It is a mark of any good game these days that it causes me to stay up well beyond my normal bedtime without even realising, and if time spent gormlessly fixated to happenings on-screen were in any way related to review scores then Fallout 3 would probably be heading for a ten on that alone. At five in the morning this past Saturday when I finally dragged myself off my 360 and toward sleep, I was convinced that, somehow, Fallout 3 was going to be dangerously close to being a perfect game.

Subsequent play and completion have dulled that thought slightly, but not by much. No – Fallout 3 is not as close to perfect as I’d possibly hoped it could have been, but it came within a whisker. The story of the young adventurer who escapes their nuclear vault community to chase after their father is one that is hugely mouldable to your own personal choices and actions, and one that could take you well over fifty hours to complete should you wish to check everything off the checklist.

You start off your adventure by working your way through a sequence of key events during your childhood, from your birth to your first toddling steps and onto your tenth birthday party. In doing this the game cleverly disguises the usual character creation and tutorial aspects that titles like this require into an hour’s worth of story that allows you not only to put a gender and face to your character, but to assign which skills you want to excel in and to make your first few decisions as to whether you’re going to be a goody two-shoes or a complete and utter git.

Having done all this, you’re then off and out into the open world having had to beat a rather hasty retreat. Upon leaving Vault 101 your vision slowly adjusts to the natural light around you and presents you with a vast, open post-nuclear wasteland, and how you explore all this is entirely up to you. As with Bethesda’s previous title Oblivion, the option to tool around finding new locations and completing sidequests doesn’t merely act as a brief diversion, but quite often completely distracts you from the main story for hours on end. With a hundred plus locations to visit and investigate, this is one massive canvas that you’re going to be painting on.

How you go about this painting is entirely up to you, but the way the game works under all this choice was always going to be the main patch of ground on which Fallout 3 pitched its tent. Calling it Oblivion with guns might sound a little simplistic and throwaway, but in effect that’s exactly what you’re getting – an adventure where you can sneak and steal, be a selfless saviour or tyrannise the native population to your heart’s content. Want to be a thief who has high lock picking and sneaking skills? How’s about an all-guns-blazing hero? An evil monster that fires first and then asks questions later? The choice is yours.

As with other games of the ilk, Fallout divides your skills up and allows you to assign points to particular ones after levelling up. Thus, from the very first moments you spend with the game you are able to take your character down particular avenues that you think will best suit your style of play, which given the fact that I particularly enjoy being as slimy as a greased-up car salesman in games was good as it meant I could spent most of my points on speech and talk my way into (and out of) plenty of situations.

In addition to this, each level gained allows the player to pick a perk that will help with a particular aspect of play or add a new ability to your arsenal. Ranging from perks that increase the amount of experience you get each and every battle to ones that allow you to perform a silent instant kill on a sleeping NPC and a bizarre one that has a random chap turn up during your battles on occasion to wipe out your enemies for you, these play a big part in how you develop too and add a nice extra layer of customisation to your progress.

Your progress is, of course, governed to a large degree by the battling you get up to against your various foes, and this is where Bethesda have had to do something different. You see, if you choose to you can play Fallout 3 as pretty much a first-person shooter (although the developers take time to emphasise that it is more of an RPG), but if I am honest the standard gunplay feels rather inexact and loose, thus it is to the V.A.T.S system you find yourself turning more often than not. With a quick tap of a button the game pauses the action and focuses in on an enemy, allowing you to select a body part to aim at with whatever weapon you are wielding in your own good time.

It works pretty well too, despite initial misgivings that it would turn the game into a very stop-start experience. Being ambushed by a group of three Raiders would be a challenge in a proper shooter let alone an FPS/RPG hybrid, so the chance to stop the action and work out a few tactics as well as seeing what percentage chance you will hit a particular limb comes as a welcome boost rather than an annoyance. It works particularly well when you are faced with an enemy who is just about to lob a grenade, in which case you can shoot it if your accuracy is good enough, or an enemy that’s hugely quick, for which you can aim at their legs in the hope that you will cripple them and slow them down a bit. All of this is accompanied by some rather fancy slow-motion cinematic effects that often end in your enemies being separated from various parts of their body in rather gruesome manners.

The thing that really works in Fallout more than anything else, though, is that it hammers home very early that awesome guns and huge piles of ammo can be found on occasion, but for the most part it is a case of scavenging your surroundings and making do with whatever comes to hand at the time. You’ll often find yourself picking up as much assorted crap as you can possibly fit into your weight allowance just so you can sell it at the nearest trader to scrape together enough bottle caps to afford a weapon repair or a few rounds of ammunition. Throughout the game you occasionally find people who are particularly interested in a certain type of scrap or scattered object and selling to them will gain you more cash, but for the most part it’s a case of making the most of what you find, as you’d expect to be the case in a post-nuclear wasteland.

The wasteland itself is something to behold, as is the general atmosphere the game provides. Caught somewhere between the future and the fifties, you end up with something similar to the Jetsons if they had lived in a post-nuclear world. Characters wander around with retro hairstyles being served and protected by strange Robby the Robot styled machines, whilst the radio stations play period hits such as the insanely catchy Bingo Bango Bongo to accompany your adventures. It’s all a bit surreal and constantly surprises you with little period pieces and surroundings that’ll have you grinning away.

In fact, one of the main positives throughout your time with Fallout 3 is that sense of discovery – of finding both major and minor details that gift you items, abilities or simply an additional battle or encounter. As an example, I found myself legging it from a chasing enemy and taking shelter in an empty shell of a building. As I ran through the door I heard a loud ‘woosh’ and turned around in time to see an iron girder suspended by chains swing down from the wall and send my pursuer flying a few hundred yards into a wall, which was as pleasing as it was unexpected. The simple act of traversing through the wasteland discovering new places is great fun, and given how much the game focuses on that then it’s a good thing indeed.

Of course, once you have found one of the many locations on offer you can fast travel to it from anywhere, which is one of the features of the wrist-mounted Pip-Boy 3000 organiser your character carries. This basically acts as your inventory screen and gives you the chance to administer medical supplies or food (the latter giving you radiation that affects your stats, so be careful) when you need them (trust me, that’ll be often), check your stats and status and listen to audio notes and radio stations. It’s a clever little system and a neat way of integrating the pencil and paper part of the game into the main deal.

So, what’s not so good about it then? Very little to be honest, aside from the occasional moment where you get stuck on the landscape. One thing that didn’t float my boat too much was the comparatively treacley speed that your character moves at, which often catches you out when it comes to combat.

The main issue I had with the game, though, was mainly due to character interaction and the story. As with Oblivion it seems like Bethesda have employed about five people to do most of the incidental voices in the game (having probably blown the budget on Liam Neeson and Malcolm McDowell, both of whom are brilliant in their roles), and the interaction still leaves a lot to be desired. At one particular point in the game I entered a tower controlled by an eccentric rich fellow who I then proceeded to kill in a rather nasty shotgun related incident. Upon leaving the tower and returning sometime later, all the NPC’s carried on talking about him as if he were still alive and part of the game.

The other negative I found having completed the game was that for the last few hours of the main quest it almost felt as if the game was rushing toward the conclusion rather quickly, which was a shame. There was also a situation in it that, if you are accompanied by a certain character, makes no logical sense at all, so that frustrates too. In a game where part of the fun is taking your time in exploring a painstakingly created world, the main quest does feel a little undercooked when it reaches the conclusion.

For all that, it still remains a superb game and a magnificent achievement. I could go on, but when you are reviewing a game that makes exploration and discovery so much fun it’d be almost criminal to start spoiling things for you lot before you can find them. There are so many things big and small to potentially discuss that I could fill out at least 5,000 words and then keep going, but I’ll l sum it up inside a few sentences for you: Fallout 3 is the game of the year, and you need to buy it. Vast, beautiful and packed full of quests, characters and incidents to come across, it’s around fifty hours of entertainment with huge replay value loaded in for good measure. Cheers, Bethesda, you’ve just given me my game of the year… and a serious case of insomnia.