Glitchy and horribly broken but fun.
It is also horribly glitchy. I am always ranting about the terrible product quality we accept as gamers and how we should be suing developers for games that flat out don't work the way they should. New Vegas would be one of my best examples. I have been keeping track and you can pretty much guarantee that there will be a freeze every 45 minutes. The freezing gets so bad near the end of the game it happens almost every 15 minutes. That doesn't take into account the other countless (and sometimes hilarious) glitches.
That's really all there is to say about Fallout New Vegas, so rather than my usual rambling tirade review I will just list a few points on the game.
Good
- I really liked the layout of the world map, how most important cities were clustered around the main road leading to New Vegas. While I like the fact that the world was so much larger, too much of the world was empty filler. It felt like the content of one Fallout 3 city was repeatedly being split into two or three cities in New Vegas just to fill the Wasteland. I didn't necessary dislike this, but it felt weird to have cities with like 6 people in them and one quest.
- Hardcore mode was an excellent addition that adds a new dimension to the game.
- The companion system is much improved although I still avoid using them like the plague. They are either going to steal your kills, get themselves killed, cause more freezes or get in your way.
- Having reputations with each faction is an awesome improvement. Having one general Karma level was pretty strained when you think about it.
Bad
- Both the overall story and especially the individual mission stories are much weaker in New Vegas than Fallout 3. But compelling story and deep character development weren't strengths in Fallout 3 to begin with, so I don't really feel like New Vegas is missing a lot.
- Vegas isn't as interesting a location as Washington.
- Gun mod are completely pointless.
- I can't help it, post-apocalypse stories draw me in and Fallout is one of the best. I love the lore of the series. This is actually my biggest complaint; New Vegas steps away from this lore. It's a story about two human empires fighting each other, with surviving the apocalypse taking a backseat. Powerplants, electricity, working cities, taxes, politics. Sometimes the way characters talked it was like there was never a nuclear winter. Fallout is supposed to be about ghouls, supermutants, people barely scrapping by and coping in their own crazy ways.
- I don't like how the choice between the NCR and the Legion is so black and white. Couldn't they have made the Legion the slightest bit sympathetic so it was a difficult choice between the two? I would like to think of myself as a fan of totalitarian, fascist regimes so long as they have some decent ideals, that's usually who I side with in games. But there is absolutely nothing redeeming about the Legion. I thought maybe Caesar would be this incredibly charismatic intellectual that would justify the Legion's brutality but he's a boorish thug. Even if the Legion wasn't so clearly evil, you spend the entire game helping and growing close to the NCR while the Legion boasts and threatens you the few times you run into them.
- So many quests just involve fast travelling to a location, talking to one person and returning. Especially the last mission which is just brutal and made so much worse by having to do it four times to see all the endings. It is essentially an hour and a half of just watching the load screen.
- The trophies are atrocious. I really enjoyed pick pocketing the same woman 50 times for her bubblegum or drowning myself while eating casseroles.
This game, being a terribly glitchy, overpriced expansion pack, really doesn't deserve the score I'm going to give it. Considering that 2010 was a terrible year for games, and I still love all things Fallout, I cannot deny that New Vegas was one of the most enjoyable games I played this year.
8.5/10