Fallout: New Vegas.

Wanna know why I haven't been doing many reviews lately? This game. And now I've poured nearly fifty hours into the thing and finished my first full play through (having played bits and pieces in the past) I feel qualified to say how I feel about it. Enjoy!

I originally had no plans to buy this game, I wanted to play Fallout 3 again and learnt, sadly, I could not as it did not work on Windows 7. Aw. Oh well, New Vegas isn't a direct sequel and I never actually finished the playthrough I started before my 360 red ringed.

New Vegas was praised but only by circumstance, the game itself was heavily panned for its technical issues and repetition but the critics still said, 'well it's better than Fallout 3 at least...', which isn't that hard, let's be honest, that game was extremely underwhelming.

So if you don't know, New Vegas puts you in the position of 'The Courier' who gets a nasty case of shot in the head. Assumed dead, friendly robot Victor decides to at least see if he can save you and takes you to a doctor. Amazingly you do survive and it's time for vengeance. Eventually along the way you find yourself right in the middle of a war and are forced to choose sides...or yourself.

Largely New Vegas is an FPS that utilises elements of turn based combat through a system called VATS. VATS itself is extremely satisfying, especially if you get the perk 'Bloody Mess', which makes basically everyone die in the fashion of exploding in a bright red flash of body bits. The combat is deep and gives you lots of ways to play around and experiment but I can honestly say I rarely bothered to come out of VATS because the combat is never quite as fun as picking a specific body part, watching the bullet fly in slow-motion through the air before connecting and completely removing the body part you chose.

The other half of the game is the RPG aspect. The base of that is SPECIAL which stands for strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence  agility and luck which shape how your character will play for the rest of the game. As you then level up, you get skill points to shape how your character fights and how your character operates outside of fighting. On top of all that are perks, which are basically special abilities or changes to the way your character works, which you gain every two levels you level up, although many of them take more to unlock than just levelling up your character. And of course there are a series of mini-games too.

A side aspect of the game are the companions throughout the game, each one coming with their own personal quests. Honestly though aside from their personality/appearance you can swap out one companion for another with little effect on the game. Each one comes with their own perk they grant you, sure, but there will be little change to how your playthrough plays out depending on who you have alongside you and don't ever expect to have the kind of emotional connection you would have in Mass Effect, that just doesn't happen.

As much as I disliked Skyrim, I have to say there are elements I really miss, especially when it comes to factions. A huge part of New Vegas is travelling from faction to faction and choosing sides as the war comes closer and closer to kicking off. However this is ultimately superficial until the ending of the game. Really it just decides who shoots at you and who doesn't. Every faction has ranks and fascinating mythology, so I felt really disappointed that you couldn't become more when siding with a faction other than wearing their armour. I mean how cool would it have been if you could side with the NCR and work your way through the military, all the way until you became a black armour ranger? And you continue your quest for vengeance, while also wandering the wastes as a NCR guardian? Or what if you got so radiated, you became a ghoul, lost your mind and were forced to run around the wasteland murdering all in sight, until you eventually learnt to control yourself as you levelled up and were able to continue on your original journey? Aspects like this would give the game real replayability. Right now if you play the game again from the beginning you can't really change a whole lot just by siding with a different faction, your experience will largely be the same. I tested that by playing my PC play basically the opposite of how I played my 360 play and very little changed. The game likes to go on about how you shape the world but that is utter nonsense.

It's easy to lose control in the Mojave too. New Vegas is as black and white as any other RPG, so prepare to make the right choice in your own mind and be punished for it or vice-versa often. By the end I became a campaigner for New Vegas' independence and not by my own choice. The game pushed me that way by making assumed moral black and whites over my actions. It's pretty impressive to feel like you have no control over what amounts to a completely superficial system as it is.

Although, to be fair, let's be honest now the main story to Fallout 3 was utter rubbish. You could beat that in like two hours. I'll at least give it to New Vegas that even when I did less and less side questing as the game progressed, I never felt like I was getting less game like in Fallout 3 where you need to constantly side quest to give the game any substance. That is one of the few, clear cut improvements.

There are other lies that ultimately limit how you play too. With the deep and detailed character crafting through the various point systems I've explained above, you'd assume there is a way to tackle every mission that suits every character type...wrong. For the first quarter of the game, you really need to concentrate on weapons and other combat specific stats and perks or you won't get very far at all. After that, you really need to pour everything you have into anything that impacts your intelligence, charisma and speech or you really will have no chance of finishing this game. Any character other than a deceptively intelligent gunslinger isn't likely to last long in the Mojave, so if you were planning on an assassin/thief type character or something along those lines, yeah...don't bother.

It's also worth noting that New Vegas, even three years after its release and many patches later, is basically broken. Before I turned my recommended settings down and updated my graphics drivers, I was getting maybe an hour of a play at a time before repeated crashes. After that the game was a lot smoother but crashes and many other glitches remained. You can be at least a little more forgiving upon its release but three years later, and it being the PC version, I'm appalled it's still so bad. Also, no questing after finishing the main story? Bullshit.

Easily one of the worst aspects of New Vegas is the map. Is it really that hard to have an onscreen pointer, or maybe a guidance system in the map? Sure you get a yellow arrow on your HUD, but it is not easy to follow or read, especially in a game world which puts so many pointless obstacles between you and your objectives. So prepare to get lost and frustrated with the map regularly, especially in interior locations where the map basically completely stops functioning. I'm not going to lie, there were quite a few missions, especially when I had to find a specific thing in quite a large building, where I would be running around in frustrated circles for hours.

I casually game on my laptop, not on some powerful gaming rig, so I have to run my games on medium to low. That being said art direction still bleeds through, even when texture popping and other such things are a common occurrence and New Vegas really has none. I mean sure it's a post apocalyptic wasteland, so I suppose it serves its purpose but it's just so very bland and boring. It is no Rapture, that's for sure. All roads point to New Vegas but it's so small and broken down with so many long loading screens, the only thing you'll really feel when you arrive is underwhelmed. Many areas and locations are redressed and repeated almost endlessly throughout the interiors and although the Mojave is big, it's pointlessly so and so the world is largely empty and not all that interesting to trek though, as soon as you have enough locations to fast trek around, you'll be thankful.

A lot can be said for the voice acting too, sure there may be a lot of unique recorded dialogue but it's all delivered by about five voice actors from what my ears could distinguish. A role playing game is supposed to make you feel like a part of its world and it really pulls you out of the experience when a bunch of people are all remarking stuff in a room and every one of those lines is recorded by the same person. It isn't like it's just the random NPC's that wander around either, some key characters you meet along the way will also be voiced by the same person who was voicing the guards outside or whatever, which seems poor effort. I'd have happily had less recorded dialogue, recording by a wider range of voice actors.

That being said, it isn't like the animations really help liven up the characters much either. Lip syncing is akin to that of a dubbed martial arts film from the 80s and rather than characters actually doing their actions during their dialogue, the actions are instead written as subtitles with the character model standing completely still. This game may be three years old, but its running on a seven year old engine and it really shows.

Also the music, the fucking music. Sure there are a range of radio stations, but there are probably ten songs in this entire game and half of those are on the score and with a game you'll be playing probably for quite a few hours at a time the music quickly goes from annoying to infuriating.

So do I recommend it? Whether New Vegas is good or not is largely irrelevant under just how addictive this game is. I finished this game in a week, I put almost fifty hours into it over that week, I could have easily put in three times that if I chose to tick off every quest on my list. I went from gaming for short bursts to gaming for five hour or longer stretches, I probably would have put in even more if I didn't have a life to get too between the gaming and although there were times I may have felt overwhelmed by quests, I can't ever say I wasn't engaged or entertained, so every problem and piece of bullshit aside, New Vegas is an addiction I recommend you get.

Think About It!

-Locke