Fallout 3

Fallout 3 is currently 75% off on Xbox — down to $2.49 from $9.99.

At 75% off, this is one of the deepest discounts Fallout 3 reaches on Xbox — near its typical floor.

That works out to $7.50 off the Xbox list price of $9.99.

This deal is for the XBOX version. Click View Deal to open the official Xbox page — prices and regional availability are confirmed at checkout, not by GamesCreed.

Before you buy, read our buying guide or compare more xbox deals on GamesCreed.

How it plays

You come up out of a vault into a wasted, irradiated version of Washington, D.C., and from that point on the game mostly gets out of your way. Fallout 3 hands you a big open map and a huge amount of freedom about how you cross it: sneak past a raider camp, talk your way through a problem, or just start shooting and see what happens. Combat runs on VATS, a system that pauses the action so you can target specific body parts before the game resolves the hits, which turns firefights into something closer to tactical planning than twitch shooting. Outside of combat you’re constantly managing radiation exposure, scavenging supplies, and deciding which factions and characters you trust, and the game tracks those choices in ways that ripple forward. It’s less about a tight, scripted campaign and more about wandering somewhere on the map and stumbling into a questline, a ruin, or a fight you weren’t looking for.

Who it’s for

If you like RPGs where the joy is in poking around every subway tunnel and office building rather than following a marker from objective to objective, this is squarely for you. Fans of the earlier isometric Fallout games get a very different animal here, first-person and much more action-oriented, so purists looking for the old turn-based formula should temper expectations. It also rewards patience. The pacing is deliberate, the world is bleak by design, and there’s a lot of reading and listening if you want the full picture of what happened to this version of America. If you want fast, arcade-y combat or a tightly authored story with no detours, you’ll probably get restless with how much Fallout 3 leaves up to you to find on your own.

Is it worth it?

For an RPG fan who hasn’t spent real time in this world, it’s the kind of game that’s easy to sink way more hours into than you planned, simply because there’s always one more building on the horizon worth checking out. It’s an older Bethesda title at this point, so don’t go in expecting current-gen polish, but the design underneath (the freedom, the choice-driven quests, the sense of a living dead world) still holds up as something a lot of newer open-world RPGs are still chasing. When it shows up discounted on Xbox, it’s a low-risk way to find out if the formula clicks for you, and if you’ve been meaning to finally see what all the fuss around this series was about, a sale is a good excuse to stop putting it off.

Quick facts

Genre: Role playing. Developer: Bethesda Game Studios. Publisher: Bethesda Softworks. Platform: PC, via Xbox. Release date: March 2, 2010.