victims. They can get hard to kill, especially if you happen up on a small settlement of theirs, like the one I found on my way to Rivet City (a broken aircraft carrier converted into a city).

The game scales it's difficulty as you get stronger, by releasing more difficult enemies into the wild, or giving the likes of Raiders and Super-Mutants better equipment, or simply increasing how many you'll find in a group. You can pretty much go anywhere straight away because of this, which is unrealistic but makes for a decent difficulty curve. Hopefully, you won't find anywhere where Deathclaws are always there until you're strong enough, both in-game and emotionally out of the game to face them without pissing yourself and dying in the foetal position like the little baby you probably are if you do this.

There are certain set-pieces through the game that are impressive. One stand-out one for me is, when you're trying to get to a certain radio station's base of operations, a Behemoth (read: giant fucking Super-Mutant. By that I don't mean it's having sex, I mean its bloody huge) bursts through a wall outside the building. It looks good, it makes you go 'woah' and you won't forget it for a while. I still hope I won't meet one when I don't have any help around, or there's a good chance I'll revert to that foetal position I was telling you about.

Apparently, it's bug-ridden, but I've only encountered one; the game freezes when someone signs into PSN/you get a message/anything that brings up a window, the game mists over as if you'd opened the XMB and freezes until it goes away. It's simple enough to fix, just sign out of PSN. Easy. I haven't found anything else, though, so maybe I'm very lucky – besides, it'll be patched soon, I'm sure.

Fallout 3 is a fantastic game. Previous fallout fans need a descriptivist attitude, or they're missing out on something special. It might not be isometric, and it's changed quite a lot since the original two games, obviously, but it's still Fallout and it's still fun as hell. You do not want to miss this game, if LBP and MGS4 weren't amongst it's competition, it would be a candidate for game of the year.