The "New" New Vegas Review

Written by Cole Burton Monday, 16 May 2011 11:00

Fallout:  New Vegas was a highly anticipated and highly disappointing game at the time of its release.  This fact was so painful because its predecessor, Fallout 3, was so amazing.  Gamers expected a great sequel to be released by Bethesda and were let down.  A few patches later, here we are.  Is Fallout: New Vegas now worthy of a complete playthrough?

Fallout: New Vegas has come a long way.  In this review, I can actually focus on reviewing the game, instead of the severity of its bugs and glitches.  When it was first released, it was a disaster.  Merchants may attack you for no reason, citizens may go crazy and run from you as if you’re a terrorist when you’ve done nothing wrong, and much more.  Even worse was the frequent crashing and corrupt saves.  You had to save ALL THE TIME to avoid game-shattering problems like failed quests due to technical issues.  And lets face it, if you haven’t saved for an hour or so, you won’t want to go back, although you just might torture yourself and do it.  Or, snap the game in half and buy something else.  Even if you do save often, the crashes could be unpredictable and the saves could be corrupt. What a pain.

Now, the worst bug I have to complain about is losing my partner.  Maybe 7 or 8 hours into New Vegas I lost my first companion, ED-E.  He was still talked about by others as if he was right next to me, but he wasn’t.  Even worse is I could not get a new companion to join me until I could find and dismiss him.  This is a problem talked about on forums all over the internet and they point out many different areas to find him.  Days after I lost him, I saw a place listed on my map that said ED-E in small letters.  I marked it and found him.  Problem solved.

Since the bad is out of the way now, let’s move on.  While Fallout:  New Vegas is really Fallout 3: New Vegas, that isn’t a completely bad thing.  Fallout 3 was amazing, so why change everything and probably end up with a worse game?  I am happy with New Vegas as it is: Fallout 3 with new missions, characters, and locations.  Oh yeah, and new weapons…  I love the weapons in New Vegas, and there are so many to collect and use it’s mind-blowing.

Fallout 3 started with your birth, New Vegas did not have that much of a connection for your character.  Rather, it starts with you, a courier, being shot in the head and surviving.  Afterwards, you learn your first big objective.  Find and kill that man.  While working on that objective you can find many side objectives and more main story objectives.  There is a lot going on in New Vegas.

Since there is so much to do in New Vegas, you better make friends.  This means not only companions, but factions as well.  There are some major factions out there that may praise, stay neutral, or hate you.  There are good factions like the NCR, evil like the Legion, and many in-between. The more you do to help these factions, the more they will do to help you.  And of course, the angrier you make other factions, the more they will do to try and end you.  I was pretty good to the NCR, and they rewarded me with an emergency radio.  With this, if I was in big trouble, I could radio in and backup would come running.  This was a pretty useful tool to have.

The sad thing about New Vegas is how much you will have to play to finish everything.  Helping some factions fails many quests for other factions.  That means you have to start the game over and play differently to see everything.  That’s a lot of replayability and a lot of work.  But hey, you are really getting your money’s worth.  This game has had many sales putting New Vegas around $20 now.  In fact, it is a value bin game on Goozex.com with the price dropping a little each week.

A couple of big things I failed to go into detail about are that now you can aim down your sights with your guns.  A great FPS feature to use when you are not using VATS, which most people will use as much as possible, just as we did in Fallout 3.  The bad thing is that once the game is over, you can’t continue from the ending.  Game over, like Fallout 3 was originally after it was released.  If you get the Dead Money downloadable content you can continue, but it’ll cost you some cash or Microsoft Points.

An important topic to close on is New Vegas’ gambling.  Hey, it makes sense right?  You can play blackjack, spin the slots, and more.  They try to prevent you from cheating by making you wait about 45 seconds every time you reload a save by a casino.  But, what we won’t do to be rich.  I think most of us will wait.  It’s a fair punishment and it helped make me rich.  There is also a card game you can play with many characters across the game, but to be honest, I never learned how to play it.  It just doesn’t seem as rewarding as hitting up a casino.

For an RPG like New Vegas, I have only scratched the surface of the game.  There is a lot to do in New Vegas, it is now cheap, and many, no, almost all of its bugs are fixed.  I suggest picking up this up.  It is a game that you can play while passing the time for other big releases.  For me, LA Noir is almost here and Fallout: New Vegas (See all PS3 Games) did a great job of holding me over.  It is a game that you may play for a long, long time.  Yet, I highly, highly doubt you will complete everything this game has to offer.