Fallout 3 Preview

We preferred the VATs targeting system

We arrive at the gates of Megaton, a shanty-town-esque collection of buildings cobbled together around an unexploded bomb. We're greeted by Lucas Smith, the town sheriff. We have three dialogue options, one obviously good, one obviously bad and one neutral. We play nice, offering to disarm the bomb that sits buried in the ground at the centre of the settlement. Our speech skill isn't high enough to get more caps, Fallout 3's in-game currency, as reward, but the quest is very much on, and, just to make sure we're aware of that fact, a strong, capitalised white font slowly appears on the left hand side of the screen - THE POWER OF THE ATOM - along with a super cool sound effect. He also points us in the direction of the local inn, and suggests someone there might know where our father is. Nice bloke.

And then, we kind of flip out, and decide that, actually, we fancy shaking things up a bit. We shoot a Megaton trader's cow with our weak pistol, which obviously doesn't go down well with the trader, or the general Megaton populace. They turn on me, shooting, punching and kicking. There is no escape. We're dead, killed over a cow.

We start again, this time picking the not so nice dialogue options with the sheriff. Interestingly, this time he doesn't point us in the direction of the inn. We haven't exactly put Fallout 3's karma system through its paces, but we can tell that at least the way you'll go about unravelling the story will change depending on how you role play. We know that you can decide to blow Megaton up, or to save it but how much it changes it, a crucial question in our eyes, remains to be seen.

Down at the protruding bomb, an old man is knelt in worship. He's part of a religion that worships the bomb, of all things, and comes across as a bit barmy. But, aware that we're on a time limit, and the fact that we haven't explored the combat system, we leave Megaton and go in search of stuff to kill. A few minutes later and we come across a Bloatfly - a hideous-looking bird bat thing that's clearly got it in for us.

Time to use VATS - Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting. With a single button press we freeze time and enter a new mode. The camera focuses on our enemy, and separates out the various body parts Robocop style. Each has a clearly displayed chance to hit. Then, using Action Points, displayed on the bottom right corner of the screen, we can cue up shots both on different body parts and, using the thumb stick to shift, different enemies within range.

... the gore some hits can result in is something else. Decapitations, dismemberment, groans, moans, flying bodies, the spray of blood on the camera...

Confirm your selection and the camera will switch into third person and super slow motion, showing bullets, laser fire, even missile fire slowly hit your enemy. Just like in the first two Fallout games, there's a tactical element to VATS - cripple the arm of an enemy and it can't fire its weapon. Shoot the legs off and it can't move. But the gore some hits can result in is something else. Decapitations, dismemberment, groans, moans, flying bodies, the spray of blood on the camera - it's all there, in super crisp high definition. It's truly shocking, and we can't help but laugh.

It's incredibly satisfying, and, crucially, fun. Pausing the action and cueing up attacks is classic Fallout, and is sure to please RPG fans the world over. It's miles better than simply playing the game like a straight-up action game, which doesn't feel as tight as other shooters. But because of the way the Action Point system works, in that they slowly replenish over time, you won't be able to constantly use VATS. We found that we used it, then had to use the normal real-time FPS mode while we impatiently waited for our Action Points to increase. In a way, VATS feels so good it shows the normal shooting up, and we suspect we'll end up wishing for more Action Points than we'll get.

Small triangles on the slider radius point us towards areas of interest, which is particularly useful while exploring. We uncover Springvale Elementary School, deserted, barren. We tune into Enclave radio and listen to Malcolm McDowell talk about baseball, a game people used to play before the nuclear war. We see retro 50s style posters - one advertising the Captain Cosmos Show, another for Sugar Bombs cereal. It's a world that's teeming with life, without actually having much life out in the wild.

Don't get us wrong, enemies aren't sparse, if you go in search of them. We're given a quest from a Megaton shopkeeper to find medicine from the nearby Super Duper Mart, a giant K-Mart inspired building with abandoned trolleys littered outside. Inside we spark a shootout with a group of demented raiders, using VATS to pop heads, tear off limbs and cripple torsos. We try the lock picking mini-game, which requires you to use the thumb sticks like independent lock picks to open cases and boxes. We find the medicine hidden on a shelf, and trigger an instruction to bring it back to the NPC. So very RPG, so very Oblivion.

Oblivion fans will feel somewhat at home

We also smell elements of 2K Games' tremendous FPS BioShock seeping through Fallout 3's virtual pores. Yes it's open world, but it's an open world devastated, a world filled with horror and a world with a million stories to tell. It's a world that tells us what's happened without slapping us in the face with the information. And we like that.

But it's also a world with a few technical problems. We noticed a degree of texture pop up as we explored the world. The camera sometimes has a fit when in VATS slow motion mode. The third-person perspective we imagine will go largely unused. And at one point we were forced to reboot the game after we got stuck under part of a collapsed bridge - fast travel wouldn't work because the game thought we were falling. Our hope, and our belief, is that Fallout 3 won't be let down by any technical issues that might make it into the released code.

So, as we head back to the office, our hands-on time over, we find ourselves whistling the Marching Band tune, without even realising it. This sums up how we feel about Fallout 3. We've hardly scratched the surface of what the game has to offer and we're desperate to play it again. We want to eek out every nook and cranny, walk down every alley, talk to every NPC and absorb ourselves completely in what could prove to be Bethesda's best game to date. This is undoubtedly a massive world, with incredible attention to detail, and a story behind every corner. The best thing? Bethesda promises even more surprises as the game nears its projected fall 2008 release. We can't wait.

Fallout 3 is due out for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC late 2008.