I did so love Fallout 3 when it came out. I completed it, did all the DLC, got pretty much all the achievements and milked it for everything it had to offer. So why has it taken me so long to replay it? Well, it was so big that doing that again was a bit off-putting. But then, Epic gave it away for free and I now have a Steam Deck to play it on, so I thought, why not? Handheld Fallout 3? Which I can play without worrying about how I’m affecting the story because I’ve already done the story? Sold. Well, not sold because it was free, like I said.

So in I went. Considering how old the game is (14 years old? What?!) it still looks pretty incredible. Part of this is probably due to being able to whack up the detail to max on the Deck, and part of it is probably just how impressive it is that Fallout 3 is now on a handheld. Thing of dreams, that is.

I do want to make one note about it on the Deck, however. Because it is an Epic game (and possibly because it had Games for Windows Live surgically extracted from it), it’s a bit crashy. Or rather, very, very crashy. Almost all of the crashes I attributed to Epic signing me out about once an hour, causing it to quit every time that happened. There were also a few “things are really busy” (read: giblets everywhere) freezes, which could be that I’m running a Windows game under Proton. Thankfully, though, I saved frequently and the loading times – even running from an SD card – are almost zero. That in itself is a game-changer, as Fallout 3 on the 360 was really, really slow to load (especially when “checking DLC”) but here you can’t even read the text on the loading screens before they vanish. Incredible.

As for how my play went, well, it didn’t go as planned. You see, I intended to just be a right bastard, murder everyone, steal everything, blow up Megaton – the lot. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Aside from the stealing. I did that a lot. I’m not sure it was the morality of killing everyone that made me stop, much as I’d like to claim that, it was more my concern that taking that route would close off quests, make the game harder, and require more ammo than I really wanted to waste. I’m practical, if not moral.

Unlike on the 360, I didn’t complete every single mission, and the only DLC I completed was the post-main-story Brotherhood of Steel one (Broken Steel?), mainly because I have other games to play and I’d already applied about 50 of my precious hours to this as it was, and I’d done it all before. However, I did find some stuff I’d not found previously! For example (spoilers, sorry), at the end of the main game you have to choose to either send the Brotherhood woman into the reactor to flip switches and die from radiation, or bravely sacrifice yourself in the same way. What I didn’t realise, was that if you have Fawkes, the intelligent Super Mutant you saved earlier, as you companion, you can send him in instead, and – being a mutant – he’s immune to the radiation so nobody has to die. Hurrah!

I know many people say that New Vegas is far superior to Fallout 3, and I’d agree to a point, but Fallout 3 is still amazing. The world, the humour and the combat are all amazing even after all this time. But, I can check for myself because Amazon just gave Fallout New Vegas away for free so guess what I’ve just installed on my Deck?

Oh, and I forget to mention! Toilets! So! Many! Toilets!