Fallout 3 Mod Review - Apocalypse Armoury

Fallout 3 Mod Review - Apocalypse Armoury

Score: +4/-4

Summary: Adds a lot of weapons and ammo types to the game, mostly guns.

Why Get This: Expands the interestingness of weapons with more (mostly) guns. Tends to give one type of gun for each of the main gun skills (Big Guns, Energy Weapons, Small Guns).
++ Greatly broadens the range of options for vanilla and DLC weapons. Every weapon has its own model, so this is not simply a retexture or having different stats on recycled weapon models.
+ Gives you automatic, sniping, and explosive weapons for every skill, so that you really need only focus on one weapon skill. In the original game, some features were available only in certain weapon classes.
+ Some interesting unique weapons, sometimes with interesting powers.
- Unbalanced critical percentages, often 1.00 or even more. In the vanilla game, automatic weapons tended to have fractional critical hit chances of about 1/(shots per second).
- Can grossly exceed vanilla weapon ranges. Not as huge a problem as you might think since some vanilla weapons are already very powerful and there is only so much damage you can deal before the rest is wasted. Where the problem often lies is in the fragility of NPCs under fire from the new weapons -- the chances of a powerful weapon spawning on an enemy is suddenly much higher.
- Can lead to annoying ammo micromanagement because you can't get enough ammunition of the type you want, or you are maintaining a very large selection of weapons based on your available ammunition, especially if your ammunition is varied but you don't have many rounds of a particular type. Also, some ammunition is rare to extremely rare, such as crossbow bolts and needler cartridges.
- Repair lists could be much more inclusive so more weapons repair others. In vanilla Fallout 3, one of the inventory management and weapon maintenance mechanics is partially resolved by having not that many weapons. Weapons continually degrade from use, so they need to be continually repaired. Each time you repair something, it consumes and entire item from your inventory. With Apocalypse Armory, you will find a lot of weapon variants, so getting one weapon that can repair the one you want to keep will be much more of a lottery, which in turn can lead to inventory issues.

Overall, the range of weapons given by Apocalypse Armoury is mostly eye-candy. As you start to get better weapons and if you can stock enough ammunition (or can use a lot of stealth to conserve ammunition), you will drop the rest of the weapons, which then defeats the purpose of the vast variety, except you get to see it on enemies.

If you feel the game is too easy as it is, then getting Apocalypse Armoury will feel like you're cheating.