Fallout 3 is the main game that I'm playing, but I did play Dead Space 1 yesterday. Yeah, I know, I'm like 5 years behind current times.
Fallout 3 is easily my favorite game of this current generation. (Bioshock and Crackdown are special mentions). For me, Fallout 3 is the closest thing I can get to, in terms of stepping inside a virtual world. Just exploring the wastelands and whatnot is a ton of fun. I love finding new locations, and getting new quests. Battling the animal life and Raiders and Super Mutants, is usually extremely enjoyable. The depth to the game is there, but at the same time, it's a great action game. It has the deep RPG parts of it, but at the same time, it's a solid action game in it's own right. I know most peeps played this in very late 2008 or early 2009, and I did play the game during 2009 on my Xbox, but I got about 20 hours or so into the game and then stopped for whatever reason. In late 2011, during a steam sale, I bought the Game of the Year version of Fallout 3 for like $7.50 or something, and then proceeded to use some mods. I'm using one of the texture packs, and also a mod called "Fellout".
The game is absolutely fantastic, but it does have it's share of faults. Just to show that I'm not blind to all the faults, here's a nice tidy list of the biggest problems with the game.
1. Glitches. Bugs. Game Crashing - Todd Howard games are known for being unbelievably ambitious, but at the same time, with that ambition, you get a game that is going to have it's share of problems. This game crashes on me pretty frequently. Part of this is probably because I'm running various mods, but still....
2. Super Mutants look like exact clones of each other - I know this is kinda a silly complaint, but when you've been playing this game for 100 hours, you realize that damn... all the damn Super Mutants are basically exactly the same, with only their clothing being different. You've seen one Super Mutant, you've seen them all. I know that Bethesda can't be asked to make thousands of unique character models, but they need to have some variations in the Super Mutants. They are a huge part of the game. The immersion is broken when you have to fight so many copy cat character models.
3. Voice Acting is constantly repeated - The voice acting in Fallout 3 is pretty good. You have to give Bethesda credit for having all the people in the world capable of talking and having conversations to one degree or another. Unfortunately, they just need to use like 100 times more voice actors. There is basically one child actor, that does the voice for every kid in the game (at least it seems that way). It sucks that they weren't able to get like 5 different kids to do the voices of the various kids. It just seems like there is only one actor for this. When it comes to the adults, there are only so many voice actors there as well. Many of the same voices are repeated over and over. I know that it must be extremely costly and time consuming to try to have so many different voice actors, but if they want to do this kind of game right, they need to hire a ton more.
4. The scenery is repeated too often - I really didn't notice this during my first 40 or something hours of play. But now that I'm like 80 hours in, it's hard not to notice how many of the designs are repeated over and over. Now, I know that it's impossible to have such a huge game world, and not repeat the same kinds of buildings and streets and playgrounds, etc, etc. Still, if you're going to try to create a believable virtual world you have to make it a bit more varied. This kind of thing is only going to get harder when we get to the next generation. Developers are either going to have to make twice as much art, or they are going to have to make their worlds smaller, and their games shorter.
5. Combat eventually turns into headshot after headshot - One thing that does kinda suck about the combat, is that you quickly figure out that the Combat Shotgun is the bee's knees, and if you can get in close on an enemy and blast them with a headshot, you can take them out pretty quickly. It gets to be a situation where you're just constantly exploding fools heads with that shotgun. Doing anything else is almost wasting your time. Sure, with the Super Mutants and more difficult enemies, you have to mix in a few Grenades and mines and some Assault Rifle, but nine times out of ten you're finishing the guy off with a headshot. It's fun to do, especially in the first 40 hours of the game, but during the second and third 40 hour periods it gets a bit redundant.
Anyways, again, I'm not trying to talk a bunch of smack about Fallout 3. I'm hopelessly addicted to the game. I've put well over 80 hours into my plays on both the 360 (back in 2009), and now on the PC. I'm not even close to being finished with the game, but I have no plans to stop any time soon. Fallout 3 is almost an embarrassment of riches in terms of how much flavor is in it's stick of gum. It lasts a long time. I just had to list some of it's faults, so that peeps would know that I'm not blindly in love with it.