Fallout: New Vegas Review
Extensive exploration and a great collection of quests with multiple solutions make New Vegas a big success.
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The start of Fallout: New Vegas brings you back from the dead with the simple task of finding your killer and the reason for your demise. As a courier of the wasteland you have been carefully exterminated by a man in a chequered suit because of what you were carrying. A strange robot rescues you and an aging doctor in a small town brings you back to full health. This is where your story begins in a new wasteland set around the bright lights of the New Vegas Strip.
This picture is missing a lot of context
A new wasteland brings forth a whole range of interesting locations to discover and crazy people to meet. Quests are just as enjoyable as the exploration with a myriad of ways to solve them by creating friends, foes or a whole lot of bottle caps. It doesn’t matter if you enjoy solving disputes through violence, negotiation, deception or stealth there is usually a way for you to do each. Finding the start of each quest is even more open with a brand new landscape populated with challenging creatures and locations waiting to be found.
New Vegas is still very much about exploration with over a hundred locations to be found in the wasteland. Stumbling onto a small abandoned house in the middle of nowhere only to realize that it is rigged with a whole range of vicious traps to keep fools like you out is just one example of what you’ll encounter. You’ll want to investigate caves, vaults, cattle ranches, rocket test sites, gas stations, hidden bunkers, ranger outposts and casinos many with a chain of quests that link them all together. There are a great number of one room shacks but there are also a few larger locations with multi-levelled buildings and a fair share of NPCs to interact with or eliminate. As you venture further out into the wasteland you can come across some rather difficult enemies including Deathclaws, radioactive Ghouls, scorpions, giant ants and rogue security bots.
The huge open landscape is populated with points of interest that can be spotted from a distance or you can just head in a direction and hope to come across some place filled with some interesting tasks. There aren’t any brutishly long subway tunnels or maze like indoor areas consisting of levels within levels this time. Most of the locations are smaller in size and this seems to help the game flow better rather than being stuck four levels underground trying to remember the way out. There are still a few vaults to explore which hold a familiar design but two of the vaults I visited were changed in ways that made them more interesting to explore. Lots of the areas you discover lead onto a series of quests ranging from standard courier missions to trickier hostage negotiations.
Your eye? No it looks fine, for a hideous Ghoul
Quests in New Vegas are as good if not better than its predecessor if only because they seem to offer more options. The quests seem a little more mature adding an extra level of detail or another clause that makes your decisions less straightforward. After 20 hours I had more than a dozen quests underway at the one time allowing me to choose what to do next and how. You’ll be told that certain parts of your quest are optional and these secondary objectives may make your main task easier or completely change its outcome. In more than one situation I was trusted to deliver goods or items that I could have simply disappeared with giving myself a handy bottle cap bonus.
The main story quests, which revolve around you finding out why you were killed, also seem more interesting than Fallout 3 even if they are still rather short. Not much of the dialogue is pointless and the quests themselves are less dull or repetitive. Depending on allegiances the later missions can be difficult so you may need to level up or acquire better equipment before attempting them. I still recommend avoiding the main quest line until you have exhausted your enjoyment from the varied side quest. Much of your questing will have you making decisions about certain groups as to their intentions and you are free to do as you wish in those cases.
Would it be Fallout without giant ants?
Do you want to help out a group of Ghouls who want to launch themselves into space with rockets? Is a lottery in a small town where only the winners live something you can ignore? Is it a good idea to test a new device on a mentality unstable super mutant? Is capturing and eating people really that bad when your ancestors did it? All these decisions are yours in the vast wasteland and your options are clearly demonstrated. The arrow that points toward your next location isn’t always flawless and indoors doesn’t help much because it only points at your destination. Fortunately you can enlist the help of other wasteland wanderers as they become your companions and importantly share inventory.
Companions get more focus this time and not just with additional quests. A full menu system lets you transfer items and set tactics for them in battle even if the system is still a little flawed. My companions set to passive often ran towards enemies in indoor locations taking them out of my sight. They are very useful though, in some cases taking many kills for themselves if you give them some of your better weapons and armor.
There are also some quests for companions which aren’t very deep but they provide some background on the characters and can discuss recent events. Although not nearly as fleshed out as a squad based game like Mass Effect 2 it’s getting there. Companions provide some extra perks like highlighting enemies but the shooting and melee action remains much the same.
The gameplay and combat will feel familiar to fans of Fallout 3 and you’ll still be using many of the same weapons from that game. VATS remains a tool where you wait till enemy gets close to press a button and unload bullets into the head or other injured appendage with a high chance of hit and then watch as it separates from the rest of the body. Without VATS combat is still sloppy and you may just have to run backwards unloading bullets as creatures move toward you with melee attacks. In a few hard sections I resorted to using cheap tactics involving me running out of a door and attacking enemies with a grenade launcher as they spawned in from the level transition. Once the enemy has been defeated its time to loot the body and repair or upgrade your items
Headshot
The inventory is still a little clunky switching back and forth between weapons, apparel, aid, local map and world map is still harder than it should be. You also need to scroll the long lists for items that aren’t grouped, assuming you remember what you are looking for. Also tiring is resetting the hot keys for your weapons which may happen after you surrender your guns at a casino lobby. The pipboy is a little unresponsive as you can’t open it while jumping mid air but there were also a few times where my weapon didn’t want to fire despite it being in perfect condition.
New Vegas still looks much the same as Fallout 3 with some minor improvements to lighting. There seems to be more volume to lights in indoor areas which can impact a little on performance. Animations are still clunky but they don’t take too much away from the huge expansive world with hundreds of NPCs going about their daily lives. Creatures look good enough and ragdolls can be humorous when explosives are involved. In the open rolling hills and dry deserts the engine usually runs smooth as silk but things take a sharp dive in some more populated urban locations.
Welcome to the Strip, enjoy your framerate loss
Probably the worst running location seems to be The Strip itself, which is pretty disappointing given its small size and the fact they already broke it up into two discrete sections. Even still due to drunk NPCs, robots and flashing lights you’ll get well under half framerate compared to that of the open wasteland. This also goes for inside the casinos which are relatively large open areas but run very poorly. Should you be unlucky enough to engage in some unarmed combat in these indoor areas the experience is quite horrid even ignoring the other bugs.
The game contains is share of bugs and glitches which can take away from the experience Thankfully I had less than a dozen crashes in 30 hours of gameplay which isn’t too bad considering the scope of the game, save often and save early is still wise advice. The quest arrow didn’t update correctly a few times and directed me via a much longer route. Other times characters got stuck or clipped through each other in weird or offensive ways. I don’t really consider New Vegas to be exceptionally buggy though, the scope of the game makes it hard to remove all bugs.
New Vegas brings back the great feelings from Fallout 3 with a wide expansive wasteland and hundreds of things to do. Although you start neutral to almost all inhabitants apart from fiends and wild animals you can quickly change that and make enemies or friends of whomever you please. You can also wear the armor of your enemies and sneak through bases for some looting or frag-grenade-in-the-pants killing. One later mission asked me to recover a crucial item from a leader of a group I had previously come to violent blows with. One disguise and a stealth boy later I was inches away from my target and disposed of him with a pistol and quickly recovered said item before running to safety.
No time for table top dancing we have quests to complete!
Aggression is one of the many options New Vegas gives to you to solve quests or disputes and the sheer number of quest options can make the game incredibly rewarding. New Vegas will hold great appeal to RPG gamers looking for a mixture of exploration and questing. Deciding where to go and how to tackle your next objective is not something that will disappear when you stop playing either. New Vegas isn’t a flawless example of presentation as the bugs and glitches hold it back but there are still few better action RPG experiences.