An awful lot can happen in ten years...we've gone through 3 generations of consoles, everybody has a telephone in their pocket, the world survived two terms of George W. Bush's presidency and the average graphics card has more RAM and processing power than an entire PC did a decade ago. Few things can survive a ten year hiatus and return to full strength – just look at the new series of Beverly Hills 90210! So it was with equal parts anticipation and trepidation that fans of Fallout and Fallout 2 embraced the news that a sequel was coming to their beloved more than 10 years later. Oh sure, there was the solid Fallout Tactics, as well as the console-based Brotherhood of Steel whose consistency ran closer to diarrhoea, but neither of these things were a proper, role-play sequel.

Then Bethesda, home of Morrowind and Oblivion, announced that they'd acquired the rights to the series and were developing a sequel. A first-person perspective sequel like their venerable Elder Scrolls series, with nary an isometric viewpoint to be seen. Then they announced that the sequel was being developed simultaneously for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 as well as on PC. By this stage, it sounded about as far removed from the original Fallout games as you could possibly get, and fear and scepticism ran rife on message boards across the interwebs.

Thankfully the hand-wringing was unnecessary and the doomsayers were wasting their breath: Fallout 3 is not only a worthy successor to the throne, it actually manages to feel even more like Fallout than the original Fallouts in all the ways that matter. It manages to capture the humour and grimness of its predecessors while expanding on its history and setting, providing us with a level of detail that simply wasn't possible ten years ago. Like its antecedents, it is not a flawless masterpiece, but it is a masterpiece never the less.

Fallout 3 takes place more than 30 years after the events of Fallout 2, and over 200 years after the actual bombs fell. Bethesda have gone to great lengths to make the story self-contained for those who never played the earlier games, while also including enough references to past happenings to satisfy the hardcore fans. To do this, they've focused the action on America's east coast this time, specifically in and around Washington D.C. Things are different here, yet ultimately very similar: barren wastelands, gangs of marauders, suffering, death, depravity, and also tiny little glimmers of hope and resilience.

But this is not how your story begins, instead, it starts with your childhood, swaddled in the protective embrace of a VaultTec vault; underground bastions of steel and science designed to protect a privileged few from the ravages of nuclear war on the surface. Your childhood and formative years act as your character creation, allowing you to pick how gender and appearance, your base stats, then your skills and eventually the karmic direction you'll take on the capital wasteland's broken moral highway. This sequence is well done and enjoyable – if not a tad too long – and in a fantastic move before, you set out for the surface you will have a final chance to do-over any of your decisions and fine-tune your protagonist.

Once you step foot into the harsh light of day, the world is your radioactive oyster. You have a vague mission (find your father), but whether you pursue that immediately or go exploring is entirely up to you. Like Far Cry 2, this open-world experience can be a little daunting at first, but unlike Ubisoft's shooter sequel, Fallout 3's is a much more pleasant sensation – you can save anywhere you please and at any time you choose, and once you have discovered a location you can quick-travel there instantaneously. The net result is that the capital wasteland is a sort of grown up's playground: it's dangerous, unforgiving, but it's yours to do with as you please and there's a safety net there in case you do fall.

And fall you will, because the opening hours of Fallout 3 will prove themselves to be quite a challenge. Your hero is ill-equipped for the grim reality of wasteland life, you're broke, and you don't know who anyone is or where anything is. The good news is that this is half the fun in Fallout 3, and the sensation of exploring the world, scavenging to survive and testing your limits is second to none on Xbox 360. Like Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series, you can steal or scavenge anything that isn't nailed down, but unlike those games where it kind of felt....dirty, in Fallout 3 it not only feels right, it's an essential part of survival. Collecting junk you find and bartering it for things you need or for bottle-caps (the currency of post-nuclear America on both coasts!) is both rewarding and satisfying.

Of course it's possible that the junk in question belonged to somebody else, or that some ne'er-do-well would rather kill you and take your stuff than go find it on his own...either way, there will be blood...shed. Fallout 3 features real-time combat in a similar vein to Oblivion, but in addition to that, Bethesda have ingeniously tweaked the combat targeting system from the previous games and made it work beautifully in their reimagining. The VaultTec Assisted Targeting System, or VATS, allows you to pause the game and expend action points by precision targeting locations on your enemy's body, before returning to real-time and unleashing your attacks in a cinematic, bullet-time style.

Despite offering both, VATS is really the only way to be successful at Fallout 3 – due to the stat-based nature of game, long-ranged combat tends to be fairly inaccurate, and even up close the game lacks the precision of your average first-person shooter. Action points can take awhile to recharge too, so if you fail to secure a kill immediately, or if you're facing numerous foes, the situation can turn ugly pretty quickly. That said, the trademark excessive violence of the series has been retained, and it's not at all uncommon for heads to explode, limbs to disarticulate, and blood to rain down like an afternoon sun-shower. All in all combat is fairly enjoyable thanks to VATS, although it tends to feel pretty repetitive even with the gratuitious gore. The bigger encounters are the most enjoyable, which is ironic since they're often the most frustrating.

Still, anyone who has played an RPG knows that combat is an essential part of the level-up system, and Fallout 3 is no exception. Sure, you can gain experience from quests or from successful lock-picks or computer-hacks, but killing legions of foes is your dietary staple. Developing your character in Fallout 3 is great fun though, so you'll be grateful for every bit of experience you can get. The fallout series uses a proprietary stat-system called SPECIAL, which stands for strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck. These core values are measured out of 10 and do not advance with your level, unless you pick a perk that grants an increase.

In Fallout 3, every time you level up you will get to pick a perk, which can range from the aforementioned stat-increase to the more esoteric, like the ability to communicate better with children characters or befriend wild animals. There's a huge amount of perks to choose from and you won't be able to pick them all, so deciding what is right for your character can be a pretty important decision. It also allows you to create a fairly unique protagonist who tackles challenges in the game differently to how your friend's character might.

Helping round out the development are your character's skills, which include stealth, barter, small guns, explosives, medicine and more. Throughout the game you'll encounter locked doors, password-protected computers and people in need, and these things can require you to have a specific level of proficiency in any of these skills. Not only that, some of them have secondary effects like increasing the amount of health regained from stimpacks or how well you can repair a broken gun. Like your primary stats, you won't be able to max-out all your skills (although you can get pretty close!), so you'll be making more important decisions in this area too.

Character development was always one of the highlights in Fallout 1 and 2, and Bethesda have done a great job of capturing that and translating it into a more streamlined experience suitable for console gaming. Your level will cap at 20, which sounds low, but in practice it limits you to "superhuman” rather than "godlike” status, and therein lies Fallout 3's biggest problem: the game is much more enjoyable early on when you're really having to fight to survive. Once you're geared up and supremely powerful, things become a little bit less enjoyable. Arguably this is true of many role-playing games, but in Fallout 3's case, it's all the more disappointing given how much fun the early portion of the game is.

Still, Fallout 3 is an absolutely massive game in terms of both geography and scope – there's miles of wasteland to explore and investigate, as well as a decent variety of side-missions on top of the primary quest. And if you find yourself becoming too powerful, you can pull the plug on things pretty quickly by just focusing on the core plot, which snowballs rapidly before ending somewhat abruptly. If you're in a hurry, you could probably beat Fallout 3 in about 15-20 hours of play, but you'd be doing yourself a huge disservice, as well as missing out on upwards of 40 hours more playtime if you enjoy exploring and accomplishing side missions. The only obstacle is the level cap of 20 which you'll hit a lot sooner than you'd imagine, but in all honestly being any more powerful would drain the fun out of the game.

While morality in Oblivion and Morrowind was an always fluid entity percolating gently in the background, in Fallout 3 notions of good and evil and right and wrong are something the game is drenched in. It's not the same sort of heavy-handed pontificating present in Fable 2, which seems almost laughably simplistic in comparison, but it is something that is present in every decision you make during your time in the capital wastes, from the time you leave the vault to the final dénouement of the game. Where moral choices were just something you made without thinking much in Oblivion, in Fallout 3 they will define not only your character, but how others perceive you, and even more significantly, the wastes themselves. And these aren't clear-cut choices either; sometimes doing wrong is the only way to do right, and sometimes a good deed will end up being punished.

It helps that the quests are almost universally interesting and fun, especially the side quests since they have the widest range of alternative outcomes. They range from hunting down rare bottles of nuka cola soft-drinks to finding a nest of vampires, with many more that will surprise and entertain. The only criticism here is that some of the really minor quests (particularly those that require you to collect X amount of something) don't actually show up in your PIP-boy device. That, and the quests are so intriguing that you'll wish there was another half a dozen or so to keep you busy!

Fallout 3 is an incredibly solitary experience for the majority of the game, which is something that really heightens the sensation of being isolated and adrift in the big bad world of the capital wasteland. The first two games relied quite a bit on having NPC companions follow you around and interact with the world and your character, and while Fallout 3 does have some companion characters, none of them is particularly memorable or even very helpful. You can at least offer your offsiders guns and ammo, but your main interactions will be with the townsfolk in various settlements across the wastes. This is where Fallout 3 shines, providing characters with a lot of depth and interesting conversation options, and most of them will react quite differently to your character depending on how good or evil they are.

Visually, Fallout 3 is a striking game, with an incredible level of detail brought to bear on rendering its own version of ‘destroyed beauty.' Where the original games forced you to read text descriptions and use your imagination, Fallout 3 is explicit in its depiction of decaying cities, rusting wreckage and a land rendered barren and toxic by radioactive fallout. It feels organic and natural too, which enhances the exploration immeasurably, as it always feels like something new could be waiting for you over the next hill. The game's draw distance is solid too, allowing you to see what lies ahead to a reasonable extent, although nowhere near as well as on a powerful gaming PC of course.

While the framerate is solid and the visuals largely glitch-free, Fallout 3 does have a few shortcomings. Textures occasionally glitch as you might expect, and the obligatory physics-based enemy corpses jerking around like demented marionettes are present and accounted for. But the real physics problem lies more with the living – friendly NPCs can occasionally fall of balconies or high areas and plummet to their deaths, which can be incredibly frustrating if they're the source of a quest. Sometimes you'll see it happen so you can try reloading, but other times you'll just return to town and people will simply have vanished.

It's the little things like this that can really nag at you and ruin an otherwise wonderful experience, but thankfully Fallout 3's sound is a lot better. Certain dialogue phrases can chafe after considerable repetition, of course, but for the most part Fallout 3 sounds fantastic. As you explore the wastes you'll always find yourself keeping an ear out for trouble, but if you aren't you can always listen to the in-game radio which features chatter from the various in-game factions, as well as the only surviving radio station in the Washington metro area. The music is great too, featuring 1950's inspired songs like the previous games, as well as a simple score that keeps you company as you traverse the wastes.