First, welcome to my stately home. This is my base of operations, my sanctuary, and a great place to exercise my OCD tendencies. Yes, the lockers are decorated with ammo boxes, missiles and frag grenades. What? Stop looking at me like that.

As with Oblivion, I don't care much for the storyline, and instead happily run off after the first glint to catch my eye. Just recently, I completed the Tenpenny Tower quest, which was fairly interesting, certainly had more depth than most. However, it was the random encounters that made it for me. While checking out a small garage shop south of the tower, found a wasteland wander, selling the usual stuff. Nothing too exciting. On leaving the shop, I was accosted by a group of Talon Mercs, my paladin status still causing quite a stir it seems. Although, after the way I usually deal with them, you'd have thought they'd have given up by now...........

In this instance, diving back into the shop, dropping mines as I went, provided hillirous results. Severed limbs flying in all directions, with the poor wastelander screaming about the mess. The combat shotgun, doing the clean up.

Generally, exploring the map is in itself a joy, visually stunning at times and rewarding of poking around in the corners of underground lairs, subways stations and various topside building including a Robo Factory.

I also found the Hubris Comic shop and printing factory, which had a hackable computer with a Zork text adventure to play and The Anchorage War Memorial, as well as many other locations. Great stuff.

Combat is satisfying in pretty much all forms, the VATS system giving me lots of excellent "mwahhahaha!!" momments, regardless of it being a sawn-off shotgun in the face, crushing spines with a sledge hammer or plainly blowing people up. It's all honest, if not grissly, good fun. For 1st person veterans however, it's a doddle and rarely challenging. It's not why you're playing it right?

Having said all this, the game feels a bit pointless. Ok ok calm down, hands off my throat please, let me explain. The game has been primarily designed to be a sandbox game, go were you want, do what you want, and to a greater extend, it succeeds. However, it all just feels a bit too thinly spread. Most dungeons (undergrounds, caves etc) feel very similar, not as much as Oblivion granted, but very quickly, the feeling of déjà vu sets in rather quickly. Even the special items just tend to be "renamed" versions of normal ones, granted so that they can be repaired by their common brethren, but still. I feel like I'm exploring a copy/paste world with patches of individuality spotted here and there. The game rarely feels like a lived in place, it purely exists for you, and you alone and it's inhabitants reflect this. I guess I was just hoping for something more "alive" I guess, like Stalker achieved with it's beautifully unique location and remarkable (occasionally broken) AI. The drive to explore is still there, there is much to find, but I now have this disappointed feeling that it's never going to satisfy my curiosity. To make things a tad more bland, the RPG character building itself is also rather dull. It appears to be too easy to be good at everything, making specific character "builds" pretty much pointless. This lack of depth in character building and equipment makes the incentive to explore ultimately wash out, much like the games colour palette. Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed a lot of time with Fallout 3, and I'm going to continue through the main story arc now but it's been disappointing as much as exciting.

Oh well, I guess I could just run about like this for the rest of the game.