If Bioshock and Mass Effect got together and combined their gameplay mechanics, the result may very well be Fallout 3. It’s got the FPS-meets-RPG aspects of Bioshock as well as its “steal everything you can from everyone that falls down,” “you can invent stuff,” and, well, the music. It also has the massive story and tons of characters and subplots (and ridiculous customization) of Mass Effect. However, while it puts these together, it doesn’t do it particularly well.I spent the first few minutes of the game feeling like I had no idea what was going on. Sure, I got through the naming and facial features screens. I was dropped down into a few different scenarios as a kid. And things went on from there until I’m killing people and running for the exit to Vault 101. Perhaps the designers nailed it, but when I first stepped outside of the Vault, I felt the same way that the character probably felt: utterly confused.

I think that’s a good description of the game in general. When I wasn’t confused, I was unsure. Often, I was ambivalent. Once or twice I was interested, but mostly I was bored. When I first stepped out of the Vault, I had no idea where to go or how to get there. Fine, I suppose. I found Megaton quickly enough and the game started. Unfortunately, within Megaton, I had no idea where I was going or what I was doing. I managed to miss a decent portion of Megaton and never had any clue that it was there. I was halfway through the game when I was complaining to a friend and he explained that I could have a house in Megaton if I took care of something I was supposed to do at the beginning. Apparently, I had found a way to bypass a fairly important part of the game without it even being on my radar. Sure, I knew that there was a bomb in the center of town, but I was willing to accept it as peculiarity of the people. No one ever said anything to me about doing something about it.

Leveling up was a chore. I never thought I’d hate leveling up, but Fallout 3 made it a horrible experience. Do I put my points here or there? Am I a lover or a fighter? Will I be picking locks or cracking computers? In the end, there are so many different skills that you only get to focus on a few. Fine, I guess, but you never actually get a sense that you’re making progress. Unless you allot all of your points for that level to one particular skill, I don’t think you’d notice a significant improvement. If you spread them out a bit, the improvement is so gradual that you may not even notice.

Leveling up also gives you a “perk.” Perks are little additional bits that modify your character in different ways. Mostly, they offer additional adjustments to your skills. Other times, they provide various status changes depending on certain conditions. Unfortunately, whenever you are given a perk, you get to choose from a long list. No perk really stands out as something you need. I spent a lot of time trying not to waste the perk (since you can only level up to 20, you only get 20 perks) but always felt like it simply didn’t matter which one I picked. I’m sure I was a lot stronger at the end of the game than at the beginning, but along the way I always wondered why I even bothered.

I also went through the whole game without firing a mini-nuke or missle. I suppose I could’ve, but ammo for the standard rifles and whatnot were so prevalent that I maxed my small arms out and simply used them. Later in the game, I maxed out laser weapons. I suppose this goes into how different people play the game, but it didn’t feel as open as a game like Bioshock.

For Bioshock, I’m a big fan of the electric-blast+wrench combo. Later in the game, I like to use the air blast (or whatever it’s called) from the DLC. Prior to the DLC, I really enjoyed the cyclone traps. I also tend to take down my Big Daddies using trap bolts. I have friends that insist on setting someone on fire and then running away and sniping at them with the handgun. Or ones that freeze someone and then bash them to pieces. I know guys that like to shoot rockets at Big Daddies and others that run up on them with the electric gel. I hack everything in sight while others I know only hack key turrets and blow up every camera. Bioshock takes a little but offers a lot in the way of open game play. Fallout 3 plays out basically the same whether you’re a fan of small arms, big weapons, or lasers.

The story isn’t even that good. I honestly didn’t care what happened in Fallout 3 because there didn’t seem to be any repercussions to my actions. I’d get around to completing a quest when I got around to it. Everyone was happy to wait on me. And for most of the game, it wasn’t much more than me simply playing “Where is the World is Daddy Sandiego?” The rest of it played out about as I expected it to. What this now? You mean I now need to finish what Daddy started? You don’t say! There wasn’t a lot of interpersonal drama and the main plot was fairly linear and basic. Bioshock and Mass Effect told great stories but in very different ways. Fallout 3 told a rather mundane story that had a lot of pulp filling in the rest.

Mass Effect really plopped people down in a living, vibrant world and encouraged the player to explore it. There was an obvious difference between missions and side quests. Missions were focused, but you could complete as many side quests as you wanted between them. Fallout 3 blurs this line a lot. During missions, you can be sent on several side quests before you can move forward with the actual mission. I’ve seen online walkthroughs that advise when to save so that you can reload and retry a failed speech option in order to avoid the sidequest. When people don’t want to do these and resort to doing what they can to avoid them, then a game has failed.

I did appreciate some of the side quests. Rescuing some kids from slavers proved to be one of the more interesting ones, albeit a rather quick one. It’s interesting precisely in that you have at least 3 or 4 options in how to rescue them. You can walk in and kill everyone in sight. Or you can sabotage some equipment and try to escape. Or you can simply purchase the kids off of the slavers. If you’ve developed your speech skill, you can even get a discount. It was one of the few that rewarded players for playing the game as they wanted. More often than not, however, the answer to every situation was to kill everything in sight.

If there were more side quests that played out in different ways, it make the gameplay much more interesting. It’d be great to have the choice of either trying to sneak your way into a place, blowing everything up, or walking right up to the front door and trying to talk your way in. Unfortunately, there aren’t many situations that provide more than a couple of options, usually either killing everything or talking them to death.

Whenever you have an option to kill someone or talk to him/her, the talking option almost always meant taking on a side quest. I am, in general, a fan of this. I liked that I had at least this little choice, of helping or killing. However, it soon got to be a little ridiculous. At one point, I think I was about 3 side quests deep into a mission and realized that I’m basically doing everything except what I had originally agreed to do.

In the end, the combat was barely passable (VATS wasn’t so much an innovation as a necessity; I’d never have finished Fallout if I had to play it as a standard FPS), the story was weak, the vast majority of it felt unnecessary, and there seemed to be no point in spending so much time creating a character since you never see him/her. I suppose that’s basically Fallout 3 in summary. There’s a lot of customization that can be done to the character, but apart from the few times that VATS shows you the character’s face when it isn’t obstructed by a weapon, you’ll never see it. Why spend so much time so such an inessential component?

Sure, there’s a behind-the-person cam view, but it’s awful and the animation is horrible. They could have cut that, too. If I’m going to actually bother creating a character, let me see him/her. Pull back during conversations so I can see my character speak to someone else. Provide cutscenes. Do something to make it useful. Frankly, character customization did nothing for me other than delay me from actual gameplay. It was pointless.

Bethesda could’ve cut out a lot of unnecessary fluff and really refined what there was. I would’ve been happy with fewer side quests if the remaining ones were polished in such a way as to reward a wide variety of play styles. I could have done without a lot of the customization features that never seemed appropriately utilized in order to polish the character growth (because, frankly, the whole Pip-Boy interface was absolutely awful). I would have preferred a much smaller sandbox if the environments were more interesting. Walking over empty hills or drab tunnels did nothing for me.

There’s so much in Fallout 3 that’s commendable, but it never really took off for me. Mass Effect did customization and the mission/side quest thing so much better. Bioshock really takes the cake for combat and all of the shared gameplay elements. If neither one existed, I might have loved Fallout. As it is, I can’t help but think of how much they did these things better. Fallout 3 makes an admirable effort but was ultimately one of the more mediocre games that I’ve played lately.