I wanted to say right away that this is a review of only the first 10 hours or so of the game. I haven't gotten very far into it, but after gaining a few levels and clearing out a few dungeons (plus reading almost 20 other reviews) I feel I can speak intelligently on the subject. Fallout 3 is an awesome game. It's not quite as good as Oblivion, but maybe that's for a good reason. Also, warning, this review is super long.

Fallout starts with your birth. Seriously. You're in the delivery room, your mother's sweaty legs visible at the edges of your screen (if you have a wide screen TV). Your father (played by Liam Neeson) hooks you up to a machine that will "show you what you will look like when you're older." This is where you get to do your character creation (more on that later). You are born into life in Vault 101. Vault 101 is a fallout shelter on the outskirts of Washington DC, and life in the Vault is controlled by The Overseer. The Overseer is a fanatical, power hungry man who controls the lives of every citizen in his fault. Once you're born you go through a series of life experiences. As a baby, you read a book called "You're Special!" that allows you to allocate your attribute points. Then you get your first doses of unarmed, melee, and ranged combat through a series of schoolyard fights, birthday events, and whatnot. When you turn 16 you take a multiple choice test that's supposed to decide which skills your character is most likely to use. Unfortunately the test is a little stupid, and a lot of the questions had no answers I would pick. For instance, a question was "Your kindly old grandmother gives you a pistol and asks you to kill a man, do you (a) do it, (b) ask for a better gun, (c) as for payment, (d) throw tea in your grandmother's face and run." In-game, a quest like that can simply be ignored, or you could lie to your grandmother about completing it, kill the grandmother for being evil, or any number of other choices. The skills you are granted from the GOAT test (that's what they call it) can be changed, and I recommend you do so. Eventually, your father manages to break out of the vault and all hell breaks loose. The Overseer is hunting you, trying to kill you, and you must escape.

This portion of the game is supposed to be a bit of a training exercise for you, the gamer. Ostensibly there's a sneaking section, a direct combat section, a hacking section, etc. Unfortunately the training section is very limited. You may want to go straight through as fast as you can, and save right before you exit the vault. When you exit the vault, you're given the option of altering your class and attributes if you've discovered you're unhappy with your choices. What I would do is go out and finish a few quests, then decide which skills you want, re-load this save game, and make your changes. You'll have to repeat the first few missions, but it's better than going through the game with bad stats. Oblivion's training level is far superior to Fallout's, and the lack of a set "class" system in Fallout really makes it seem like you're just guessing as to what to do.

Once out of the Vault, you're confronted with the Wasteland, an area of nuclear fallout around DC. There's a number of abandoned 1950's-style neighborhoods, shattered highways, and newly-formed refugee cities. You make your way almost immediately to "Megaton," a city built out of tin shacks centered around an unexploded nuke. Here you come into contact with a number of good and evil characters, as well as an amusing little cult who worships the bomb. You accept or decline missions, do your part to repair or destroy the town, and generally go about your own selfish business attempting to find Liam Neeson. I won't ruin any of the story for you, but you can be assured it's as interesting as you've been lead to believe, though slightly less engaging that Oblivion's.

As for the game mechanics themselves, they could use some work. Like Oblivion, the character creation screen seems to have been made specifically so you can't really tell what your character will look like. In Oblivion, you do your character creation in a torch-lit sewer. In Fallout you create your new face on a filthy, flickering computer monitor. It makes things difficult, to say the least. Especially since moving a single features slider one single click and case your face to explode in horrible ways, which you can never recover from. If you're serious about getting the face on screen to match your face, go through FIRST and move all the sliders to the middle. If any slider is near the edge and you try to touch it, you may throw your face all out of whack.

The main character statistics are sparsely defined as well. I mean, it's pretty clear what they do, "Strength" and "Endurance" and "Luck" are all well-defined words, but it seems like they don't have any bearing on the SKILLS. They do, of course, have an effect on the skills, but it's much more marginal than you would expect. The bonus an attribute gives to its governed skills is double the value of the attribute. Since the attributes go from 1 to 10, the whole argument is relatively moot. Gaining a single level and putting all skill points into a single skill is worth more than the choices at the beginning of the game, and that seems wrong. Again, I draw a comparison to Oblivion, where selecting Strength as a primary attribute would give you a 10 point bonus to Melee weapons, whereas in Fallout selecting Strength gives you a 2 point bonus to Strength and that's it.

Speaking of Skills, they're a loose collection of relatively useful tasks that have no connection to each other. Without knowing the relative frequency of the various weapons and challenges in the game, you're left guessing. Are there going to be more energy weapons than high explosives? What's going to be more useful, hacking or lock picking? There's a lot of unanswered questions that could have been at least hinted at in the character creation screens. Also, the hacking and lock picking skills don't work like Oblivion's. With practice and a careful eye, a novice could pick the hardest lock in the game in Oblivion. In Fallout, you can't even attempt to open an "easy" lock until your lockpick skill is at least 25. I would choose this as a starting attribute just so you can open the roughly 40 locked boxes you come across before level 3.

There's one thing Fallout has that Oblivion doesn't, and that's Perks. A Perk is like a feat in D&D, it's a special ability that you select that truly customizes your character. They range from mundane perks like "+5 to engineering and science" to crazy ones like "+10% damage to women" (named "lady killer" instead of "wife beater," for political reasons I'm sure). The Perk system is pretty cool, and since each perk has multiple levels, and you can't only get one perk every few levels, it makes character advancement interesting.

The game also introduces the concepts of crippling, radiation, and Action Points. Crippling adds an interesting twist to the game's combat. Any character in the game can suffer damage to each individual body part, and enough damage to a single part will cripple that part. When it happens to your legs you get decreased movement speed, and when it happens to your arms you get decreased weapons effectiveness. When it happens to your face you can't see as well, and when it happens to your chest you die. It's an interesting concept. Being crippled can be cured with an injection of healing serum to the affected limb, or by sleeping for an hour, because that makes sense.

Radiation is suffered from eating contaminated food, walking through or past contaminated areas, and just plain being outside. There's syringes of "RadX" and "Rad-Away" strewn throughout the game, as well as characters who can heal your radiation. Each action you take has potential radiation consequences, and it's an interesting alternate health bar. You have to say "is 20 HP really worth 8 radiation points?" and "Should I really cross the irradiated river just to see what's in that house, or should I find a bridge?"

You can spend action points to perform actions in the VATS combat system, and they recharge at a fairly rapid rate. You can perform roughly one VATS shot with your pistol every 5 seconds. VATS is actually really cool. During combat, you can hit the right bumper and enter VATS mode. VATS pauses the action (which is handy in its own right) similar to using your powers in Mass Effect. You can cycle through the other characters in the room with you, and VATS shows you how likely you are to hit any particular portion of their body, including their weapon. You can select a portion of their body to shoot at, marking many shots at once if you like, then exit VATS and watch as your character performs a very cool slow-motion series of shots to the areas you've selected. I used it once to perform an execution on someone milliseconds after opening the door to the room he was in. It's very cool. Plus, a smart player can use VATS to assess a situation and cripple or disarm the biggest threats first.

As for the combat outside of VATS, it's reminiscent of both Oblivion and System Shock 2. The weapons are all apparently constructed out of atom-thin strands of gossamer moonlight because they break on you with shocking regularity. I'm not certain, but I do believe that machine guns don't generally fall to pieces after 10 clips in the real world. I think they're made of steel or something. It is amusing, however, that there seems to be a "Chinese" counterpart to all the weapons, which degrades quite a bit more rapidly, but is cheaper. Aside from the weapons falling apart ala System Shock, the enemies are impossible to kill. On "Normal" it takes 3-4 headshots to kill a standard "raider" (human enemies who wander the wasteland). Within your first couple hours you will also encounter what appears to be a anthropomorphic sand crab, with armor plating and claws that can tear your limbs off that takes at least 20 shots to kill.

The combat itself is frantic and fast-paced when you're surprised, but can be surprisingly strategic if you get the drop on the enemy. With long range rifles, land mines, grenades, and natural hazards like pockets of radiation, you can set up elaborate traps, blinds, and lures to hopefully kill enemies without using much of your scarce ammo supply. There aren't any special combat abilities (thus far) like the Magic system in Oblivion, so the combat blow-to-blow is much less complex. Your choices are "shoot him," "shoot him with another gun," "hit him with something," and "run away."

Now for the inevitable comparison between Fallout 3 and Oblivion. I normally wouldn't do this sort of thing. There's no reason to say "in particular, Mortal Kombat has easier combo moves than Street Fighter" because they're different publishers and different games. However, Fallout and Oblivion were developed by the same company (many of the same people, actually), and they use the same mechanics and even sometimes the same levels. You'll run into an Oblivion cave in one of the first few side quests.

So anyway, here's the major points where the games differ:

All in all, Oblivion is a better game in almost every category. I said in the intro that Fallout 3 may be worse "for good reason" and I wanted to clarify that. There are no "hacks" in Fallout like there are in Oblivion. In my Oblivion review I talked about spells and skills that could give you infinite money, permanent invisibility, and power-level your magical skills. Since Fallout is significantly more limited in terms of skills, and lacks magic of any type, none of those things apply. It means I have less fun making a character that will kick ass without me asking him to, but it also means that the game is consistent even if you're not a pro at character creation. If you've already played Oblivion, Fallout is still fantastic. If you avoided Oblivion because you didn't want to seem like a nerd for playing a game with magic and swords and cloaks, the Fallout 3 is basically Oblivion on the set of Mad Max. If you're trying to decide which one to play first, I honestly can't help you. Oblivion is a better game, but that means that Fallout will be a slight disappointment. But if I recommend Fallout first, the game is of sufficient length that something else may come out that prevents you from playing Oblivion. The choice is yours.

ADDENDUM: After playing the game for 5-6 hours I restarted and chose a better character loadout, for those of you who are new to this sort of game:
SPECIAL (you have 40 total points to start with)
Str: 5 (you can upgrade this fairly easily within the first 3 hours)
Per: 6 (Highlights enemies on the radar, useful)
End: 6 (Governs HP, this is the lowest value of End you need for all the END based perks)
Cha: 2 (Useless. Helps a little with prices and conversations, but get the speech/barter perk and/or level speech/barter skill instead)
Int: 7 (Max this for more skill points per level and better hacking/repair)
Agl: 7 (governs action points, movement speed, and some neat skills. Switch this for END if you plan to get killed a lot)
Luk: 7 (Every action has a percentage success chance. Every percentage gets your base luck added to it. Critical hits are also $luck%)

"Tagged" Skills (from the GOAT. You can ask your teacher if you really have to take the test right before he gives it to you, he'll allow you to skip it if you whine):
Small Guns (Covers everything up to sniper rifles and machine guns. Most common gun in the game)
Lock Picking (You encounter ~~20 locked chests in the first few hours, and the lockpick minigame is annoying also)
Repair (As stated in the review, your guns break like they're made of crepe paper.)

When you advance to level 1, I would recommend leveling Speech and Explosives immediately, to bring them up to the same level as your tagged skills. Speech gives you great choices in conversation, and you can avoid a lot of busy work by convincing someone to do something for you. Get it as high as you can throughout the game, I'm shooting for 70-80, though you can do it slowly after the first burst. You can also play the "quick save before a conversation, then reload until you get a success" game, but that's retarded and breaks flow. Explosives you need at 30 for a quest in the first town, so you might as well get it up there so you can complete it. After that, only level explosives if you really want to.

After the first level or 2, keep increasing:
lockpick (up to 100, but take note that only multiples of 25 matter)
speech (100 unless you do the quicksave trick)small guns (100)
repair (100)
science (100 [for hacking])
sneak (if you want to use sneak at all)
medicine (any leftover points would be useful here)

Keep those skills fairly even. You can continue past 30 in explosives if you like land mines and grenades, but it's not all that useful to me at least. You can also boost medicine higher if you're having problems surviving, though I would just try to find a place to sleep whenever possible. Resting for 1 hour restores 100% HP, and if you do it in a bed that you own or pay for you get "well rested" which increases XP for the next few game hours. Also note that some clothing gives you skill boosts, so you could get lockpick up to 70 and always keep a utility jumpsuit on you to change into for an extra 5pt boost to get you over the 75 limit for hard locks.

Perks: The perk that allows you to gain more experience is relatively weak. You'll be leveling fast enough anyway, and from what I've heard you will reach the maximum level before you beat the game. There's a "Gun Nut" perk that increases small weapons and repair, which is very necessary at the start. "Thief" is similar to "Gun Nut," but does sneak and lockpick, both handy. You also want to save all the skill books you find as you go through the game until you get the perk that doubles the effectiveness of skill books.