I bought Fallout New Vegas about five months ago and was very pleased with my purchase, that same pleasure still lingers today, after having played the game through three times. I am yet to purchase any of the acclaimed DLC, although I do plan on taking a look at The Old World Blues content. The Fallout series is renowned by the gaming society for being massively open world, with amazing amounts of deep and interactive stories. Fallout New Vegas does not fail to please, with over one hundred and eighty marked locations, each with something interesting to be observed and explored.
The storyline of New Vegas starts with you the player waking up in a strange man’s home. You find out that you were shot in the head and that the man whose house you reside in is the doctor that patched you up. You create your character, with a fair amount of customisation options, and are sent out into the big wide world with only one quest, find the man that shot you. On your travels you will encounter many of the different factions that were created after the vaults opened, you can choose to befriend those factions, or to start a fight with them, but you must remember that many of the decisions you make in your game will effect things later on. After travelling for a while, you will likely come across the New Vegas strip, a small area of the old Las Vegas strip that was protected from the nuclear blasts, this was achieved by a man named Mr. House. In my game, I joined Mr. House in his plot to take over Hoover dam, a major power and water provider for the entire Nevada desert. I had great fun with Mr. House’s missions, but when I started a second playthrough I decided to join another faction and ended up playing what felt like an entirely different game.
I enjoyed the story each time I played, but there was always the annoying slog at the beginning of the game when you have to complete the same old quests over and over again. I ended up completing these quests on one of my saved games, saving my profile, and then instead of starting a new game each time, I would just start from this save-game instead. I found this technique was actually quite a nice way of skipping the monotony of the early-game. When getting to the end of the story though, there is no way of continuing play. When you complete the game, the credits roll and then you get taken back to the start menu, if you want to continue playing you have to go back to the save before you finished the game.
One of the key features of the wasteland, are the companions you can persuade to join you on your journey. You can unlock every companion by about half way through the game, but you can only take one humanoid companion and one robot companion with you at a time. My favourite companions to have with me were Boone, an ex NCR sniper, and Ed-E an optical drone that can be upgraded to have very tough armour and brilliant laser turrets. Also every companion has a special ability, for example when you have Ed-E in your party your perception skill is increased by one.
Unfortunately, New Vegas has very poor quality graphical content, I found that many of the buildings looked identical and there was barely any difference in many of the characters builds and faces. Another thing I noticed was the vast number of glitches this game seems to have, these ranged all over the board, from holes in the sides of mountains to dead NPCs being partially absorbed by the ground and then still interacting with eternal physics. This completely ruined my immersion, which is never a good thing for a sandbox RPG as the whole point of playing Fallout New Vegas for me, was to experience what it might be like to live in a post-apocalyptic world.
Another notable feature is the option to turn on true iron sights, I loved this feature and would religiously use it. It helped compensate the poor graphics a little, and it just felt like a nice little buff to my immersion.
I would recommend taking a look at the Fallout universe, especially if you are a fan of games such as Skyrim, another title by Bethesda, or just open world RPGs in general. But I would advise you to play this game with a light heart, because if you are a hardcore gamer, you are highly likely to rage quit about ten minutes into the game. Hope you enjoy the game!
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