Review by Kyle Stegerwald:
"Fallout 3 as a game is almost unimportant. It's been a rhetorical creation for so long that actually playing it feels weird. It's not quite "is this it?", but it's close. After ten years, a cancellation, layoffs, buyouts, spin, seemingly interminable PR offensives and endless rivers of online ink spilled, I half-expected Fallout 3 to be cataclysmic – either very good or very, very bad. I was leaning towards the latter. It's neither. It's a competent follow-on to Oblivion that's going to sell a lot of copies and infuriate people who will only play a Fallout if it's isometric, turn-based, and stays just on the right side of pop culture references. But in a double-blind test most people would be forced to admit that, while it doesn't quite have the atmosphere or follow the letter of the Lore, it's a lot more similar to Fallout than it would first appear. And it's not that terrible either."