Far Cry

Blast from the Past

FBT goes back to where the Cry began. And gets reduced to tears

The Past

I remember raving and raging about the original FC. I bought it thinking it was a regular FPS, and faced with this open, up-to-me approach after so many Doom-a-like corridors I was … terrified. It was like the first day of school, and very quickly I wanted my mummy.

It was beyond anything I’d played; there’d not been a shooter world like this before, but it wasn’t just the astonishing graphics and brilliantly realised world that felt like a shooter-heavy GTA VC – the hero even had a Hawaiian shirt on – this time it felt like it really was me being the hero rather than playing one; I was deciding how to get things done … and it turned out I was crap at being a hero.

Nowadays, extreme open-world shooters are no big thing. I laugh in the face of Borderlands. Was FC really that tough or was I just unprepared for the non-linear shooter world? Will it have mellowed? Have I toughed up?

With the FC series reskinning since FC3, I’m looking forward to playing the game that started all this open-world shooter mayhem.

Still a Blast?

We’re Carver, the classic hero; ex-military now a hard-drinking loner. Running a boat charter in a remote part of paradise, Carver’s hired by journalist Val to take her to a nearby atoll to investigate something; Carver gets to see the something up-close when he and his boat are blown sky-high by an RPG. Washed ashore, Carver is contacted by someone called Doyle who explains the island is a secret facility guarded by mercs, and Val has been taken prisoner. Tooling up, Carver needs to rescue Val and get himself a new boat.

I’d say maybe a third of this game is staring at the load screen. Not just because it takes a good minute to get the game reloaded, but because of how often I get killed. I just keep dying. The AI of the mercs is good, they wander aimlessly and have little auto-actions like chatting or milling about, but if you get spotted it’s go-time. They’ll run for cover, work around you, keep you pinned down while others flank, and they’re are brutally accurate. Carver can only take three or four shots before he’s down, and he always gets hit three or four times. And there’s no quick-save. Paradise this isn’t.

But it is paradise to look at. I can’t believe this is over 15 years old. While FC is showing its age, it’s still astoundingly beautiful. It may not have the minute detail but the design, the look and feel, it’s real. Palm tree-lined beaches with clear water filled with fish and turtles, rainforests with encampments and old ruins to navigate, huge open valleys and rivers, it’s great. Until someone spots you and ruins the moment. Most of the time we’re just given a marker and make our way there; even when the game’s being cheekily linear about the approach such as bottle-necking you in a crevasse or just killing you when you stray too far, like I needed more ways to die, it still feels very open. And you need that open space. To run screaming.

I can try to sneak around the mercs, swim between islands, stay hidden in bushes or thickets (whatever one of those are) but if you get spotted you’re pretty much dead. You can stay hidden but it takes a lot of work and they don’t give up once they’re onto you – they’ll investigate and keep investigating, making logical assumptions about where you might have moved to. In short, the AI is smarter than I am. At least change out of the bright red Hawaiian shirt Carver! I must stick out a mile.

Carver is part of the problem though. He’s supposed to be ex-special forces but this only seems to extend to knowing how to reload. The only edge we have is previous FPS experience which is no good here. Carver doesn’t have any special abilities, traits or tricks besides tag n’ track binoculars, which later get upgraded to heat-sensors letting you go Predator on the Mercs. But not a very good Predator. The odds are already heavily stacked against him; even something as cool as using a hand-glider to silently zip over their heads tends to attract a helicopter with a mini-gun, and it just becomes frustrating

Even when you’re facing an already large group they’ll still call in reinforcements – which include the Choppers with mini-guns, VTOLs filled with more troops, rocket-armed dinghies. Eventually though, I start to figure things out. This is a realistic shooter; I can’t just go Doomguy on the mercs, I need to work around them, pick them off, watch their routines, or just go full-coward and walk for miles to get around camps. Whatever they’re guarding must be valuable. Or dangerous.

It’s dangerous. Of course. Turns out the island is a testing ground for mutants. I’d forgotten about this, and how terrible they are. Naturally those things, the ‘Trigens’ break lose and are running rampant. By now I had my eye in, but the Trigens have none of the merc’s AI or wit. They just spot you from a mile off and come running. Mostly it’s gorilla-type slashers, but later we’re contending with borgified mercs with guns and rockets sewn into them and all the subtlety I’d started to get into goes out the window turning it into a murky barroom brawl.

It’s disappointing too that we start to leave the island for the confines of the labs; it just becomes a typical FPS with corridors and caves, and although a standout is a zoo-like holding pen with Trigens and Mercs fighting it out below us as we navigate tension bridges, leaving behind the beaches and mercs for monsters and corridors just makes it samey.

That seems to be a constant with CryTek; ‘spiritual sequel’ Crysis is essentially FC with a weaponised wetsuit until the squiddies rock up and ruin it, and both FC3 and 4 continued the concept with the second, tougher location you reached. I guess the Trigen third was added because it was felt FC needed to change up, but blasting the hell out of Paradise was a great deal more fun, and still felt fairly unique. Shame. I was actually enjoying it; well, surviving.

Far Cry is an odd game to play now. It’s been far surpassed and replaying it seems redundant – there’s nothing here that’s not been done better since but it’s got a nice simplicity to it; I’m not farting about hunting skins or helping islanders, it’s a pure shooter that requires you to really get dug in and find a way to survive on your own wits. Carver is a solid reluctant hero type and his observations on the situation work really well; it’s a shame he was never seen again, and Val’s ‘project far cry’ could have seen the two of them going off on other adventures. Instead, Ubisoft just kept remaking this one.

FC is absolutely worth a replay, if you like loading screens, and if you kick it in the head after the zoo level it’s still a cracking free-range FPS that deserves recognition for turning linear shooters into a free-for-all. If we hadn’t had this we’d not have had Borderlands and for that, I think, I thank it. Still, if I was Carver, I woulda just shacked up on one of the little islands with a Wilson Volleyball and left the Trigens to run rampant like the ending to Jurassic Park.

2004 | Developer; Crytek | Publisher; Ubisoft

Platforms; Win, PS3, X360

Die Hard Nakatomi Plaza

A Blast from the Past Review

Is FBT just another cowboy?

The Past

Die Hard is my all-time fave action movie so I originally approached DHNP like walking across glass barefoot. How could it possibly be any good, even if the movie’s plot is basically a FPS? But in my memory, DHNP trod a fine line; referencing the movie yet sneaking in levels like protecting Argyle and filling out the bit between ‘shoot the glass’ and John in the bathroom. There are two things I remember most clearly about DHNP; it tried very hard to respect the first film and it was as hard to finish as the fifth film.

The game took no prisoners – shooter experience was not part of the equation this time, you realised that. God knows how Hans got all those terrorists in one van – they were everywhere. One wrong move and you’re down before you had a chance to say Ho-Ho-Ho. Still, I recall it as a cracking shooter that let you live out an against-the-odds action movie.

But considering its lacklustre reviews and that it’s not even reappeared on Steam or GOG makes me wonder if my DH love overshadowed the game itself. Was it Yippie Ki-yay or just Motherfucker? I remember a great, if unforgiving game and it can’t be worse than Die Hard 5. Even if it doesn’t run it can’t be worse than Die Hard 5.

Still a Blast?

I’m alone, tired and seeing diddly squat from Windows10. I just couldn’t get past the welcome screen, like John looking for Holly McClane. I lost myself in patches and dead links trying to find a way to make it work, but nothing. I had to find out if DHNP really was a lost classic and not a Die Hard In A Building rip-off. McClane wouldn’t give up; neither will I.

A week later I was staring at that Windows XP wallpaper courtesy of a battered Dell computer off eBay. I get deafened by the start-up tone and begin installing DHNP. It’s good to be back. And it’s even better when DHNP loads up like a boss.

Although it looks pretty dated now, DHNP is really trying. The opening sequence, while truncated is faithful and there’s detail only a Die Hard geek would spot – when you walk to the elevator the second security guard is idly picking at his nails. A major difference is how everyone looks; Holly has the same perm (no one’s gonna trademark that) but Ellis now looks like an 80s porn star. Karl doesn’t look anywhere near as menacing and has his hair in a little ponytail, but the biggest change is John McClane. Because he’s not in it.

Die Hard’s strength as a high-concept movie wasn’t the shooting, it was who’s doing the shooting. John McClane was, as the trailers said, an easy guy to like. You wanted to see him succeed; he wasn’t Arnie shrugging off bullets, he was a regular Joe caught in a situation he had to face. But in DHNP we never see JM’s face, only hear him, even in cut-scenes which is distracting given how much of this is about him; and JM doesn’t always act like JM – at one point, while stalking through Nakatomi’s R&D department, he has the option to gas several terrorists just to clear a fairly easy path. What raised Die Hard above other actioners was that JM was fundamentally decent; he never kills anyone who doesn’t shoot first, yet here, you can kill Tony with the buzzsaw. DHNP’s John is more Doomguy than nice-guy.

As it progresses, DHNP seems to be unsure if it’s for fans of the film or a standalone shooter; I couldn’t proceed until I looked at Tony’s shoes which would make no sense to those who hadn’t seen the movie (since we can’t see JM’s feet) yet Hans is hidden for half the game. I couldn’t work out why until I met Bill Clay – ahh I thought, if I get taken in by that fuckin’ TV accent I’m going to get shot, but Hans doesn’t get the drop on JM this time either, so keeping him hidden makes no sense to a gamer who never saw the movie.

One minute it’s relying on you knowing what’s happening then it’s acting like we’ve never been here before; John finds C4 on a seat next to an elevator shaft which seems fairly obvious, but still needs Al to prompt him before you can use it. By picking and choosing what to reference, DHNP creates huge plot holes; Thornberg is completely absent so how did Hans know to kidnap Holly?

But the biggest ‘huh?’ is Karl, who has his Tony-tantrum then all but disappears, so when he rocks up and says “we’re both professional, this personal” it doesn’t have the same resonance – we don’t even get the “that man is pissed” moment. Plus, he runs off and gets reinforcements! The hell? It also messes with the structure of the film; SWAT enters the building despite the RPG attack occurring and Al mentions they’re sending in Paramedics; it undermines JM’s isolation if folks are coming and going freely – he visits every floor, even going for a swim in the sewers for no good reason, yet never opens an outside door to get help.

So, if it’s not the Die Hard experience I remember, how does it hold up as a shooter? Frantic and frustrating. The AI of the terrorists (who all sound like Arnie) is basic, and there’s hundreds of them. There’s a nice touch in the way they switch to sidearms if you get too close and do lots of duck and rolls, but it’s insanely difficult due to their numbers and accuracy. Even in the finale Hans needs seven or eight shots to the head just to send him out the window. While Holly is doing everything she can to get shot herself.

There is a lot of care here though; the ‘don’t hesitate’ guy pops up – then down onto Al’s car, the receptionist that looks like Huey Lewis is there and others from the movie too, and it’s got the look and feel of the Plaza down perfectly, meanwhile some extensions work really well, such as trying to outfox the terrorists tracking your blood-soaked footprints, reworking the giant fan scene or saving Argyle. Sometimes it does go left-field, most notably in a sequence where John discovers C4 counting down (doesn’t that go against Hans’ plan?) and has to disarm it in a time-sensitive rush.

So did DHNP live up to the memories? I can see why DHNP faded away. It’s just an Okay Shooter, given a pass by its inspiration. It tries, but relies on your awareness of the movie to fill gaps in its logic, then asks you to ignore the logic where it suits. Can’t have it both ways, and instead of enjoying it I just wish Hans would open the front door for me.

Die Hard Nakatomi Plaza might not have been what I remembered, but the saddest part is what I had to go through to relive it. I now have an obsolete PC lying around. It’s a shame that older games are left to die-hard as the tech marches on; we’re even seeing it in mobile platforms now which were once the last chance saloon for older games – Monkey Island no longer works in iOS 64-bit, which sucks. It’s frustrating when you can’t enjoy something anymore just because the industry decided not to carry the past into the future, worried it would look dated. So maybe that XP rig isn’t obsolete after all; I have a ton of old discs W10 turns its nose up at. XP, come up to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs.

2002 | Developer; Piranha Games | Publisher; Sierra Entertainment

Platforms; Win XP

Wolfenstein

Second Wind

FBT plays Wolfenstein. No, the other one.

This 2009 Wolf effort has seemingly been scrubbed from existence. Maybe because of rights issues; it was released by Activision who own devs Raven, but the franchise is owned by id who were bought by Bethesda; maybe Bethesda wanted it gone so folks wouldn’t confuse it with the reboot; or maybe it’s just not very good. Either way, it’s been MIA since 2014. But I have a copy I don’t remember playing – time to replay Wolfenstein for the first time. Maybe.

A sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein, we’re back in the boots of blonde and blue-eyed BJ, except now he’s a brunette as he’s ‘undercover’. Which lasts roughly 5 seconds before he’s discovered and heroically sinks a Nazi battleship, escaping with a strange medallion. BJ is then sent undercover in a Nazi-controlled mining town where crystals within the medallion are found. Which lasts about 5 seconds before he’s recognised; BJ’s surname is ‘Blast’owitz, he was never going to be a master spy.

Saved by a resistance group, BJ begins doing missions for them while investigating the strange crystals and discovers, via another secret group, that the crystals let the medallion connect to ‘The Black Sun’ alternate universe and focus its energy. BJ must stop the Nazi’s experiments before they weaponise the crystals and use Black Sun to win the war.

The medallion is very handy, granting BJ in-game power-ups; Mire, which slows down time, Shield which reflects attacks and Empower which gives weapons a boost. But the best one, Veil which reveals secrets and lets you pass through walls, is so tightly scripted what seems like a great edge quickly becomes a chore. You can only pass through areas marked with a Sigil and naturally, they’re located only where the game wants you to go. Usually to locked rooms with treasure, or a scripted get-around. Often the only way to proceed is by using Veil so it feels contrived, which makes it less of a cool power-up and more of a lockpick. I wasn’t expecting it to let me leap around the battlefield untethered but – okay, that’s exactly what it should have done.

There’s a strange sense of conflict within Wolf. It looks and feels like a game that has a lot to say but doesn’t, ending up frustratingly unrealised, and it also feels a little old-school. The cut-scenes and plotting jar with the linear, mow-them-all-down tone of the missions, and that’s most evident by the free-roam town we doss about in.

Isenstadt, the town, has two areas each with a resistance base you strike out from. Within those bases you can chat to forgettable characters and pick up missions, several of which can be active at once but the two camps, ‘drive out the Nazis’ and ‘uncover the secrets of the crystals’ don’t converge or conflict so there’s no emotional investment in their plotlines, no final choice for BJ. They don’t even coincide within a location, so Isenstadt ends up like a multiplayer lobby. A really confusing, easy to get lost in lobby with loads of dead-ends, confusing paths and pointless areas. The whole town is one big empty frustration that slows the game to a crawl; I’m too heroic to ask directions, but the marker is no help and neither is the map.

Isenstadt isn’t just a chore to walk through, it’s filled with respawning Nazis. They constantly repopulate, obsessed with finding the world’s worst spy, yet stop shooting if you enter a safe-house then resume when you leave. At the very least we should be either sneaking (like, with a medallion that can let you pass through walls) or killing all witnesses before entering a safe house? At one point we enter a bar and not one Nazi in there reacts – I was literally followed in by Nazis trying to kill me but now they’re all like ‘will ein Pint?’

You can upgrade weapons and the Medallion by using gold and trinkets, but that causes you to waste time searching instead of shooting and Veil just becomes a metal detector. Intel and “Tomes” (from Heretic, why no return to Heretic, Raven?) will unlock some of the upgrades and finding all of them makes upgrades free. I never find them all.

Once you’re finally free of the town, you’re into familiar shooter levels. A hospital, farmlands, mines, a dig, the standard paranormal base filled with freakish experiments, an airfield and a castle (not Wolfenstein), before a zeppelin and a detour into Black Sun which feel very cut-short and reveals nothing about the Medallion. It’s just such an ‘almost’ great game.

Thing is though, it’s a great shooter and loads of fun. The levels, while linear are all epic both to fight through and look at, and once you get your aim in, it settles nicely between modern shooter sensibilities and retro mayhem; there were times when I was just blastowitz’ing everything in sight and loving it. The Nazis are strictly Indiana Jones types and BJ is a bit of an Indy himself, cock-sure and one-liner driven. He can even pick up sledgehammers and axes to throw; that’s never going to get boring. Firefights are given a nice edge by canisters filled with the crystals; shooting them causes Gravity to take a short break which is great, while the medallion’s powers also add levels to the mayhem.

It does show its age occasionally – the Nazis are not as clever as they make out, they’ll yell out my position but not react, shout ‘flank him’ and not move or ‘he’s reloading!’ and not take the opportunity to fire, revealing they’re scripted rather than AI led, including tell-tale signs like sniping one Nazi only for the other to carry on talking like he wasn’t covered in his mate’s brains. But still, I never got bored and they’re varied enough to keep it interesting, going from grunts to SS troops; in one level I sneak into a house at night and get confronted by Nazis in their PJs, which is a different look for the master race.

In later levels we face off against armoured sons-a-bitches, scampering experiments, invisible assassins and a wicked crystal-using Nazi who makes like those twins in the Matrix sequels and is great fun/annoying to fight, especially as they can also pass their powers onto nearby troops. We even have the catsuit-clad female Nazis from Return, which is a welcome sight, as is a Nazi dominatrix complete with whip, while in the Veil there’s odd aphid critters which you can shoot to create electric storms. Pisses them off though, as you’d expect.

All in, it’s a fine shooter, you just get the feeling it was intended to be more; there’s a subplot of not one but two betrayers in Isenstadt and we don’t get involved in that, let alone Black Sun; a big bad from there pops up, makes like the Alien Queen then it’s never mentioned again, and there is a good mini-boss fight where you can only damage them while in the Veil, where it’s revealed they’re actually a monster – but it’s unexplored; is he just an experiment too, or are the Nazi elite actually from another dimension? Wolf just seems headed for something bigger but doesn’t get there, and it’s frustrating because you’re up for it. Maybe it was all being set up for a sequel; if they’d revealed more there might have been one instead of the oh-so-serious second reboot.

Ultimately, Wolf is derivative and half-realised and I can see why it’s forgotten. But I really got into this; Wolf deserved more than just being wiped from alternate history and I won’t forget it this time. I’m brunette BJ all the way. Easily my fave of all the Wolf reboots and it deserves a rediscovery if you can find it. It deserves a Steam sale at least.

2009 | Developer; Raven Software | Publisher; Activision

Platforms; Win, PS3, X360

Fallout 3

A blast from the past review

FBT falls-in with Fallout again.

The Past

It’s odd to do a Blast from the Past on a game that’s only a few years old. Sorry? Released 2008? TEN YEARS AGO?! It can’t be, Fallout 3 can’t be a decade old. Have I been frozen in a vault for all that time? I hope not, that would make a terrible basis for a Fallout game. Ten years…

For the longest time F3 was one of my fave games, easily in the top five, but over time it slipped away as I just couldn’t face repeating that huge slog through the wasteland, the impossible scale of it. Until Bethesda took free-roam indulgence to 100 with Skyrim, I couldn’t imagine a bigger game (other than their Morrowind). But although I call it a masterpiece, I just recall endless rubble, raiders and botflies, have flashbacks to never managing to reach my destination without being distracted. I remember having a crush on the off-kilter girl writing the Survival handbook, wearing a ghoul’s face for a mask and everyone chatting to me like it was normal to be walking about like Hannibal Lector. Wasn’t there a giant robot at the end? I know it was all to do with water and my Dad but the more I think about it, all I remember is that rubble, those raiders and damn botflies. I played it multiple times but I think I only finished it once; once all the DLC was added it never ended. It’s time to go be Liam Neeson’s sonaughter again. Ten Years!

Still a Blast?

Oh wow I remembered my own birth. As I go through the classes and appearances it’s a nice character build sequence. Bethesda always did those well, from Morrowind’s immigration questions to this glimpse into who I’ll be as we go from cute toddler to a bratty teen taking their aptitude test. It’s a nice way to get to know myself without being a preachy tutorial. I don’t get to know Mum, who dies in childbirth. Least I still have Dad though.

Dad’s gone! And somehow it’s triggered a riot. I escape the vault, my home for the last two decades, and it’s an oddly bitter-sweet moment. On my first playthrough TEN YEARS AGO I blazed through this sequence itching to get going but this time I’m a bit more relaxed about it. Vault life isn’t so bad. I even try sticking around after the riot but eventually everyone just tells me to leave. The party’s over. Wearing my Fonzie leather jacket and a birthday hat I got for my tenth birthday, I’m well prepared.

Following the original games’ overall story-arc, in 2077 a short-lived nuclear war broke out, with predicable results. Playing off paranoia and threat, “Vault-Tec” had begun building shelters all over the country (in this case, Washington DC) and now they had a captive audience. Vault-Tec added additional tests, events and scenarios to better understand human nature or something probably more insidious. Those in the vaults created their own societies for two hundred years, while outside, survivors and Vault-escapees did the same.

Stepping out into the wasteland still packs a punch. For a decade old F3 still looks great; games might have more pixels now but it’s all about belief and for all its sci-fi, F3 feels real. This is the aftermath of a nuclear war. In this reality though Apple never got out of Jobs’ garage; their style over substance approach is nowhere to be seen (maybe somewhere there’s a Vault that looks like an Apple Store). F3 is one of those fifties ‘the world of tomorrow’ films come to life. An over-designed, art deco, Vic-20 meets Nostromo world buried under an apocalypse. Ten years on and I’m still marvelling; Bethesda know how to build a world. Fallout 4 might have watered down the memory with its retread but this feels more gritty, more real; the immediate danger has passed but there’s no real hope of rebuilding. Instead, folks are eking out a living the best way they can; I just came from a vault which while restrictive, was safe and had water that wasn’t eradiated.

It turns out that’s what Dad was after all along. He was a huge fan of bottled water and his project, Purity, was a way to cleanse the area’s water and the first step towards rebuilding civilisation. But it’s taken a huge amount of steps to reach this point. Like all good RPGs, you follow the mission marker less ‘how the crow flies’ and more like ‘pissed bumble bee’. It’s impossible to walk in a straight line. There’s hundreds of things to go look at and those things have things in them that you spend hours ferreting through or send you off looking for other things that you don’t reach because other things. I’d forgotten how hard it is to get anywhere without being pulled somewhere else. What’s that?

The main mission is brilliantly done; our character has questions, there’s a nice tension between me and Pa, and Dad realises his kid doesn’t need him anymore. You can play the character as pissed off, indifferent or desperate but no matter how you react, nothing will be the same again. As you attempt to finish Dad’s Purity Project, you draw the attention of the Enclave, a remnant of the previous government who realise controlling the water is a means to reasserting power – coincidentally that’s the plot to Tank Girl and both antagonists are played by Malcom McDowell. I’m also dressed like Tank Girl.

It’s fun to dig into your inventory and work out what items you can cannibalise, although it’s not as detailed as I remembered, especially with the weapons. Similar items can be folded into others to raise their stats, but you never really alter or jury-rig stuff the way you should, leaving you to carry multiples of everything, weighing you down. Mostly you’ll be carrying junk, digging through everything like Steptoe in the hopes of uncovering something valuable – or a bobbypin so you can unlock items to find more junk. Although this does feel a bit endless and slows everything down, I’m still enjoying wandering eerie old schools and decrepit Nukacola factories hoping to find something. Usually bloody radroaches. Usually.

There’s a whole host of beasties to battle, and to help there’s the VATS system, which stands for something. You can pause and pick where you want to aim and you’re given a percentage of how likely the hit is. It’s a bit like an intellectual’s Bullet-time but fun watching the shootout in slow-mo. It’s also fun using VATS to fatboy a botfly. Swatted the bastard.

But, the botflies and radroaches soon give way to speedy giant scorpions and Guai; I’d forgotten about those werebear things; but I hadn’t forgotten about the bloody Deathclaws, apparently a war-time super-weapon gone awry. Also very awry are those Super-Mutants and their side-kicks, those nightmarish Centaurs. There’s also the ghouls, folks who survived the nuclear fallout but lost their sanity (and looks, but not their clothes. Even zombie America is concerned with modesty), and giant ants referencing the infamous fifties movie Them! but mostly we’re fighting raiders who figure the best course of action is swing a lead pipe at the gal in power-armour. When Fallout was adopted by Bethesda, there were grumblings from the original series’ fans that it would become The Elder Scrolls, and to be fair, it has. This is Oblivion without spell casting, but it’s a lot more focused and you do more digging around, and the setting is much more relatable. Plus, no Oblivion gates popping up every ten feet. It is its own game and ten years on I’m still finding new areas, new experiences and loving the post apocalypse.

The good thing is, unlike more recent RPGs (like Fallout 4), the main story is nicely non-urgent. Almost from the outset Dad says the water purification project won’t save the world and it’s freeing to not be that heroic, to not have pangs of guilt when I return to Megaton again to offload junk then go do something for folks who need this, want that, send you there. We’re getting a priest to realise he’s in love, putting a stop to cannibals (or not), and researching lovely Moira’s Wasteland Survival Guide. We’re looking for old civilisation artefacts, rescuing folks from Super Mutants and Slavers – unlike Fallout 4 and Skyrim’s disheartening ‘radiant missions’ this feels more realistic than endlessly visiting a smug Jarl who’s yet again bitching about a Dragon that’s outstayed it’s welcome. Instead, there’s just enough to lone wanderer into. Unless your lone wanderer prefers company.

Unlike Oblivion, followers are more than bullet-catching NCPs. The best is Dogmeat. A mutt we rescue, he becomes a doggo liability, running off to attack something ten times his size, falls off cliffs and constantly get in the way. After a short while I leave him at my digs in Megaton, terrified I’ll lose him. There’s various mercs, thrill-seekers and more than a few quest-related folks who make life interesting by following then disappearing, getting stuck or dying and leaving the mission unfinished forever. Followers haven’t been quite perfected in F3 and they kind of undermine the ‘Lone Wanderer’ shtick our character is rocking, but at least they can carry stuff for you. Just don’t give them anything valuable.

Another Oblivion nod is the Karma system. This was much better utilised in New Vegas, here it means getting pestered by do-gooders and having marginally better dialogue choices, but also draws the attention of mercenaries who don’t like nice people. If you decide to be a mercenary yourself, the ‘Regulators’ come after you instead, and being a dick doesn’t block you from mission opportunities, just more evil options once you’re mean enough (bye, Megaton hovel, hello penthouse in Tenpenny Tower).

I’d like to say a lots happened since F3 was released, but … has it? Playing this now, I realise RPG hasn’t moved on, it’s just repeated itself. F3, along with Oblivion, got it perfect and as I play and remember moments, events and set-pieces I realise how much Fallout 3 informed my expectations of RPG. It’s good. When’s the last time you had a hundred-foot-tall robot as a follower? F3’s scenery does become samey but there’s so much layered into the game that it becomes more than endlessly clambering over a tip. The loose societies and clans that have sprung up, the communities like Megaton or Rivet City and heavy-handed groups like Enclave and Brotherhood of Steel – this is how its going to go when someone finally presses the button.

When you add in a compelling but unpressured main story, tons of side-missions and events, and some stellar characterisations and observations, you’ve got a decade old game that’s timeless. Graphics might continue to impress and advance, and one day Fallout 3 might seem creaky and basic, but it’s spirit will still be indomitable and that’s missing from modern RPG; Fallout 4 and Skyrim included.

Like lovely Moira’s Wasteland Survivor’s Guide, Fallout 3 should be required gaming for anyone planning on taking up RPG so they understand how it’s done; and it should be a tutorial for anyone planning on developing one – and that includes Bethesda. Fallout 3 is back in my top games list. Play Fallout 3; make Liam Neeson proud.

2008! Developer; Bethesda Softworks | Publisher; Bethesda Publishing

Platforms Win, X360/One, PS3