With Fallout 3 Bethesda Software has taken up the reins of the long moribund franchise, which Interplay and Black Isle Studios created and published a decade ago. Bethesda has successfully replicated the look and feel of the much beloved franchise while endowing the game with addictive and engaging gameplay, but they’ve still got a ways to go in reproducing the substance of the first two games. Fallout 3 is a game that strives for greatness, and comes ever so close to pulling it off.

This is a classic RPG in the sense that you design and level a character and venture out into a world loaded with NPCs, quests, and danger. Your character has come of age in an underground vault in the Washington DC area that was first populated after the nuclear armageddon of World War 3. It’s been 200 years since all was laid to waste and now dear old dad, your sole surviving parent, has left Vault 101, a place where the credo is, “You’re born here. You die here.” It’s also the place where we get our first hint that the plotting of Fallout 3 too often fails to live up to the overarching story’s lofty ambitions.

It’ll surely come as no great shock that your dogged pursuit of your father has you stumble onto a much larger story that affects the entirety of the game world. Nor should it be surprising that everything you’re intended to take for granted isn’t necessarily based on reality. The ideas of fighting the “Good Fight” and sacrificing for the sake of others are prominent. But, much like Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, this intricate and compelling story too frequently gets tripped up in its implementation.

Take your aforementioned exit from the vault. Everyone in the vault was born in that vault. Everyone there has spent their lives together. Yet, we’re to believe the day dad leaves, the vault’s Overseer is so enraged that he orders everyone to be confined to quarters, has a man beaten to death, intends to have you killed and threatens to kill anyone else found in the vault’s corridors? Even if the Overseer were established as dangerously unstable, which he isn’t, we’re to believe nearly every vault security officer is willing to listen to these orders and ready to gun down the same vault civvies they’ve known their entire lives, with no questions asked? That doesn’t strain credibility—it holds it over its head and then snaps it over its knee.

The game isn’t rife with plot elements like this; they do, however, occur too often and at the worst possible times, where their impact on the story’s believability is most crucial. Whether it’s important characters in towns not recognizing when a significant event has occurred even though it directly affects them, a schism in a group known as the Enclave that is never fully developed and is poorly implemented, or worst of all, a moment in the game’s final minutes that simply defies all laws of logic (if you have the character of Fawkes in your party). The game also borrows ideas from other stories, including Fallout 1, without doing nearly as credible a job (the fate of President Eden comes to mind). As individual moments, they’re never as disastrous as Sith’s Darth Vader as Frankenstein scene, but there’s still too many times where the story is either underdeveloped or clumsy in carrying out its aims. It’s not a game-killer by any stretch, but it’s unfortunate that it holds this game back from greatness.