Fallout New Vegas

Disclaimer 1: I don't believe in that thing called objectivity. No human being can be truly be objective. But for the most important part a objective review would be kind of boring.

Disclaimer 2: English is not my mother language, so if you find any mistakes, please inform me, so I can improve my English.
If it helps, you can imagine this review to be read with a very obnoxious German accent.

Fallout New Vegas

To be honest I haven't finished the game yet. But I think the 150 hours I spent with it so far, entitle me to say a few things about.
Wait? 150 hours and not finished? Yes, first great thing about it: Content. It simply has tons of content, expect tons of locations to explore and quests everywhere.

For those people that are not familiar with the Fallout series: The Fallout games are set in a post apocalyptic America. According to the lore, there was a big war in 2077, where everyone nuked the crap out of each other. The games play a while after that.
Culture has various degrees of development. From tribal to high technology you will encounter everything. Though the high technology elements are looking like they are straight out some comic books published in the 1970s.

Like this rifle:


Or this robot:



Now onto the game:

Fallout New Vegas is one of those modern games with lots of RPG elements, but you play from a first person perspective. Though it is more of the RPG side of things. Also if you don't enjoy shooting stuff, you can also choose to hit them with heavy things. Since there is also something called Vats, which lets you briefly 'pause' the game and you can choose, which enemies you want to shoot. You eve get to choose at which body part your character will aim at. Or... bits... if you are shooting at robots. The shots/swings will then be done in a slow motion fashion. Which I don't like, because it kind of breaks the flow of the game for me. But since you don't have to use Vats at all, it is not much of a deal. The usage of Vats is limited by your Action Points, so you can't spam it anyway.

The game starts with a nice little intro, ending with the main character getting a close distance shot in the head. Luckily he/she gets better. Otherwise the game would already have ended. That would be kind of silly wouldn't it?
Anyway you wake up in a little town near Vegas and to choose the gender of your, character, how he/she looks, the attributes and quite a bit of other stuff.
Noteworthy is the return of traits, which were present in both Fallout 1 and 2, but did take a vacation during Fallout 3. These are optional and give your character both an advantage and disadvantage.
The different attributes and skills create a bunch of different ways you can play your character, creating possibilities for multiple runs through the game.

Then you are sent on your way to find the asshole who put a bullet into your head. But after around 10 minutes you will be distracted by a lot of side quests. The quests, characters and dialogues are far superior to Fallout 3. The names of quests are often also references. For example there is a quest named 'G.I. Blues', which is both the name of a song by Elvis Presley and a movie starring him. As an extra you get this quest from a gang called 'the Kings'.

There are also quite a few references to the older Fallout titles. That does not include Fallout 3.

Pretty much all of the bigger side quests also have multiple ways of solving them, again creating reason for another play through.

On your way out of, you are asked if you want to enable the 'Hardcore' mode. In this mode the main character has do drink, eat and sleep. Additionally healing items heal over time instead of instantly, ammo does weight something and the various companions, you can convince of traveling with you, can die permanently.
This mode has some little flaws. My level 30 character, who has cleansed most of the Mojave, has slept not a single hour. Caffeine-containing drinks for the win. Also the weight of ammo often makes you play Fallout Inventory Manager. But otherwise I liked it.
If you start on Hardcore, but decide that you don't like it, you can always turn it off.
Other than that Fallout New Vegas has five different combat difficulties.

Your enemies are not leveled. For example if you venture forth in the northern direction from the starting town you will encounter many warning signs. If you chose to ignore them, you have a high chance of encountering one of those fellas:

Hint 1: These are bigger than you.
Hint 2: They are also faster than you.
Hint 3: You are fucked.

Graphics:
My graphics card is four years old. I don't care for graphics very much. It is all gameplay for me. That being said, a few people might be more interested in it. The animation of characters and their faces are sometimes pretty wooden and some might expect more from a game this recent.

Sound:
Yes, there is sound. Also you can listen to a radio all the time. There are only a few stations and they kind of get repetitive after a time. But with songs like: this or that one it is not much of an issue.

The bad:
Bugs. Sadly you can expect quite a few of them. Random crashes and problems with quests are the most frequent ones, especially when a quest bugs out and you can't complete it properly, it is super annoying. Sometimes there a some clipping issues, too.
Also sometimes doing a quest will render you unable to complete other quests. For example doing quest a will render you unable to do quest b. But if you do quest b first, there won't be a problem. This won't bother everyone, but it sure did bother me.

Conclusion:
Well, I spent 150 hours on this game. Needless to say that I pretty much like it. The bugs somewhat lower it's score, since they can get quite annoying.
A special mention goes to mods, it is fairly easy to mod this game, and there are a fuckton of mods out there. So if you have a problem with some gameplay elements or want other textures, or animated prostitution there is a mod for everything. Some even fix some of those bugs.

Verdict:
9.5 of 10 FSTEAKS!
I also add this beer pong setup I found ingame.


If you want to know more about certain aspects of the game, I will add them to this review. If you like this review, I might do more. Though to be honest, I am not buying/playing a lot of different games. I might do a review of the Old World Blues DLC for Fallout New Vegas regardless, because I fucking loved that.
Also I hope the images are okay.

It's a nice review. I would like it if you talked more about the graphics like how detailed they are, how they compare to other games, the clarity of them, etc. I say that because just in case if screen shots were to go down, we would have written text to describe them Also it would be nice to tell about the music like the style of them or quality. Other then that, good job

StealthKnight wrote:It's a nice review. I would like it if you talked more about the graphics like how detailed they are, how they compare to other games, the clarity of them, etc. I say that because just in case if screen shots were to go down, we would have written text to describe them Also it would be nice to tell about the music like the style of them or quality. Other then that, good job

Thanks for your feedback!
Had a pretty busy weekend. Vintage Festival here.
Will add a bunch of stuff later today or sometime tomorrow.

It was great, the only problem was, like Fallout 3, there were bugs, quite alot of them. Also had my game freeze a few times, not happy they didn't decide to fix that

The songs on the radios were a nice touch though, and the the amount of places to explore in the game are huge.

Also, fuck deathclaws in this game. In Fallout 3 you can just make a dart gun early and laugh at them, in New Vegas, the're are swarms of these fucking things, and there is no dartgun to save you (far as I know).

entous wrote:It was great, the only problem was, like Fallout 3, there were bugs, quite alot of them. Also had my game freeze a few times, not happy they didn't decide to fix that

The songs on the radios were a nice touch though, and the the amount of places to explore in the game are huge.

Also, fuck deathclaws in this game. In Fallout 3 you can just make a dart gun early and laugh at them, in New Vegas, the're are swarms of these fucking things, and there is no dartgun to save you (far as I know).

Nope. No dart gun.
I play on Very Hard with Hardcore mode on (stimpacks heal over time not instantly) and pretty much my only hope is to snipe them from far away if there is more than one adult deathclaw. I could maybe beat two, but one of them will have murded my companions by then.

Also kinda lazy right now, soo lets see about that update. sry.
edit: well I added a brief explanation on Vats.