Sassafrass Reviews: Fallout: New Vegas
Notes Before I begin
Any TL;DR (Too Long; Didn?t Read) posts will result in a report.
Any images are provided by Google, credit goes to those who made them.
This review is of the 360 version.
This review will be based on the unpatched version as my connection is too poor for me to download patches. Plus, always review a product as sold, not before they fix it after release.
Fallout: New Vegas is a role-playing video game developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Bethesda Softworks. It is set in, and around, post-apocalyptic Las Vegas (New Vegas) as puts you, The Courier, on the path for revenge against those who stole your package and left you for dead, while also getting you caught up in the political battle between the many factions vying for control of the Mojave Wasteland.
New Vegas starts in off in the bluntest way any game has ever started before. On your knees in front of a group of shady characters, knelt next to a freshly dug grave. One of the group gently fingers a 9mm pistol, before aiming it at your head. The guy with the gun quips ?From where you're kneeling, it must seem like an 18-carat string of bad luck. But the truth is, the game was rigged from the start.? then pulls the trigger. After that fairly dramatic opening cut-scene, you are put into the game proper. After being nursed back to health by the local doctor in the town of Goodsprings and sorting out your characters looks, name and stats for the game, you?re spat out into the world with one task. Find the man that shot you and find out what was so important about the package you had taken from you in such a violent matter.
However, seeing as you know next to nothing about the guy that shot you, you will naturally have to find out who it was by helping people out and as you do so, you?ll either piss off a lot of people or piss off a lot of people, due to the Factions in the game, NCR and Caesar?s Legion being the two main factions at the start and they, of course, hate each other. I cannot go into greater detail then that as it would spoil any potential outcome but needless to say, the choices you make over the course of the game dramatically change how the game ends, and what happens to the Mojave Wasteland in the many years to come. For such a basic sounding story, one if revenge, it?s actually pretty misleading and a fairly good one as well. It hides the bigger picture of what is happening in and around New Vegas, hiding the true motives of why you where mugged and left for dead and why that package you were carrying was so important to so many people. It?s a fairly linear story at the start but it soon opens out into a massive ending, with four possible factions to side with and numerous endings.
As mentioned before, factions play a heavy role in the game and do effect how you progress through the game and how other factions look at you. For example, do a job for the NCR, you will lose standing with Caesar?s Legion. Similarly, do a job for the Legion, you?ll lose standing with the NCR. It is like this for many of the factions, who all hate or like other factions, depending on their beliefs, aims or goals. It?s a great addition to the game, meaning that you do have to manage relations with the various factions in and around New Vegas, so you don?t end up as a hated enemy and therefore attacked on site by them. To tie in with this and make avoiding annoying other factions a lot harder, and to make certain you really think about these things, New Vegas has some really tough choices to make and they aren?t as black or white as they where in Fallout 3, where you knew what you were ding was right or wrong. In some missions, there are no definite right or wrong way to go, meaning that you are left uncertain whether or not what you did was right. A good example of this uncertainty would be the quest given to you in Jacobstown by Marcus, a Super Mutant, and how you deal with the end of that quest, which I shall not spoil. Needless to say, I was left wondering if what I did was actually the best choice in the long run and it did leave me feeling a bit uneasy about it. It?s one of only a few games that leaves you thinking whether or not that choice you made is going to come back and bite you hard in the ass later in the game.
To help you through the game and to also help you kill off the various creatures, Raiders and, if you so wish, the general population of the Mojave Wasteland, New Vegas uses the same gameplay engine that Fallout 3 does, so anyone who was a fan of Fallout 3 will be instantly familiar with how this feels and handles, so will take to it like a Deathclaw takes to crunching your skull after it removes it from your shoulders. There have been a couple of smaller tweaks to the aiming, to make it more accurate. True Iron Sights have been included, making aiming a lot easier when you activate them, which is a blessing when you have something huge bearing down on you and Obsidian have made it feel more fluent as well. However, the biggest change though is the addition of Hardcore Mode, which makes the game a little bit harder. In Hardcore Mode, you have to keep an eye on your sleep, dehydration and hunger levels, whilst keeping an eye on how much ammo you have as that gains a weight stat and could heavily limit the amount of stuff you can carry. It also restricts the healing effects of stimpaks, forcing you off to see a doctor or use a Doctors Bag to heal those limbs. It makes the game that little bit tougher and adds on a new level of gameplay, meaning that the gung-ho players will have to adapt and plan trips ahead or struggle and die in the Mojave Wasteland.
New Vegas, in its basic mode, has a more unforgiving side as well, and that is due to the difficulty spike Obsidian has put into the game, making the game feel tougher overall, making you think tactics or at least, making you choose between ?Fight? or ?Flight?. Do you attempt a full-frontal assault, a sneak attack or do you just ignore them completely, finding a way around them and avoiding any attacks? It feels more intuitive this time around, giving you choices in how you take on groups of enemies. Enemies are generally tougher to take down on Normal, they swarm you and try to flank around you, sometimes forcing you to holster your gun and just run as fast as you can back to safety as their sheer power overwhelms you. While this may sound horrible to some of you, for me it was a great thing. You aren?t a godly man or woman walking the Wasteland, crushing any and everything beneath your boot, looting and cackling as everyone runs from you. You are a courier, a normal person, trying to find out who stole your chip, whilst being over-powered by a couple of Giant Radscorpions, struggling to stay alive out in the Wastes as all manner of creatures try to make you their next meal. Even at the higher levels, you will still struggle against a couple of Deathclaws, or a swarm of Cazadors, a new bee type enemy which can and will swarm you, leaving you scrambling for a Stimpak and running for your life.
The gameplay of New Vegas is very fun, easy to pick up and easy to get your head around but also challenging at the same time, making the perfect balance for new-comers and seasoned veterans. But sadly, it can be very, very buggy at times and thus, ruin the fun of the game by making you die cheaply or lose a lot of health. At times, the aiming and firing completely locks up, neither letting you aim down the sights or even fire the gun for a good 5 to 10 seconds, leaving you extremely vulnerable and prone to a quick death, quests bug out and either automatically fail or glitch, the auto-saving system on the 360 is extremely suspect as well. I lost two saves due to the saving bug and the only way around it is to turn off the auto-saves which, in a game as big as this, can be a bit of a kick in the teeth if you forget to save regularly or get ambushed by the many creatures that inhabit the Wasteland. Some of the older bugs and glitches that were found in Fallout 3 also return too. While the bugs happen on occasion, the save glitch bug and the random lock-out on the aiming and firing controls are bugs that should have been found before release, not afterwards through patches. They can easily ruin the game for you, either by destroying that 20 hour save you had or by getting you killed in a fight you were about to win if the commands worked.
The sound and graphics are totally free of the bugs either. At times, while listening Radio New Vegas, one of the new radio stations, the sounds drops out and becomes quiet, regardless of what the sound setting is in the pause menu, the sound of a gun being upholstered or holstered is delayed by 3 or 4 seconds. As for the graphics, textures will, albeit very rarely, load, just leaving a flat, brown surface and also give your character a few weird moments where they might grow about four more arms. But, all that said, the graphics in New Vegas, whilst nearly the same as Fallout 3, are so much better. The colours they?ve added to the world make wondering from one place to another interesting and denotes that there is life here. And the voice acting has improved a lot, so much so I?m prepared to say this is one of the best voiced games I have ever had the pleasure of playing and listening to.
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