Fallout: New Vegas
PlayStation 3
Nostalgia Factor:
Story:
The setting: a nuclear ravaged version of the Mojave Desert. You play as a courier who makes his living running around the desert delivering letters and packages to people. On one of your runs, you are attacked by a group of men who steal your delivery and shoot you in the head, leaving you for dead. You are taken in and nursed back to full health by a kindly doctor named Saul Tigh, excuse me, Doc Mitchell.
After helping Doc and the fine people of Goodsprings fight off a bandit attack, you head out into the Mojave wastelands to track down the men who attacked you. The Mojave is a complicated place, filled with all kinds of different tribes, factions, outposts, cities, and eccentric individuals. You never know who or what you are going to run into on your adventure.
A major struggle for power is brewing in the background, and you get caught up in it as the game progresses. You can choose which faction you want to ally with. There is the NCR, who is basically the military looking to restore civilization as we once knew it. There’s Caesar’s Legion, an ancient Rome inspired group of barbaric savages who go around slaughtering and crucifying their enemies. And there is Mr House, an old man kept alive by machines who controls an automated army. He doesn’t want anyone to win the battle, and wants to maintain the status quo.
It’s hard for me to completely recap the story, because the choices you make in the game affect how the game plays out around you. No two playthroughs are alike. You could play this game and wind up going down a completely different path than I did. Just as in Fallout 3, you can be a good guy who brings peace and order everywhere he goes, or you can be a destructive force who takes things and kills people at will. It’s up to you. Not only do you have this choice on how you wish to play the game, which faction you align with affects things as well. I aligned with Mr House on my first play through. If and when I ever play this game again, I really want to go the evil route and align with Caesar’s Legion.
Gameplay:
If you haven’t played Fallout 3, I’ll break it down for you real quick. This game takes place from a first person perspective. You could potentially switch the camera to an over the shoulder view, but this view is useless and not even worth messing around with. You can shoot or melee attack your opponents in real time, but the game does have an extremely useful feature that allows you to freeze time and lock on to your enemies and target their limbs. This will be your main method of attack throughout the game, as it not only almost guarantees you will hit your opponent, it also doles out more damage than regular attacks. You can’t use it endlessly though, as there is a meter that regulates how often this feature can be used. Using it depletes the meter, and it takes time for it to charge up again.
As you play you will pick up new weapons and new items. Some items can be used for healing, others are used for repairing things. Some are of no practical use whatsoever except to trade in for some extra money. You have to be careful how much stuff you pick up though, because if you take too much you will become over encumbered. This means you move at a snail’s pace and cannot fast travel between locations. As someone who likes to pick up any and everything he lays eyes on, it’s a pain in the butt is what it is.
Fallout: New Vegas is an RPG, and as such you will encounter many familiar RPG tropes. You fight things. You gain experience. You level up. As you level up you can assign points to different characteristics of your character. Strength, stamina, intelligence, that kind of thing. You walk around and talk to people. You take on missions for people. You make choices that advance the game’s plot. That kind of thing.
One gripe I have about Fallout 3 has carried over to this game: the map system! You can mark your destination on your map, which is fine. An arrow will point you in the direction of your destination, which is fine. But if there is a cliff or obstacle blocking your way, the arrow doesn’t adjust itself to point you in the right direction. It’s just like “your destination is that way!!” and keeps pointing at the thing that is in your way. I know my destination is that way, ya big jerk. But how do I get to it? I got lost and had to aimlessly wander around many times in this game. The problem isn’t as bad as it was in Fallout 3, probably because there is no subway tunnel system to throw things off in this game. But it is still pretty bad.
Graphics:
Overall the game looks okay. It is not breathtaking or anything, but it isn’t ugly either. It looks fine.
Pee Wee's Big Adventure, anyone?
Sound:
The sound effects are fine. It’s hard to mess up the sound of explosions and guns being fired. No complaints there.
You can’t discuss a Fallout game without bringing up its music, however. The music for the game is very good, if a bit repetitive. It surprised me a bit when I Googled the music for the game and I saw people attacking Johnny Guitar. That is one of my favorite songs in the game! There are a few duds musically on the game’s soundtrack but for the most part I liked them all. Some of my favorites are Blue Moon, Big Iron, Ain’t That a Kick in the Head, Heartaches by the Number, Johnny Guitar, and my personal favorite: Let’s Ride Into the Sunset Together. I like how Fallout 3 and now New Vegas have introduced me to so many songs I would have never even thought to listen to.
Overall:
No, actually. Perhaps it was only because I had never played anything like it before, but Fallout 3 completely blew me away when I first played it. If you read my review of that game, you will see that I gave it an A+. Maybe it was because I had just played Fallout 3 a few months before taking on New Vegas, but New Vegas didn’t wow me like 3 did. Despite all the cosmetic changes and gameplay tweaks, this is almost the same game but with a different skin.
I also found the game to be bogged down by an alarming number of technical issues. When I peruse online forums that compare Fallout 3 with New Vegas, most people say that they had more technical difficulties with 3, and that New Vegas was a much cleaner experience. I had the opposite experience. This game was constantly freezing on me. It happened a lot when I would save the game or enter new areas. It even happened a few times in the middle of conversations. Every time I would enter a new area I had to hold my breath that the game wasn’t going to freeze on me. I’d say that over my 60 some hours of gameplay the game must have frozen about 25 to 30 times, and that is no exaggeration.
Another glitch happened to me later in the game when I needed to speak to a certain character in order to advance the game’s story line. But when I would walk up to him and talk to him, he wouldn’t respond at all. So there was no way I could start the mission. I even left and came back, and when I returned he was gone completely. The map marker was still pointing me to where he would normally stand, as if he was still there. Weird. Luckily I was able to load an old save and take a different route to end the game (which is why I ended up going the Mr House route. I had planned to side with the NCR!). Stuff like this was constantly happening all game long where I couldn’t finish missions properly for some reason or another. I didn’t know if it was me doing something wrong that had broken the game or wrecked the mission so it couldn’t be completed, or if it was 100% the game’s fault. I’m thinking it is the game’s fault.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the game’s long loading times. Dear God, the loading times. They are out of control in this game. A perfect example is the Vegas strip. For some reason they broke it in to three sections instead of one big section. You can’t fast travel into the strip either, so each time you need to pay the strip a visit (which is a lot in this game), you have to sit through at least two loading screens – one for fast traveling to the location right outside the strip and another one for when you actually enter the strip. As I mentioned, the strip is broken into several sections. So if you need to access something at the very end of the strip, you’ll have to sit through another two loading screens just to get there. It is ridiculous. This area of the game is bogged down with several fetch quests too, so you are constantly having to leave the strip and come back a few minutes later. Might as well have a book by your side as you play, because you are going to be sitting there looking at loading screens for quite some time. How this isn’t something people don’t harp on more often, I have no idea.
The glitches and the long loading times alone were enough to drop this game below Fallout 3 in my opinion. There are a lot more quests and things to do in this game, but many of these quests are just mindless fetch quests that feel like filler. Normally I would be okay with this as I am an Animal Crossing vet. Fetch quests are nothing for me. But the long load times really made a lot of these quests a big chore to complete.
Anything else I need to gripe about? Nah, I think I got it all out!
All in all, this was an enjoyable game, despite the several paragraphs long rant that I just posted. There are lots of issues here, but nothing that made me say ScReW this GAME!11! or anything like that. It is very addicting. A lot to see, a lot to do, a lot to collect. I spent many long nights playing this game and telling myself “just one more mission! Just let me talk to this one person. Just let me collect this one item, then I will stop.” But then I would just keep on playing and playing and playing.
While the Fallout 3 vs New Vegas debate seems to be rather one sided (most people I know are in New Vegas’s corner), I have to go against the grain on this one. I liked Fallout 3 a bit more. Maybe I liked it more because it was more new and original when I first played it, and this one is just more of the same. I just feel like New Vegas didn’t have the same impact on me as 3 did. It does a lot of things better than its predecessor, but I just wasn’t as into it, for a variety of reasons. It started to feel a little bit like a chore to me on several occasions, which never happened to me with Fallout 3. That is the main difference between the two. Not to say this is a bad game, by any stretch of the imagination. We all have opinions, and this is just my humble version of one.
Final Score:
B
If you liked my review of Fallout: New Vegas, please check out some of my other game reviews:
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