Fallout: New Vegas Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on October 24th, 2010

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Fallout: New Vegas is an expansive and complicated RPG that encourages you to see and do as much as you can. This is an explorer's game, always lavishing new and interesting quests on you and giving you a lot of flexibility in how you approach many of them. It builds upon Fallout 3's mechanics in interesting and esoteric ways, making it a comfortable evolution to one of 2008's best games. A few glitches and performance issues occasionally let it down, yet Fallout: New Vegas is periodically awesome and often compelling. If you crave an expansive and flexible adventure in which your choices actually matter, this is one gamble that will pay off.

New Vegas is just way too much fun. It's got everything in a game that I love, from a huge open world to explore, interesting characters to meet, challenging critters to fight, an awesome environment, great soundtrack and bloody mayhem. When it comes time for me to hand in the review copy, I'm going to be racing out to buy - yes, buy - my own copy of New Vegas.

Of course, Fallout 3 and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion were both full of issues that you could write a book about, and yet remain two games we love. Fallout: New Vegas is another one to gladly add to the love list. In terms of mood, atmosphere, playability, it hard to better it. It's still great to walk the deserted wasteland and stumble upon a secret area. It's still great doing so listening to soothing 50's music. It's compelling, it's funny in places, it's twisted at times, it's Fallout. What more do you want wastelanders?

I think the best way to describe Fallout: New Vegas is to say it's Fallout 3 with a bit of Alpha Protocol, which makes sense. But even with that extra little bit, New Vegas is most definitely a Fallout game. More specifically, it's a Fallout 3 game. So regardless of what I or anyone else says, you should already know if you'd enjoy it. If you don't, then you haven't played Fallout 3, in which case, shame on you. I enjoyed Fallout 3 and I certainly enjoyed New Vegas.

So losing yourself in New Vegas is easy; its charm and character sucking you into a world wonderfully realised. The only downer is that it's not as pretty as it might have been. Despite it being rough around the edges, the bright lights of the world's biggest adult playground is unavoidable. Enough time since its predecessor has elapsed that you're not going to feel burned out by the nuclear winter. Sinatra had it right when he sung: (This town is a make-you town, or a break-you-town.

...if you had a ball with Fallout 3, you are going to love Fallout: New Vegas. The main narrative isn't as strong as Fallout 3 and definitely has slow pacing issues from the start, but the involving side missions will delight you and are really the true meat of the game. There's easily another 100 hours of missions to play through in New Vegas (but remember that completing the main storyline will end the game and force you to reload from a previous save). Pick Fallout New Vegas today if you have any love for action-based role player games or first person shooters.

With its breathtaking sense of true freedom, Fallout: New Vegas is another shining example of how to make an expansive game truly accessible. Once you surrender yourself to it, there really is no going back, and for anyone tempted by the prospect of a true adventure, this is an utterly essential purchase.

In spite of Fallout: New Vegas being plagued with bugs, it still manages to take what is familiar and make it work. Sadly, I'm still not sure if putting in the hours is worth the effort just yet because of the random crashing that occurs, and that can really break your patience if you forgot to make that last important save file. The critical side of me feels that this game could have used more polish, especially since the game engine has already been out long enough for the developers to work out the kinks, which they clearly didn't do. The quality of other open world games really make New Vegas seem mildly archaic in its presentation, however the long list of missions, additional features and technical aspects may entice the hardcore RPG fans to come back for more if they are willing to forgive the rampant glitches. If you're a fan of the franchise, play the hand you're given here with Fallout: New Vegas. For others, it might not be worth the gamble.

From technical issues like crashes, to loading issues where the game at times can take forever to load literally, forever, to a point where we gave up and to specific game issues, like an enemy disappearing into the thin air, or even teammates. We even lost our save games at one point because of an error in loading the game. That's a big no-no, where we wasted a good hour of gameplay. There are even quest specific issues, where the game wouldn't register that a specific action had happened, so you were stuck there, unable to move on. Which can be fixed by reloading, but takes time and is annoying as hell. Overall, New Vegas has a few things going for it, but the game is hampered by lots of bugs and technical glitches. It feels very rushed, and probably required several more months of development.

There is one major issue however - the game is incredibly buggy, with freezes, crashes and glitches all the way through. If you can overlook them and hang on in through the slow start till you hit New Vegas you're in for a real treat, but it's not the incredible experience that Fallout 3 was.

Fallout New Vegas is a good game, but it plays second fiddle to Fallout 3. As for long time fans of the series it may play second fiddle to even the previous entries before that. It takes nearly everything about its previous title, while only making minor adjustments to the gameplay, graphics and infrastructure of the game which ultimately makes Fallout New Vegas feel like an old shoe. It's kinda of comfortable but deep down it stinks. The shoe that is, I wouldn't say Fallout: New Vegas stinks it just not as easy to overlook the flaws of the game as it was in Fallout 3. Perhaps it was the less interesting story, or the graphics that feel a tad dated, or the loose and sloppy controls, but I certainly didn't have as much fun with this game as I had with it's predecessor. Though at least there was some fun to be had.

If Fallout 3 stole hundreds of hours of your life away, you'll still likely get a huge kick out of this new adventure. Don't expect Obsidian to have re-invented the wheel, or to have even sanded down it's crooked edges, and you'll easily find yourself falling in love with the apocalypse all over again.

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