The Mojave wasteland is a dangerous place. It’s full of giant mutated animals, raiders, and warring factions, all vying for the same small pieces of dust that are still livable. In other words, it’s just an average day in the Fallout universe.

This time around, Obsidian Entertainment is at the helm, and their team has some of the guys from the original PC Fallout games. While I’ve only briefly experienced the first two games, I was very interested to see what they would bring to the table for Fallout: New Vegas.

Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat; New Vegas is not Fallout 4. Obsidian used Bethesda’s Gamebryo engine to build the game. New Vegas looks and feels a lot like Fallout 3. Some might even say exactly like it. The FPS mechanics are in place, the V.A.T.S. system is there, and the character models are still kind of ugly, while the wasteland has it’s own strange beauty to it. This is, as it was intended to be, a spin-off.

Basic game mechanics aside, Obsidian did leave their stamp on the franchise once again.

The Fallout series has always been known for its Karma system. Knowledge of your good or bad deeds will spread around the wasteland. This will effect how various characters react to you in conversations, even opening or closing quest chains depending on what they think of you. There is another layer added to that in New Vegas. Now, all the characters belong to various factions.

Your behavior towards the factions will cause you to either be liked, which opens up new quests and gives you discounts in their stores, or hated. If a faction hates you, they will usually attack you on site. There is one way around this, in which you can wear the clothes of their faction and they will accept you as one of their own. Sounds like a get out of jail free card, right?

Well, it would be, but sometimes the NPC’s are smarter than that.

After becoming hated with a group of outlaws because I defended a town against them, I tried to infiltrate the prison they had taken over by wearing their faction armor. However, when I got to the guard at their door, he knew something was up. I played as a female character, and he knew there were no woman at the prison before the takeover. It was an interesting twist that I was not expecting to come across.

And that is really the strength of New Vegas. As you would expect with a story driven RPG, Fallout: New Vegas has a plot full of twists and turns. It’s these sort of moments where the game takes you completely by surprise that really drive things forward. Every quest has multiple ways to approach it, depending on your character stats, and several different outcomes. This is great news if you are the kind of gamer that re-plays their games several times. If you want to try something fun, put your intelligence down to 1. Characters will comment on how stupid you are, and your responses in conversations will sometimes reflect your lack of communication skills.

That speaks to another aspect that is very firmly intact for New Vegas. The games have traditionally had a very dark sense of humor, and that is definitely present here. There is even a special perk you can choose at the start of the game called “Wild Wasteland” which will add such Easter eggs as an adventurer that was killed in the nuclear blast while hiding in a fridge, a scorched couple you can find in a destroyed town named Owen and Beru, and many more such nerdy references.

But sadly, it isn’t all fun and games in the wasteland. Those that bought the game at launch, or that don’t have an internet connection, are very likely to encounter bugs. I started playing New Vegas the day the first patch hit the PC version. Even still, I encountered some crashes, framerate issues when playing for extended periods of time, and one instance where my companion stopped following me and I had to reload my save file to correct the issue.

Since this was post-patch, the issues were pretty few and far between for me. There is also already a second patch in the works. But please be aware; if you normally don’t have your console of choice hooked up to the internet to download the latest software patches, you will likely encounter some very strange bugs. If you have the means to hook your machine to the internets, please do so if you plan on playing through New Vegas. For your own sake.

That aside, I really enjoyed my time with Fallout: New Vegas. The writing was interesting and took turns that surprised me. The mechanics I loved in 3 were back and worked just as well as I remembered. For fans of the series, New Vegas is going to be a must play. If you are new to the franchise, I would probably suggest either waiting for the second patch or picking up Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition. Either way, you are in for some fun in the desolate wasteland sun.

This review is based on a copy of the PC (Steam) version of Fallout: New Vegas provided to us by Bethesda Softworks.

Tags: action rpg, Bethesda, Fallout, Fallout: New Vegas, FPS, Obsidian Entertainment, rpg

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 9th, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.