Fallout: New Vegas

Figured it was time to write a review of this game since it sucked up two weeks of my life last year – that and another 48 hours for the Dead Money expansion pack. Ever since Fallout 3 was released in 2008, I’ve a redefined idea of what qualifies as a truly amazing video game. I can also see why people probably find games like World of Warcraft so lethally addictive. The experience of Fallout 3 was for me so immersive and addictive that I was literally unable to leave the screen for two weeks and what this means in practical terms is I pretty much lived in front of the XBOX the entire time I was playing the game. I even played for 36 hours straight at one point because fuck it with games like that sleeping can wait. Maybe sometime I’ll post a review of Fallout 3 but the best gaming experience of 2010 I had by far was Fallout: New Vegas. When I first heard about it, I simply couldn’t wait and when it finally arrived I was saddened to learn that it was saddled with bugs – then I released something important – all the Fallout games are and promptly went out and bought it.

I didn’t really expect too many changes from the winning formula of Fallout 3 and there weren’t any really. The game used the same game engine, the same PIP boy interface, and the same sandbox-style quest structure. The game was really Fallout 3.5, the only thing that changed was the location, characters and storyline. I consider the differences to be not unlike the differences between Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. Same engine, same style but everything is tweaked and the number of missions drastically increased. In Fallout 3, there are around 30 main quest lines – each having a different storyline and involving different characters at different locations within the game. New Vegas on the other hand has over 100 quests however unlike FO3, some of them are mutually exclusive so the outcome of the game largely depends on which quest routes you choose – of which there are four competing ways to complete the game. New Vegas feels like a much bigger game despite the game arena being of a comparable size (about 16 square miles) and there seem to be a lot more places on the map that have relevance to the quests unlike in FO3 where the western part of the arena felt more like empty space.

Unfortunately I didn’t find New Vegas to be a better game for a number of reasons:

It isn’t as dark – in FO3 danger seems to be everywhere and what is left of civilisation is severely limited. There are isolated communities here and there but there is no overall governance to the area. New Vegas on the other hand is set in the Mojave wasteland and there is a struggle for control between the New California Republic, Caesars Legion and the mysterious Mr House over control of the only city on Earth that survived nuclear destruction – Las Vegas. The NCR is from all counts a fully functioning stable democratic state and its very existence detracts a little from the bleakness that prevails in the Fallout games. Yes it was there first two games but it was still an isolated faming village in the middle of nowhere. Still New Vegas takes place 204 years after the war so it’s probably to be expected that true civilisation would begin to re-emerge. What New Vegas lacks though and I was really hoping there would be more of them is mutants. In Fallout 3, there are things like the supermutant behemoths to deal with – damn that was scary the first time I saw one. In New Vegas all we get are the Nightkin. Many of the same monsters from FO3 are there but I was really hoping they’d introduce a few more – perhaps we’ll see something like this in Fallout 4.

It isn’t as interesting – FO3 had everything, it was like a vast labyrinth in places, especially the dangerous ruins of the metro system and often it would take hours to navigate your way through the maze to find what you were looking for. There is no comparable complexity in New Vegas which makes the game a little less fun to navigate. People called the storyline in FO3 uninteresting but I didn’t think it was – I thought it was pretty much the same kind of plot that we’d already seen in the first two games. In  New Vegas the plot of the game resolves itself reasonably quickly if you follow the main quest lines and then you’re forced to choose an allegiance before continuing on to the end of the game.

It isn’t as shocking – I’d never played a FPS / RPG hybrid style game before FO3 so the immersive-ness of the game caught me off guard. I was caught off guard by things sneaking up behind me sometimes getting so absorbed into the game it’d make me physically jump when something did that. New Vegas rarely did this save for once in one of the vaults where I was caught off-guard by some of those plant people. There just aren’t as many dark, poorly lit areas where things can hide and jump out on you.

The end isn’t as epic – Face it the end of FO3 was amazing. I’m not talking about the end end because the final cut scene was a little disappointing. I’m talking about fighting your way through the ruins of Washington DC with the enormous Liberty Prime robot on your side. It was even darkly humorous stating “Communism is a lie. Embrace democracy or you will be destroyed”. In New Vegas the ending although quite a battle isn’t nearly as good. And as for the final cut-scenes at the end, it seems impossible to get a truly happy ending which is part of the appeal of the fallout games – the ability to singlehandedly change the world for the better.

There were a couple of other things about New Vegas that annoyed me. As the game progressed the load times between areas became so long that it really started to irk me. I managed to offset this a little by installing the game to the HDD (which I probably should have done to start with) but the load times remained frustratingly long. There were also a few broken quests / glitches in the game where I ended up going round in circles not realising that the quest had glitched. And finally the game froze on me more than a few times. None of these were problems I remember encountering in F03.

Ultimately though I’m comparing New Vegas to a superior game. Despite the above qualms, New Vegas is in its own right a very good game. The soundtrack is spot on, the dialogue and speech options are far more extensive than its predecessor. The game allows for a lot of weapon and medicine options that weren’t available in its big brother and that on its own in a way made it more fun to play – guns, lots of guns. There’s the usual gratuitous violence for which the series is well renowned and if you’re bored you can always try and make a killing at the roulette tables in Vegas. I also loved the expansion pack – Dead Money – that was especially challenging and in my opinion added a whole new dimension to Vegas that should have been present in the original game.