Bethesda Softworks
Fallout 3

The first shot is between your mother's legs, just born into a desolate underground bunker; near what remains of a destroyed Washington DC, like the rest of the planet, after the nuclear war. What is your name, what will you look like when you grow up; will you be a little Hercules, a frail scholar, a handsome conman? All this inside this damned hole of concrete.

Until, around the age of twenty, you are awakened by your Vault friend (still this bunker, your lifelong home), who tells you that your father has decided to defy the radiation and escape from that cursed place hidden from the sunlight. And you, defying the dictatorial rules of the Vault, embark on the trail of your poor dad, and find yourself on a hilltop, with the mountains behind you and EVERYTHING ahead. Further on, among car wrecks and radioactive muddy puddles, you catch a glimpse of a semblance of a former settlement, to the left a valley where a highway once passed, over there. On the right, an imposing pile of scrap metal, inside of which it seems someone lives. Meanwhile, as a sense of disorientation grips you, a small flying robot passes by and with it a '50s-style military march tune.

Now you can start playing the third chapter of Fallout, the legendary series of PC Role-Playing Games. And this third episode is one of the best video games ever, of all time.

When you first step into the Washington countryside, you can already notice one of the game's major strengths: extreme freedom of play. You don't know whether to explore the nearby village in search of some caps (yes, the common bottle caps, the currency of the post-nuclear world) or go directly in search of help in the fortress city a little further west. You decide on the latter, and present yourself at a sheet metal gate guarded by a robot, which welcomes you. Also, the detail of the characters and the environment is more than satisfactory technically, considering that the game engine must be able to calculate the virtual surface of several square kilometers fully explorable. The animations aren't so fluid, but it's a more than negligible detail.

Once inside, the mayor of the citadel, a strange type dressed like in the Far West, approaches you and warns you to keep your weapon holstered and not to cause trouble. Everything is excellently dubbed in Italian. While strolling through the center a broken radio plays an old-time swing tune, and a little further on, a preacher, celebrating a mass, exalts the presence of a nuclear bomb immersed in a murky pool. To understand if he is sane, you want to go talk to him, but you realize it's not exactly healthy to get wet with that water, as you feel the radiation crackling in your limbs. The guy can't be feeling too well...

Continuing at this pace (no action-packed scenes and pyrotechnic battles) the game continues: your initial goal was to seek out your poor dad and understand why to face the dangers of the Contaminated Zone, but first, you realize you can't go far with a little gun and a rusty crowbar... The mechanism, already tested with Oblivion (from the same developers), is the classic one: talk to a person, carry out the task, get the reward, all enriched with related experience points. Worth highlighting are the multiple variants: a mission can typically be completed in 2-3 different ways (potentially tripling the game's longevity, which stays around a hundred hours to complete 100% everything), objectives are fairly varied, and depending on your choices, you will develop a positive, neutral, or evil moral alignment (karma). With the sympathy or vice versa of the various characters in the world.

The atmosphere is something unique: the first 2 chapters of the saga unfortunately remained trapped in 2 dimensions, but the 3D (in first person) allows for the tangibility of the backdrop elements; the setting is a kind of future in ruin, indeed after the ruin of the nuclear conflict; the music and many references (often ironic) to '40s/'50s America make it an imaginary future seen from the average American of the Cold War era.

This mix of innovative and traditional elements, of irony and drama makes it, as already mentioned, one of the best games ever, certainly a pinnacle of Role-Playing Games.