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With Fallout 3 almost upon us, we thought that now might be a good time to compare how the game plays with the two original, Black Isle developed Fallout games from the late nineties. We've not played the full thing, of course - but having clocked up seven hours of exploration we've now seen enough to make some general comparisons. For the sake of simplicity, we're going to focus on the previous Fallout RPGs, rather than the squad-based Fallout: Tactics or the frankly embarrassing Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel.

Combat / Perspective

While fighting is by no means the be-all and end-all of Fallout, we're going to start with a combat comparison because of the way hardcore fans have responded to the VATS system. In the original Fallout games everything was viewed from an isometric perspective, giving you a fairly generous view of your character and the surrounding environment. In standard play you'd be free to move around as you wish, but whenever a fight broke out the game would shift to a turn-based system. Depending on your character's Agility rating, you'd have a number of action points (AP) which could be spent on moving, firing weapons and accessing your inventory. Now, this setup may sound totally archaic to some modern gamers, but the fact is that it resulted in a high degree of tactical consideration. It was important to make every point count, resulting in situations where you'd have to weigh up whether you should go for an easy torso shot, or a riskier but potentially more damaging attack to the eyes.

As you probably know by now, Fallout 3 is primarily a first-person game; a third-person perspective is available, but we can't see many people using it for any length of time. While you can choose to play the whole game as a real-time shooter, you'll find it much easier to use the VATS system, which allows you to pause time and queue up a limited number of AP on targeted shots. There's certainly a degree of similarity to the old games here, with an emphasis on blinding or crippling your opponent - but you'll rarely have enough points to end a battle using VATS alone. We've found that in practice we tend to soften the enemy up with a few manually-aimed shots, before switching to VATS to make a few decisive hits. It's not exactly old-school Fallout, but it's not Doom either. It is, however, very satisfying. We were a bit worried that VATS might get old quite quickly, but we now believe the balance of its use is just about right.

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