Fallout: New Vegas Review
Extensive exploration and a great collection of quests with multiple solutions make New Vegas a big success.
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.
Our ratings for Fallout: New Vegas on PC out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
Performance
(Show PC Specs)
CPU: AMD Phenom II 955 @ 3.2GHz
GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB
RAM: 4GB DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB
RAM: 4GB DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
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Nov 11, 2010 10:30:59 (Nov 11, 2010 10:30)
