I really wanted to AT LEAST give this game 3 stars but I'd honestly just be being disingenuous.

This is probably going to be the longest review I've ever written on Backloggd. After playing through this game and all the DLCs and doing pretty much almost every major side quest I can safely say that this easily the weakest mainline Fallout game, IMO even weaker than 4 and 76.

However, I don't really hate or completely dislike FO3. Before I complain for a while, I wanna at least talk about things I like about it.

-The art style is pretty cool. I like the art deco/retro futuristic industrial look of downtown DC and I actually like the green tint the game has, it’s iconic and sells DC a bit more as being fucked by tons of nukes.

-I think a lot of sound design is really good. A lot of the guns sound super crunchy and loud like the Chinese assault rifle, combat shotgun and sniper rifle to name a few.

-Both the licensed soundtrack and OST is really good.

-There aren’t a lot of side quests but the ones that are there are usually pretty neat. Even some of the parts of the main story like Tranquility Lane can be fun. The Superhuman Gambit, Oasis, Blood Ties and Replicated Man are some of the highlights of the game because they’re the only quests I’ve found that give you more options to solve than just “be irrationally evil for no reason or be a good guy” They have multiple ways of solving them and aren’t just shooting galleries.

-Fallout 3 captures the gritty, desolate vibe of the first two fallout games the best out of any of the sequels (arguably)

-Like most other BGS games, the gameplay loop can be pretty addicting.

I genuinely couldn't think of a lot of other great things to say about the game though.

So many people have already torn this game apart so I don't wanna just repeat stuff that everyone has said but I still wanna bring up parts of the game that really bug me. I'm probably just gonna list a ton of stuff that comes to mind in no real order.

The world's map design is so weird and I don’t like it. Several times, I’ve felt like I had to look up where to find cool side quests because they’re so out of the way and blend in with the rest of the game because every area looks the same and anytime there’s a new POI, I discover I assume it's gonna have dogshit in it, so when there’s actually some cool like a unique weapon, I’ll have no idea unless I look it up. Examples of this are side quests like the one around Republic of Dave which is literally in the ass end of a corner of a map and for weapons, The Terrible Shotgun comes to mind. You have to kill this random raider merchant in the middle of a dungeon where you'd have no clue he has a unique weapon unless you looked it up or found it by accident since all the "unique weapons" in this game look the exact same as their normal models.

This game uses the same system of leveling that Oblivion does where the enemies in the world level up with the player. This initially sounds like a good idea because it lets the player freely explore the world anyway they want but IMO at the end of the day this is more of a determent to the overall gameplay loop. It completely kills any sort of progression to give the player a broad path to follow so the devs can slowly feed them bread crumbs of new quests and content they can discover and they can genuinely feel like they're becoming stronger. When you reach late game, especially late 20's, every enemy just becomes a bullet sponge no matter where you are and its so unfun. (DO NOT FUCKING GET ME STARTED ON THE FERAL GHOUL REAVERS AND THE ALBINO RADSCORPIONS)

This is no secret but this game has some of the most nonsensical and dogshit writing I've ever seen in a video game, it was so hard for me to care about any of the characters in this game or even the Capital Wasteland itself. Even your Dad doesn't give a shit about you when he sees you again after you leave the vault, he's just like "Oh, you're here? Go help me with project purity hehe." Again I don't wanna go to into so many examples, its not hard to know what I'm talking about if you watch any video about FO3 or even half paying attention to the game's dialogue and story.

Obviously the gunplay and combat sucks in Fallout 3 and VATS is a crutch because of how clunky it is. However, nobody really ever talks about how bad the collision meshes are for any of the environments in FO3. I’ll shoot someone behind cover and so many times, my shots will just get caught on invisible walls. Especially when using scoped weapons, this is infuriating. Of course not having true ADS is absurd and inexcusable as well, especially when every gun in this game has a random Valorant ass spray pattern. If you're not building for VATS and getting Grim Reaper's Sprint, Concentrated Fire and Better Criticals, you're literally just nerfing yourself.

The Good vs Evil karma system is fucking garbage. It might genuinely be the worst aspect of the entire game. I don't know what Bethesda was thinking when they decided to tell players DIRECTLY if they were doing something the writers liked or not. It completely takes away any agency from the player to make their own choices that can involve any sort of real nuance or decisions. Because of this system, it makes so Bethesda wrote a lot of the choices being between being a complete dick or being a reasonable person with no grey morality or nuance.

That's another thing too, unless you're doing a "what if?" scenario like one of those videos where people beat games while purposefully nerfing themselves because its funny, there is absolutely no reason for anyone playing this game to have bad karma unless they're actively trying their hardest to be evil. The game actively punishes you for having bad karma with almost absolutely no real reward in return, you're basically just shooting yourself in the foot. It's genuinely infuriating holy shit.

I hate how much random stuff this game takes from Fallout 1 and 2 and just plops into this game no matter how little sense it makes. Radscorpions in fucking DC? Sure dude! They're so iconic we HAVE to put them in the sequel even if they don't exist in the East Coast! Harold from The Hub? He's back in this game somehow! It's so incredibly forced in this game especially, its insane.

Speaking of that, this is more of a minor nitpick and even though I said I enjoy Fallout 3's aesthetic, I really wish the environment had more variety and wasn't just a pseudo desert with nothing but dead trees. Where do the people that live here get their food from? How is there a functioning ecosystem in The Capital Wasteland?!

I know its mainly because gamebryo is silly and just like how Oblivion had to retcon Cyrodil from being a swampland into being gm_flatgrass and LOTR because the engine couldn't handle the amount of foliage it would have, its still insanely disappointing because DC would be filled with various wetlands. Ironically, Point Lookout portrays this way better than the base game but even that DLC runs like complete shit even on PC despite having such small land mass, so if that's anything to go by, this is a little bit more forgivable than other issues with the game.

Even though New Vegas was the first fallout I played back in 2010 and it was and still is my favorite Fallout and game of all time, I still really liked Fallout 3 as a kid and I was genuinely excited to play it again and be like "Yeah, this is really fun!" almost in spite of loser nerds like HBomberguy making 8 hour long videos on why Fallout 3 is the worst game ever created but it wouldn't be genuine if I said I "love" this game as an adult.

For sure, the best DLC for Fallout 3.

It definitely has more stuff to do than most of the other DLCs despite being really short but the biggest selling point of the DLC for me is the vibes and the environment.

If the gamebryo engine wasn't so dogshit, I feel like this is what a lot of the rural areas in The Capital Wasteland should've looked like. Even in the dlc which is a pretty small landscape, the framerate tanks a lot because of the engine, regardless of what hardware you're playing on. Too much foliage and trees.

But this DLC's environment is much closer to what it could've been and its really cool to see. Instead in the base game we just get a desert devoid of any life to make the game run better and to try and capitalize on the aesthetic of the first two fallout games.

Anyways, this DLC also has a lot more weapons that are actually useful like the lever action and the double barrel. The enemies are very unique too and the fact there's a side quest that connects to a location in The Capital Wasteland is pretty awesome.

This DLC still suffers from the issues that every other Fallout 3 DLC has with shit writing and being way too short but I feel this one is definitely more enjoyable than the rest.