Fallout 3 - Review @ NMA

Several sources wrote in to point out NMA's Fallout 3 review written by the famous (infamous?) Vince D. Weller.  Vince isn't impressed with the cohesion of the setting but finds the quests quite well designed:

The East Coast “wasteland” is anything but dead and empty – one of many inevitable changes brought by switching the format from a “classic”, isometric RPG focused on exploring through dialogue to a first person, sandbox RPG heavy on the action side. Running into enemies at every step is a traditional sandbox feature. Sticking with Fallout's "dead wasteland" atmosphere would have made traveling in first person unbearably boring. As a result, the "wasteland" seems overcrowded: hungry monsters, trigger-happy raiders, super mutants, and stray, hostile robots of all shapes and sizes are everywhere. Evil-doer hunting Regulators and do-gooder killing Talon mercenaries complete the picture.

The setting’s casual approach to nuclear explosion is especially jarring. You get out of the vault, look at this brave, new world, and someone promptly asks you to detonate a nuclear bomb inside one of the towns. Why? Because it's cool, apparently. Later on you will unavoidably run into a super duper mutant who can only be taken down by a several direct nuclear blasts that, oddly enough, have only a few meters radius and are harmless to people outside this radius. Shooting old rusty cars results in even more nuclear explosions, which makes you wonder if there really was a big War or if a simple car accident caused a chain reaction of exploding nuclear cars across the States.

In other news, Shamus Young's Twenty Sided blog revisits some cynical questions asked a while back and finds Fallout 3 doesn't measure up so badly and Gamasutra has a piece called Escape from Vault 101 that finds the changes made by Bethsoft work well in the end.