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Dialogue and tone

We suspect the dialogue and tone will be the biggest bones of contention for hardcore Fallout fans. Pithy dialogue and description was a key part of the charm to the original games; there's a very distinct tone that was always going to be a big challenge for Bethesda to replicate. On a visual level, there's really no questioning the fact that the team has done an amazing job of recreating Interplay's post-nuclear-war world, but at times the dialogue is perhaps a little too theatrical for its own good. That's not to say it's badly executed - the standard of voice acting is very high, on the whole - but the actual tone of the script writing seems to vary quite a lot from area to area. An example: The ravaged settlers of Arefu seemed like a fairly miserable, desperate bunch - but on the way there we ran into a merchant named Crow, a colourful chap who seemed far too jolly for a man who risks his life by walking the wasteland for a living.

The point here is that Fallout veterans who come to this game expecting the same style of gritty patter are likely to get wound up rather quickly. For the rest of you, your reaction for the dialogue is going to be a matter of taste. To reiterate: there's no real problem with the way speech is delivered. It's more to do with the fact that what's actually being said can be a bit overly dramatic. Sometimes this approach works, at other times it's a tad hammy. If you've seen any video footage of Megaton's Mister Burke, you'll get the idea: as soon as he opens his gob, you know that he's a boo-hiss villain - and as boo-hiss villains go, he's really pretty well done. We've not heard much of Liam Neeson's contribution to the game, but we love the gravelly pomp of Malcolm McDowell's John Henry Eden - the leader of the fascistic Enclave. So far we've only heard his radio broadcasts, but we look forward to meeting him in the flesh (or pixels, whatever).

Conclusion

For people who love the first two Fallout games like their only child, a Bethesda-developed sequel was always going to be hard to swallow. If you fall into this category, then you probably already have a fairly good idea about how you'll feel about this game. If you're still mourning the cancellation of Van Buren as if it happened yesterday, then it's unlikely that Fallout 3 will win you over. If, however, you're a fan who is open-minded about the idea of a non-Black Isle Fallout, you'll find that Bethesda has done an admirable job of capturing the atmosphere of the wasteland you trawled through in the late 1990s. No, it's not exactly the same - and it was never going to be - but from what we've played, we reckon that Fallout 3 will offer one of the most exciting and involving video game adventures of 2008. And, we reckon, it's going to introduce a huge swathe of new players to the Fallout world - and that can only be a good thing.

Fallout 3 is due out for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 on October 31.

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