Fallout: New Vegas Review

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Let’s get something out of the way here: yes, Fallout: New Vegas is similar to Fallout 3. Every reviewer has brought this up, and it seems they’ve docked points from their final word because of it. But the fact that New Vegas is similar to Fallout 3 isn’t going to influence how I feel about the game, and it shouldn’t influence how you feel about it either – because even if you’ve seen these character models before, even if you’ve fired these guns before, you haven’t had an experience like the one New Vegas provides before.

Where New Vegas succeeds, and I mean succeeds with flying colors, is in its story. In the past, you were given a clear moral choice: either you side with the good guys and work to vanquish the forces of evil, or you relish in your delightfully evil choices and watch the world burn. Those days, however, are gone, and New Vegas ushers in a new era of story telling – an era where you’re never quite certain who the good guy is, and where almost every choice you’ll make falls within a rather large gray area.

Don’t get me wrong, the karma system from Fallout 3 is still intact. You’ll still gain negative karma for taking things that don’t belong to you, and you’ll gain positive karma for helping out innocents. However, you won’t gain karma, be it negative or positive, after everything you do this time around. Instead, you earn reputation with certain groups, and every time you become accepted within a group, you almost certainly become vilified with another.

The fact that you find yourself in the middle of multiple faction wars is what makes New Vegas such a dynamic experience. Do you help out the NCR, a group that claims to be helping the greater good and bringing Nevada back to the ways of pre-war America, knowing that you’ll be gaining the attention of Caesar’s Legion, a powerful and brutal faction that is ideologically opposed to the NCR? What if you don’t much care for the NCR or Caesar’s Legion, when at some point you know you’ll have to choose between the two of them?

The war between Caesar’s Legion and the NCR is just one of the many faction wars happening across the Mojave Wasteland when you find yourself recovering in the town of Goodsprings at the beginning of the game. Right from the beginning, too, you’ll find that you have some difficult choices to make, and the game isn’t about to hold your hand while you make them.

We all know that the game starts with your character getting shot in the head and being left for dead in a shallow grave. Once you recover, it’s up to you to track the men who ripped you off and attempted to kill you, but you quickly discover that the rabbit hole goes so much deeper than that. While its true that the game’s main quest doesn’t really get going until you make it to New Vegas (which doesn’t happen until about 10 hours into the game), when it does pick up, you’ll find that the suddenly explosive story was well worth the wait.

Indeed, this isn’t a paper-thin story about two groups fighting over control of a water purifier. The game’s story has so many layers, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with the choices put in front of you. It’s incredibly difficult to read everyone’s true intentions, as just about everyone you talk to, from the bartender in Goodsprings to Mr. House himself, will put their own personal spin on why they’re right and why you should ally with them. I often found myself consulting my girlfriend about what I should whenever I came to a crossroads, even though I knew she wouldn’t be able to help (she was just as torn as I was), realizing that really I just needed to talk things through in order to see which path made the most sense to me, both logically and emotionally.

Of course, all of my gushing about how good the game’s story is doesn’t mean it’s without flaws. There are bugs in the game, and while I have yet to experience any that are game-breaking, I know they exist [note: I played the Xbox 360 version of the game]. I’m always quick to dismiss bug problems in Bethesda’s games by blaming it on the fact that they all take place in such a huge world, which makes it virtually impossible to catch all of the bugs before the release. However, I can’t argue that this time, as this is the fourth Bethesda release in the past decade that is riddled with them. I know it isn’t possible to catch everything, but with the amount of bugs in this one, you have to wonder if Bethesda (and in this case Obsidian) is even concerned with looking for them, and in the end, the game ends up feeling like it lacks a degree of polish – even if Bethesda promises that they will soon be patched.

However, it should be noted that since the gaming Gods have been so good to me during my experience with New Vegas, I can’t really justify docking points from the score for the big, game-breaking bugs that I have yet to come across, even though I know they exist. I did witness bugs, but they were all just silly instead of a hindrance (a group of NCR troopers who needed to quickly squat before delivering their dialogue, for instance). While some people have probably wanted to hurl their controllers at their TV while playing New Vegas, I never did, and I think it would be unfair to rate the game based on experiences other people have had and ones that I have not, however fortunate I may be.

I was also extremely disappointed with hardcore mode. My first playthrough was as a melee user on hardcore mode, and to be honest, I was expecting to die a lot more than I did. I was told that hardcore mode was to add more of a sense of realism, rather than provide a more difficult playthrough, and if that’s the case, your character is still a beast of a human being. You won’t have to eat, drink and sleep as much as the previews make you think you will, and there are perks you can take that all but negate the added weight of ammo, so essentially, hardcore mode only equates to being more of an annoyance than an exercise in realism.

You better get your character to level 30 before you finish the main quest as well, because you won’t get the chance to go back and explore afterward. I can’t believe I’m even talking about this after so many people were disappointed by the fact that they couldn’t continue their character after the original end of Fallout 3, but it’s true. Obsidian made a huge mistake in going the route they did with the ending, and I can’t help but be bitter about it after experiencing so much with my character.

At the end of it all, though, the benefits to playing this game and experiencing the spectacular story are well worth the potential risks, even if the risks could be game-breaking. If you loved Fallout 3, this is definitely the game for you. If you’ve never been able to get into the Fallout games, New Vegas isn’t going to be able to offer much to you. And if you hate Bethesda’s take on the franchise because they didn’t emulate Fallout 1 & 2, this certainly isn’t going to change anything. As for me? Well, if you need me, I’ll be exploring the wastes.

TFTS Score – 9.0/10

(Still torn? Check out the first 15 minutes of New Vegas to see if its something you want to take a gamble on)