Fallout 3 has annoyed me. The original games were fun and had a lot of humor. Fallout 3 has basically five indoor tilesets and three outdoor tilesets (one of the outdoor ones is only used in one place). There are by my count 12 kinds of bad guys in the game, and with sub-types differentiated by name rather than even a minor graphical distinction. "Wow, a room full of identical super mutants."
In other words, it's the same thing over and over and over and over.
The world is HUGE, and it's pretty cool that in some places they model the game world after actual places (e.g. the Metro stations are really close to real ones but I've been to the Air and Space Museum and the capital building and they don't look like that. The Lincoln Memorial is astonishingly close, though). It's frustrating to travel through various locations to find the one thing that makes it unique from all the other locations with exactly the same tile set.
Previous versions of Fallout were turn based. The current game can be played in a super, super easy turn-based mode called VATS, which more or less renders combat an annoyance, or as a straight-up FPS. Depending on your FPS skills I suspect that might be even easier than the turn based mode.
When I started the game I just set out exploring, ignoring the main quest. I still haven't started the main quest but by walking into the wrong area at a low level, I also fast forwarded through about 60% of the game content. I still haven't tried to do any of the main quest, but my character is level-capped and in most cases skill-capped. I've visited almost all the in-game locations except the place I actually need to go to officially play the game and the only annoyance I have is that my character has been carrying around a suit of super-awesome power armor for 15 levels that I can't put on because I haven't learned how to put it on yet.
I have a dog. My dog is probably my favorite part of the game. I can tell him to fetch things and he will do it. "Find ammo, boy!" and he will wander as far as he needs to to bring me some kind of ammunition. Hilarious. He will even unlock doors and safes to do it. I suck at unlocking doors and safes, so I abuse the hell out of this.
At first the exploration was awesome. I would go in a ruined town and into all the ruined homes to find little pieces of people's lives. As you get farther away from the starting area, there's less and less of that. Which is sad, because to me that's the fun part.
The weapons in Fallout 3 are quite frustrating. Some of them are awesome. Mini-Nukes, for example, or the Railway Rifle that lets you pin pieces of bad guys to walls, or the Rock-It gun that lets you shoot all the random crap (tin cans, teddy bears, vacuum cleaners) you find strewn about the wasteland. The regular guns unfortunately aren't sufficient to kill the late-level baddies quickly, so I end up hording one particular type of ammunition for one particular type of gun.
Another minor point of awesome, something I know that's been in the various GTA games for a while, is the radio. It alternates between upbeat 1940s-era pop music (Danny Kaye, for example) and updates on your in-game actions. Sometimes the radio follows up on a storyline that you've finished. I thought that was a nice touch.
I can't say that I haven't been entertained, but having explored everything in the game I'm not sure I'm going to bother to finish it. I don't know how many identical sewers, metro stations and ruined offices I can bring myself to slog through.
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Yes, I'm bored at work today. Why do you ask?