From Bethesda Studios, makers of the hit Oblivion, comes Fallout 3 a massive RPG/Shooter set in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Washington D.C.

In 2227 almost 200 years after bombs fell on America, your hero or heroine leaves their home of Vault 101 to search the wastelands for their missing father who mysteriously left without a trace.

It won’t be easy either because you have an open world of 16 square miles filled with raiders, super mutants, rabid dogs, slave traders, cannibals, giant scorpions, and mercenaries after your head, not to mention the miles of underground subway tunnels filled with ghouls and occasional mine.

In that though is the best part of the game. It is such an open ended world that you can completely stop doing the main quest and explore, doing side quests, leveling up, and meeting the fine inhabitants of this torrid world. Your actions also affect how you’re perceived in D.C. You can be protector of the downtrodden, or a tyrant of the wastes. If you feel the need to take out your mini-nuke launcher and lay waste to an entire town, do it. If you want to save that same village from an attack by slavers, do it. It’s all up to you.

Another pretty cool part of the game is the detail that’s given to customization. What your character looks like is completely up to you. You can do what I did and make your player look just like you, but admittedly it’s kind of eerie watching yourself get killed, or you can make some kind of horrible monstrosity of a person and just like the game it’s all up to you. Also with the large skill set you can make a character that is just so damn good at lying to people or maybe s/he likes to sneak around and break into people’s homes and still things whatever you want to be you can be.

Now for people who’ve played Oblivion and were wary of Fallout 3 don’t worry. While the two games are similar in the way of talking to people and character design, this game is also completely different. Instead of forests, ruins and temples you’ll be going to such famous places as the Washington Monument to fix a radio dish and the Lincoln Memorial to either drive off slave traders or help them in catching runaways. Every building is its own place from the tiniest gas station to the Museum of Natural History.

The game plays as an RPG as well as a First Person Shooter where you can choose looking at a first-person view or third-person over the shoulder one. But if you’re not a FPS player then there’s the new addition for you. V.A.T.S. which stands for Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System lets you freeze the action and aim for a specific body part based on the percentage you’ll actually hit that body part.

If you want to play Fallout 3 let me re-state that this game is MASSIVE. Unless you plan to just run through the main quest and ignore the side quests this game will still take a good deal of time to beat. So get your comfy chair, a few gallons of your favorite energy drink and get that journey started.