You might provide a drug addict his fix, but if your speech skill is high enough, you can convince him to get on the straight and narrow. Maybe you'll fend off the robots defending a long-forgotten museum, but you might also steal an identification card that allows you to walk around (mostly) unharmed. There's a ton of flexibility in how you might approach certain tasks. The same is true of many supplementary quests. The choices you make might lead to a dramatically different experience from another player's experience. While the tale isn't as evocative as it might have been, the way it blossoms as you advance, giving you any number of ways to proceed, is extraordinary.

Like with Fallout 3, the greatest delights aren't in the central storyline but on its periphery. A poet in an unlikely place mumbles aloud his difficulties in finding the right rhymes. During one quest, a robot with a specialized skill and a gut-busting name might offer a service that surely no game character has ever offered before. Some of the most fascinating occurrences are the wittier ones. You investigate the disappearance of a sharp-tongued wife in one town and bring star-crossed lovers together in another. Socialites in formal attire run a casino known for its creative menu choices, and if you play your cards right, you might get to make a menu alteration of your own. A society of ghouls with pie-in-the-sky aspirations is creepy enough to make you squirm, yet blind devotion to their dreams still inspires empathy. Many of these quests are lengthy, and great dialogue and good voice acting will invite you to learn more about the characters, as well as keep you wondering about what will happen next. Nevertheless, the main tale provides a solid skeleton from which to hang a dumbfounding number of tasks and stand-alone parables. The large-scale combat scenarios are less epic, and the surprises are less dramatic than Fallout 3's mid-game reverie.

This latest trip into the desolate American landscape possesses many of the same elements that made Fallout 3 such a successful role-playing game, but its story doesn't boast as many memorable moments.

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