A little bit of Fear and Loathing, a little bit of Dr. Strangelove, but you gotta want it.

User Rating: 3.5 | Fallout: New Vegas X360
IMMERSION: In New Vegas, players start by creating a unique character. This is done rather poorly, identifying changes is difficult and even after that the characters look pretty much the same. So, sense of agency is not an effective immersion tactic in New Vegas, the conversation which decides personality traits is more interesting and seemingly meaningful. Sense of agency then does not ticked off as a method of immersion. Something New Vegas does have is lots of NPC's with issues for players to sort, usually by killing, talking to or fetching some number of something. The number of them and the variety of quests works to varying degrees, but it does bring up an issue with the game. Graphically New Vegas is lacking by modern standards, NPC's look as animated as stone statues. This is in stark contrast to the voices and the writing. New Vegas then cannot be said to be immersive to every player, and requires some effort, usually involving one of the game's many weapons. (5/15)

DIFFICULTY: New Vegas is as difficult as players want to make it on themselves. Players who choose to use only one type of weapon will have different experiences of difficulty than others. That said though, the game has some issues with it's combat. Some enemies blend in too well with the landscape, making identification difficult. There also seems to be a minimum effective range on most firearms, any enemy closer than that is impossible to hit, and hit detection overall is iffy. New Vegas makes no apologies and will occasionally be pardon me, dickish. A "correctly" built character can minimise this, so pick early and look up suggested builds to get around this. (5/15)

LASTING APPEAL: Variable, some players will keep playing the game repeatedly, while others will not. Regardless, it does take effort to continue to play, it does not lend itself to the kind of marathon play sessions other games do. 5/15

OVERALL (5/15) New Vegas falls short of the hype and affection given to it. On a PC, the issues are mend-able with mods and conversions, but not on the xbox. Watch Dr. Strangelove instead.