If there was one game we absolutely had to get our hands on this year at E3 it was Bethesda's Fallout 3. It's been 10 years since the release of Fallout 2 and this sequel is long overdue. To our dismay, the demonstration consisted of only 30 minutes of unrestricted gameplay on the Xbox 360 version of the game. Sadly the PC version was not available.

For some games 30 minutes is plenty of time to get a feel for everything the game has in store, but for Fallout 3 we were barely able to scratch the surface. That's not to say that the demo was a waste of time; quite the contrary actually. But like Bethesda's previous role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3 is going to be enormous and eat up a great deal of everyone's time.

We weren't able to go through character creation but rather we were kicked straight out of the vault with a pre-rolled character. With our 30 minutes ticking away we knew that the first priority was to see how this new game approached Fallout's combat. Combat can be run in real-time like any other shooter or turn-based using the Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System, or VATS.

You can enable VATS at any time which pauses the combat but you'll still need Action Points to perform attacks. Assuming you have sufficient action points, which regenerate slowly over time, you can queue up attacks targeting individual body sections and then watch those attacks executed through a cinematic camera. We were attacked by a wild dog not long after leaving the vault but easily dispatched it with three shots to the head using VATS.

VATS allows precision targeting of specific parts of your enemy.

If you don't have enough Action Points to attack using VATS you can still fight as if it were a standard first or third-person shooter. After a couple VATS fights with wild dogs we tried approaching it as a straight-forward shooter and found that it was faster and easier to take out the enemies that way.

So why use VATS when you can just run-and-gun your way through? As Executive Producer Todd Howard told us VATS ensures more critical hits and allows some strategic choices like deciding whether to destroy an enemy's leg to hinder movement or their arm to make them drop their weapon. Frankly the low-level monsters we were fighting - wild dogs and fire ant warriors - didn't pose a big enough threat or much opportunity to engage in strategy.

I loved Fallout 2 as much as the next PC gamer but some of the early fights, like when you're beating rats to death with a stick, get a tad tedious using turn-based combat. Tedious? Actually I found them to be soul-destroyingly boring. Thankfully, this won't be a problem with Fallout 3. The rodents and pests of the wasteland can be dealt with easily enough in real-time allowing you to get experience for the combat without the need to go through a turn-based fight for each one. VATS combat is fun and feels like classic Fallout but it could become a hindrance if you're trying to quickly cover ground for a quest.

The world of Fallout 3 has both the sheen of new graphics and the art style of classic Fallout.

After fighting with a handgun and an assault rifle we decided to move up to grenades. A pack of fire ant warriors clustered near an old car posed no problem using VATS and the collateral damage was enough to set the car on fire. I was just about to investigate the burning car when it exploded crippling both my arms and a leg. My ruined limbs were easily fixed with a few stimpaks but I was reminded that it pays to be aware of your surroundings. I imagine Fallout 3 will offer plenty of opportunities to use the environment as both cover and a weapon.

The PIP-Boy 3000 perfectly captures the nostalgia of previous Fallout games.

Since time was running short we started flipping through the pages of the PIP-Boy 3000, which contains your inventory, map, quest journal, status, skills, perks, all the things associated with Fallout role-playing. Just as we had hoped these screens look and sound like classic Fallout made new, and that's the most important thing I took away from the demo. It isn't a top-down perspective and it isn't 2D sprites but it still looks and feels like Fallout.

Our 30 minutes with Fallout 3 was far too short to get a real sense of it but the promise of a new Fallout game is enough to keep me excited. While the graphics on the Xbox 360 version were impressive I can't wait to see it on a PC. Bethesda has taken the open-world model of Oblivion and transplanted the lore of Fallout. Instead of wandering around lush fields and ancient ruins you're scavenging through the wreckage of post-apocalyptic civilization. Bethesda promises over 100 hours of gameplay and from the half-hour we've seen it'll be time well spent.

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