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. In addition, 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 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 are 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 in exchange for information. Along the way, you?ll either piss off a lot of people or piss off a lot of people, due to the Factions in the game, with the NCR and Caesar?s Legion being the two main factions at the start and they hate each other. I cannot go into more detail then that as it would spoil any potential outcome but 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 is actually pretty misleading and a 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 is a 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 affect 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 will 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 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. I was left wondering if what I did was actually the best choice in the end and it did leave me thinking about my choice as I wondered off to my next destination. It is 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 and indeed questioning if what you just did was the right thing to do.
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 are not 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 whenever you run into a pack of them without realising they are around.
Happily, to help you around those harsh Wastes, you can still find and recruit companions. While some are more useful then others, each one is more then a glorified pack-mule this time around, with all the companions coming with their own small side-quests, back-story and personality. The companions range from Boone, a former sniper with a sweet rifle and a chip on his shoulder with everything, to Veronica, a companion who loves to punch things and wants nothing more but to find a nice dress to wear, to Rex, a cyber dog who is in dire need of a few repairs. To go with the newfound personalities, each companion comes with their own little side-quests as well, extending the game?s length a little bit. Add to that, a proper system for guiding the companions around known as the Companion Wheel, the improved A.I and general humanness about these companions make you care for them a little bit. They are no longer just pack-mules, but people you will get to know and like, have fun taking down those annoying Radscorps with. That is right up to the moment they decide it would be wise to charge a Deathclaw with a f**king machete. Sadly, the companions will, at times, totally disregard your orders and go native, regardless if they are aggressive or passive, getting them selves knocked out, although this has happened rarely to this reviewer.[footnote]Before anyone quotes me to tell me this, yes, I know Boone goes psycho whenever he sees Legion and Lily has psychotic breaks at times.[/footnote] They will also sometimes not do anything while under attack and get killed, which is a major problem as well, especially if you?re doing their quest at the time.
So, 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, plus 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 be ambushed by the many creatures that inhabit the Wasteland. Some of the older bugs and glitches that were found in Fallout 3 return too, which is very disappointing, as they have not been addressed in the two years between games.
The sound and graphics are not totally free of the bugs either. At times, while listening to 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 on occasions as well. 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. However, all that said, the graphics in
New Vegas, whilst nearly the same as Fallout 3, are so much better. The colours they have added to the world make wondering from one place to another interesting and denote that there is life here. In addition, the voice acting has improved a lot, so much so I am prepared to say this is one of the best-voiced games I have ever had the pleasure of playing and listening to, with more voices this time around. The background music when not listening to the radio is also superb as well, always matching whatever you are doing at the time. The radio stations themselves have a good selection of songs but nothing as memorable as Fallout 3?s amazing radio soundtrack.
So, would I recommend you to pick up
Fallout: New Vegas? Well, a big yes and a very big no. While the game is undoubtedly one of the best games I have played, the bug issue is a massive problem. When there are no bugs and it?s running smoothly, it is gaming perfection, a game that all developers should be striving to make and it nestles firmly into my Top 5 Games, alongside the likes of Viva Pinata, Oblivion, Final Fantasy X and Banjo-Kazooie. However, when it is buggy, it tends to quickly become gaming hell. The bugs will soon go from being a minor inconvenience, like a Radscorpions corpse falling through the ground, to skull-crushingly annoying, like the loading times and numerous times you go to fire your gun and nothing happens to the freezes you might suffer. I would whole-heartedly advise to wait for the many patches that will be released and are being released as I type this, before buying. Maybe even renting it, downloading the patches then playing it, to see if it has been fixed yet is a better option before buying it out right.
[small]
After about 100 hours of playing, two attempted and failed play-throughs and one finished play-through, I?ve regretted taking Boone along for about 20 of those. Mainly as he could shoot off a housefly?s testicle hair from a mile away and is unstoppable, thus ruining my fun, partly because he is a snarky tosspot who is slowly making me wants to punch him in the sunglasses! Dude, we get it, you are an emotionless sniper who is out for revenge. Stop letting us knows about that already.[/small]
