Fallout 3's been in the news a lot in Australia. At first because it was refused classification due to its realistic use and depiction of drugs, and secondly because once it was granted classification, there was a question of what had been omitted to allow it so.

While it's always really annoying, frustrating and painful not to be able to play games in the original form envisaged by their creators, there is a strong argument that - at the end of the day - the core game is still going to basically be the same.

At the Leipzig Games Convention I was left alone with Fallout 3 (running on the Xbox 360, which is apparently pretty much completely identical to the PC version) for a good 45 minute session and got to check out a big chunk of the game. I set out to try and enjoy the game anyway, hoping the experience of using drugs (in-game) wouldn't cause me to become helplessly addicted and preclude me from returning to Australia. I think though, I'll be OK.

In the interests of ensuring that the story is completely fresh and exciting when the game is finally released, we were asked not to write about certain defined parts of the game that we saw. I actually avoided a few of the story points to focus more on the general game, so if you're wondering why there's no mention of story - that's why. Oh, and I can't talk about achievements, or some of the stats things.

The segment I played kicked off just behind the door of Vault 101. Hitting a switch to open the vault, I walked out into an overpowering brightness; which blinded me for the first few seconds. Gradually my character's eyes adjusted, ever-slowly revealing the shattered wasteland of a decimated city in front of you - promising death and danger at, well, pretty much every turn.

The landscape is massive and open. This is of course rapidly becoming the norm, but it's still neat to see games approaching it in new ways. Recognisable chunks of the game-world reveal your location as Washington D.C. and as you walk around the rubble you'll see trashed buildings appear on the horizon; remnants of the old society which once ruled the land are scattered about you, but they're now just home to creepy mutant animals and Wastelander criminals looking to kill you and, I can only assume, eat your face. Wandering into a blasted house, I found skeletons lying in bathtubs (and I assume they'll be in many other places); people who must have died instantly when the atomic fire flashed through their lives.

After a few minutes walking around I was attacked by both of the aforementioned groups of bad guys (the mutant animals and Wastelander criminals), so this proved a great opportunity to check out the combat. Fallout 3 offers two combat modes - typical FPS-style combat where you point and shoot, or the new V.A.T.S. (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting) system, which basically allows you to target a bad guy, queue up a bunch of attacks (you can opt to shoot certain body parts with various levels of risk/payoff that will depend on your character's skills) and then watch the attacks unroll in a cinematic style.

I didn't get enough combat time to determine if this is definitely the case, but I certainly found it harder to finish fights without using V.A.T.S. - even with all my leet FPS skills I struggled to take out some of the opponents. Using V.A.T.S. made it pretty simple, although there's some initial weirdness because of the disconnect flipping between the free-flowing FPS mode and the cinematic V.A.T.S. mode.

The V.A.T.S. thing looks cool - some of the deaths are particularly spectacular and satisfying - but I'm not sure about the long term appeal. I found I couldn't skip some of the death animations, which I wanted to, after some casual engagements.

I also would have liked the ability to move the camera around during these engagements - at least once in close-quarters fighting the automatically selected camera angles were up way too close against the character and very awkward.

After slaying a few errant Wastelanders and getting some better weapons (an assault rifle with, like, 10 rounds of ammo and an SMG), I thought I'd venture into the local town.

I was met by a sheriff and entered my first conversation, which was fairly normal for an RPG game - obviously I can't go into too many details here because of the story implications, but there's a bit of depth to the conversations you can have, even with seemingly completely random people.

Because I was well armed I thought just for a larf, I'd attack the sheriff. Doing that meant the whole town rose up against me, which I thought was a nice touch - you can imagine in a post-apocalyptic wasteland everyone would be pretty keen to band together against outsider threats. Of course, I died (I suspect because I was a pretty low-level character).

The demo version I was playing though started at a point where you were close to dinging the next level. Once you hit it you get to distribute skill points amongst your various skills. You can also select your perks. There's a variety of things here that, obviously, will affect your character and ultimately how you play the game, so choose wisely. Or else choose randomly and just play the game again - there's a lot of content and the flexible nature of the game will probably make it pretty replayable.

Given this is a post-apocalyptic setting; it would be a bit weird if you could walk around without copping at least a bit of fallout. Radiation accumulation occurs in a variety of ways as you make your way around the giant landscape - barrels of waste, unexploded atom bombs, the usual sorts of things you'd find lying around after a civilisation-destroying nuclear war. Drinking Rad-Cola and eating some of the foods will give you a small health boost, but this'll add to your radiation exposure. You'll need to keep track of that; your Pip-Boy portable device has all those details on it. There're medicines and other things you can do to lower your rad count, but prevention is probably better than the cure, so keep your eyes open.

Speaking of giant landscape - walking between places takes a while. I started a quest, died in it, and when I continued I was surprised to find that it was back at the previous save point - there's no magic auto-save when you start a quest (I guess I was used to the GTA 4 way of doing things), so I had to walk across the terrain again. There's no run or sprint so you're just moving at the same speed. However, after raising that with one of the developers hosting the session, he introduced me to the Quick Travel feature, which allows you to instantly flit between locations on the map that you've uncovered. That was, like, five minutes I wasted.

There're some freaky random things that happen to keep you on your toes - I had a woman run up to me in the middle of nowhere begging for help because she was strapped with explosives. She ran off, not really giving me any opportunity to help her (bug?) and then exploded. Weird.

When I first saw video footage of Fallout 3, I was a bit disappointed with the movement. It really looked like you were just gliding across the landscape, with no sense of true movement at all. Playing it though felt nothing like that and even though there's the normal bobbing gun animation (indicating movement), overall it felt pretty cool.

One thing that did bug me though was the jumping - it's like slow motion moon jumping or something; you just bounce in the air and can actually move through the air as well (dislike because it's just a bit of a disconnect from the gritty realism of the surrounding environment).

The game is looking nice and lush and performs really well. After a while I noticed the sun set and then the moon came up - you can actually choose to rest for a few hours, which I played with just to check out the whole day/night cycle, which is very pretty. The entire setting of the game really brings atmosphere to the fore - right from the moment you emerge from the vault you really get the desolate wasteland vibe.

It's estimated that there's 20-30 hours of the core game story - in only 40 minutes I feel like I could waffle on forever about all the neat things I saw - but if you take the time to do side missions and everything else there's apparently around 100 hours of Fallout fun for you to enjoy. Whether the core story grabs you is, of course, something you'll have to wait and see, but in terms of the key gameplay mechanics and technology, Fallout 3 is shaping up to look very impressive. It's due to land on October the 31st in Australia.

You can check out all of our accumulated media from our Fallout 3 game page.