Fallout 3 [X360]

Almost from its opening scenes, Fallout 3 nails its colors firmly to the mast. Fresh out of the vault where your family took shelter from a nuclear holocaust, you find your way to a small town, cobbled together from scrap and built around an unexploded nuke. The sheriff soon offers to pay you to disarm the bomb; moments later, a smartly-dressed stranger offers you considerably more to rig it to explode, wiping out the town and its residents. Either choice resonates throughout the rest of what's easily a 40-hour game. Which will it be?

Although it's firmly couched in its often tongue-in-cheek 1950s sci-fi mythos of a war-devastated D.C., Fallout 3, with its frontier towns, roaming bandits, and hostile environment, has a curious Wild West atmosphere. Its story, which sees you searching for your Liam Neeson-voiced father, is compelling, but plays second fiddle to the joy of just poking around the expansive wilderness in search of quests, the many convincing supporting characters, or scrap to assemble into improvised weapons.

You'll need them. Addressing one of Oblivion's weaknesses -- a game with which it shares more than just a graphical engine -- Fallout's combat is a triumphant blend of role-playing number-crunching and shooter reflexes. Toss in a healthy (one could even say excessive) helping of gore and a weapon selection that includes a pocket nuke launcher, and you're ready to take on anything. Fallout's heritage -- a couple of dearly-loved PC role-playing games from the late 90s -- couldn't be in safer hands.

One typical problem of games that offer such open-ended experiences is that when they break, they break badly, in a sort of Wizard of Oz moment that reveals the lever-puller behind the curtain in drastic fashion. Yup, Fallout drops the ball on occasion, and the beiges and grays of its shattered versions of the White House, Washington Monument and surrounding miles do wear on the eyes eventually.

The mere fact that that's a criticism speaks volumes about the game's staying power. Not only will you be glued to the game right up to the end, you'll go right back and play it through again just to see what consequences different choices will produce. Fallout 3 is a technical triumph, but more importantly, it's a beautiful piece of design, exploring the well-trodden video game ground of good vs. evil better than any other game to date. It's not so much a morality play as it is a morality playground, and in proud showbiz tradition, it just leaves us wanting more. If Fallout 3 is life after the apocalypse, then bring on the bombs.