Fallout New Vegas Review

War never changes, but games do, so lets jump into Fallout: New Vegas!

Taking place in the year 2281, four years after Fallout 3, and in the Mojave Desert near Las Vegas, or as it is now known New Vegas. New Vegas starts off with a nice pre-rendered cut scene and then going into a intro video to explain the region and the back story. This is typical by now for Fallout games and is a good way to start things off. Though the pre-rendered cut scene could give false impressions of how the game actually looks. After the exposition we get to see that the seen near the end of the pre-rendered cut scene is where we are and things are not looking up for us. As such we get shot in the head and left for dead in a shallow grave.

After the intro cinematics we begin the game in the town who’s cemetery we where buried in, and thus begins the character creation. The options are much better than in Fallout 3 in terms of age and physical looks, but the eyes are still dull but better, and the hair styles are still lacking in verity.

 The man who tried to kill you and took what you where to deliver to New Vegas.

But still the textures and normal maps are better than they where in Fallout 3, and seeing as this is on the same engine as Fallout 3 and Oblivion I will cut it some slack but I do feel that it could be done much better. (To be frank I know about Skyrim and how much better the character models are, but I also know and have many mods that improve the looks of characters, and they date back to Oblivion.) After you set your race and face, we get to setup our S.P.E.C.I.A.L., which is our stats, with the Vito-Meter which is strait forward and fast. Personally I love the streamlined character creation. After this and a basic psych test we are given a weapon, some cloths, and our stuff from before we got shot. This is when we learn we where a Courier for the Mojave Express and have lost our package. Now it is time to head out into the town of Good Springs. At this point Obsidian made the right choice and allows for the player to just skip the tutorial and head on out to either the distant city of New Vegas that wets our appetite off to the north or go south and east. Of course going strait to the main course is not a good idea due to well, the signs say it all.

As we travel the Mojave desert we learn of what has happened in the past few weeks or months as well as NCR politics and Legion terror tactics. We begin to side ourselves via the reputation system with various factions in the Mojave, and slowly will come to siding ourselves with one of the greater powers. Along the way you meet a few people who need help or ask you to aid their post or town. This slow build up for the Main Quest is nice as you follow Benny the man in the checkered suit in the introduction back to New Vegas. You get the feeling of your actions do effect the lives of the people in these small and mostly isolated communities. You also can feel the actions of the other larger factions in the surrounding area. Here is where I found the voice acting superb, you hear NPC’s enter dialog about your recent actions and due to the wide variety of voice actors in New Vegas you generally never hear what amounts to the same person talking to themselves. There is the problem of from time to time you will get a NPC who has a specific voice for dialog with the player, but that only comes up when you walk up and interact with them and going into the dialog menu. This can be quite strange but nothing as bad as Oblivion.  As the game progresses you start working with either the New California Republic, a new government based on old world ideals of freedom and capitalism, or Caesar’s Legion a mass of enslaved tribal’s run by a power crazed leader. But also the mysterious Mr. House who runs New Vegas with his Securatrons and the NCR's Military Police. And a forth option pops up, take if all for yourself.

What this whole war is over.

Game-play:

The game play for New Vegas is pretty strait forward, WASD is your movement by default, left click is bring up weapon or fires it, right click is block/aim, scroll wheel is used for the camera. E you use for interacting with objects or people, space for jumping, left control for crouch and alt for aim as well. Very basic controls to the point that I say if you played a First Person Shooter in the past two years on PC you know the controls. The user interface is quite basic and out of the way, staying in the bottom and corners, with the exception of the messages that show up in the top left and the cross hair in the middle of the screen. Basically it is the Fallout 3 user interface. 

Added into New Vegas is a second mode that changes how the game plays slightly, it is called Hardcore where ammo has weight and you have to eat, sleep, and drink, and if you don’t regulate them like radiation in FO3 you will drop dead. Now for me H2O was easy due to having the Classic pack for the canteen, but when I played without it yeah, hardcore just makes you rely on food and water instead of stimpaks for healing. Sleep is kind of just there, it does not start penelizing you tell you have been awake for more than 24 hours from my experiance. Stimpaks and sleep don't do anything other than heal you and also stimpaks don't instantly heal, they heal over time. Limbs don't regenerate unless a cybernetic is used or drugs or the doctors bag.


The reputation system is a nice simple way of setting things up so you can be a really good person but still be hated by one group or another. And it also makes it so you can do bad things and not be hated by everyone. Like how I play where NCR and the Strip love me but Legion hates me, and I have amazingly good karma. In theory I bet you can end with having everyone except Legion hating you but still having good karma. Makes a nice system instead of like in Fallout 3 where any evil you did was instantly known to everyone, no matter how disjointed and distant the events are.

Some bugs are just odd, but it ends up being mostly one type, the clipping through terrain due to what I suspect is bad spawn placement or a glitch in the engine itself.

Balance:


The game has of course set difficulty settings in the options, and personally I never felt like changing them from default as I found it a good challenge. Now as the game goes on you find yourself either hard pressed or decently challenged throughout the whole game. There are exceptions to this and they are the Deathclaws and the Cazador’s both are creatures of immense strength and will tear though all but the most prepared and well armed players. These are more or less ways to just keep prizes out of the players hand or to keep low level players from sequence breaking. However, with this said you can still run strait to New Vegas through a nest of Deathclaws and live at level one. I did this, just you are going to die, a lot. Quests are always challenging either through combat, skill, or resources which is nice as not all quests are go there and kill something then come back. Quite nice and balanced over all even when on Hardcore.


AI:


The AI in New Vegas is very good, you never see NPC’s go into areas that don’t make sense, they feel alive with their dialog with each other and movement patterns. You get some that cower or fall back and regroup and you get some that blindly rush in. And from what I have seen the AI varies on how it acts based on your reputation and based on what faction they belong to. Quite amazing and good. Also they do not have Far Cry syndrome, which is where they can hear a silenced pistol go off a mile away and shoot you with a machine gun with pin point accuracy just after you fire. Your companions are much better and generally smarter than in Fallout 3 which is very nice for anyone who would rather not travel the Mojave Wasteland alone, though they suffer from not falling back when using ranged weapons against melee fighters. They also tend to go rushing in with ranged weapons to get a ‘better’ shot at the enemy which results against some things them dieing within seconds, or being knocked unconscious when not in Hardcore. They also have some problems with following, mainly the lack of the ability to jump but most games NPC’s can’t jump anyways so it is to be expected. Companions are easier to take care of with the intuitive and very useful companion wheel which Obsidian rightfully kept showing off whenever they could during development.

Replay Value:


The replay value is immense, you will find that the story is quite enjoyable. There are many different options on how you deal with events in the main quest and every time you play again you will find new side quests. And as time goes on new DLC will be released adding more fun in. On a sad note when you finish the main quest you cannot continue, however the game warns you ahead of time and makes a save for you before the end so you can just reload and have fun.

 Mr. House's Gambit for New Vegas.

Final Verdict:


Fallout: New Vegas is a stunning game, beautiful vistas, amazing game play, and a very fun story. It has both light and dark humor in it, and over all has a little bit of everything so everyone has something they can enjoy more than the core game play. It is amazing the fact that it is easy to put in a hundred seventy hours into a game within the month of it’s release. Now then I will say this, it is mostly a shooter game for combat. V.A.T.S. is still around but you will find yourself playing the game like a FPS or over the shoulder shooter. A lot of points though you will find that if you invest skill points into things besides weapon skills, and some times weapon skills too, you get extra dialog which gives experience and instant success. This gives the option of peaceful solutions. One last note, I would suggest that anyone who can get New Vegas on PC do so and solely for the huge mod community, it will keep bringing new and exciting things to the table well after the last DLC is released. 

Me at Hoover dam keeping New Vegas free for all. As you can see you can even get Warhammer 40,000 into New Vegas. As always here is my archive of screen shots from the game which will get more added to it from time to time.