Fallout: New Vegas, FNV, has everything its predecessor had and more: More guns; more armor; modifiable armor, guns and even bullets!, more quests, more interesting enemies… FNV feels very much Like F3 to play but with a new, far more in-depth scenario; your decisions, whether diplomatic or “crush-omatic”, have considerable influence upon the story's progression and even how characters react to you. It's the RPG I've wanted for years~Play it!

New vegas is in one word awesome

Its not stuck by rules or invincble friends

You can do and kill any/everything you like

I rate this a 9.9/10

After the horror of wrestling with Windows Live for Gears of Disappointing and Grey and Fallout3 Old Washington. I did not pre-order Fallout: New Vegas. But upon finally receiving confirmation of it's Non-livedness I plumped for a copy.

The first thing I should mention is that the console version of this game is, at the time of this writing (but not when I got around to finishing this review and posting it) practically unplayable with bugs. It should be, but it isn't. The FIRST thing I will mention is that this game was not made by the designers of Fallout3, but rather by Obsidian, the gamehouse who soaked up the OTHER half of the Black Isle Interplay family that didn't go to Bioware. Creators of the popular bug ridden half finished KOTOR2 (that they inherited from Bioware when LucasArts got snarky and decided that time wasn't a factor in producing a game.) So I wasn't expecting much. And I wasn't disappointed.

Fallout: New Vegas is very much like Fallout 1 and 2, games made in the 90s that were completely surpassed by Fallout 3 in every regard, so being more akin to these fossilised throwbacks seems like a step in the wrong direction.

HA HA HA, oh Bethesda, you didn't think I was serious did you-

The game play in NV is about what you would expect from any game featuring the EXACT SAME ENGINE as Fallout3. It's almost unaltered but Obsidian have made a few tweaks and included a broken Hardcore mode that completely failed to work until patch. Good job Obsidian, it's nice to see you haven't forgotten how to spend three seconds in QA before booting the thing out the door to take its first uncertain steps into the world with the umbilical cord still glistening wetly beneath it's horrible wrinkly sagging premature birth skin, but then saying that Obsidian games are a little buggy is like saying Saudi Arabian law is a little unfair to women. No, Obsidian have managed to do what Bethesda almost but not quite succeeded in doing. Bringing an old classic into the new millennium.

The Actual game part of the game is what you would expect from a modern game, it is a title where you shoot enemies from a first person perspective, and I really think we need a snappy name for that, Perhaps Scrolling Perspective Orientated Shoot-em-up- You have the option of jumping out to third person mode, but that just shows off the awkwardness in which the character model moves between poses and movement speeds. Also your big wasteland wanderer bonce tends to get in the way whilst looting everything out of Anfang Towne or Goodsprings, whatever, I shouldn't need to explain the game play beyond Fallout 3 Ctrl+C Ctrl+V.

The game starts out with you being shot in the face oh sorry… SPOILER ALERT! The Game starts out with you being shot in the face. Fortunately there happens to be an old country doctor about ten feet away with a full modern plastic surgery theatre stocked to the gills with magical instant scar removal and swelling-be-gone. Except in the console version where there is an old country doctor nearby with an oddly spinning face… XBox 360 joke here. It is here that you use the character creator to try and batter yourself into some vague shape that resembles something you might want to look like. Unless you want to be bald. You can spend all morning and several drums of hair product styling several highly improbable styles, but you cannot, it seems, buy a good razor. You can be male or that chick from V for Vendetta. That notwithstanding I made Jamie Hyneman and set out to bust a few myths. (and find a beret) So I set out into the town, Myth that I can't steal from a shop right in front of the owner: Busted. After a number of conversations with disturbing people who stare right through the back of your skull unflinchingly I learned that I could help some guy or Help some other guys who want to fill that guy with bullets as a going away prank. Or I could just walk out of town and go to the next one. While the game map is ostensibly free roaming if you go anywhere beyond your pre-ordained and broadly hinted at Southern route, you will get your face ripped off by deathclaws. Non linear progression: Busted. So anyway I headed off into the wasteland. Only to have my immersion slightly broken as I am offered, just outside of Beginning Town, the ability to perform emergency plastic surgery on myself.

Hardcore mode seems to make it so that I need to eat sleep and drink for reasons other than miraculously resetting broken bones and closing gaping wounds. Now here is why I turned that off. For the longest time I wouldn't drink my water because it said -H2O. And no matter how much Nuka-a-cola I drank I would still get dehydrated. Convinced that yet again Obsidian had messed up royally, I deactivated the mode. It turns out, That bar gets more full the MORE you need to drink. And -H2O means positive effect, and +H2O is bad. How utterly unintuitive, so Hardcore mode gets to go away. I mean yes I could have read the manual, but I am a man. Men don't need manuals. Besides which I don't really have time to read them what with game playing, lifting weights and having copious amounts of relationships with many beautiful women. You can't prove that's not true.

The game has improved upon the old crafting system in that you can now break down ammo, and build ammo you need by interacting with a workbench. But you won't, because ammo weighs nothing, is everywhere and Caps (which also weigh nothing) are so abundantly available that you can just buy new ammo. The skill and perk system is largely unchanged, you can select tag skills, and sink points from leveling up into various abilities such as use guns, or pick locks. Even stealth. But you won't, because Stealth without a Stealth-Boy item is about as useful as a pair of night vision goggles on the surface of the sun. Unless you are actually behind something, or out of sight all-together, Stealth doesn't work, And when you ARE it works exactly as well at level 100 as it does at level 8

Now Obsidian has, as I mentioned earlier, brought the spirit of the Fallout games nicely up to date, Why this and not Fallout 3– The writing. New Vegas has a lot more of the old Fallout humour and a better range of more diverse side quests with more solutions. There are a number of factions you can join with, NCR, Romans, And House… Not Hugh Laurie, he looks more like Gomez Adams. You can also just try to set up your own empire.

One of my major problems with people in Fallout games is how they never band together to try and engineer a new society, learn to build again, learn to farm, protect and shelter scientists so they can work at cleaning the soil and water. No, they just staple a bunch of tin together and live feudal lives huddling in the desiccated shell of a bygone era. This is of course PERFECT for the Post-Apocalyptic genera and is a lot of fun to wander around in, as it points out humanity's innate hubris. The NCR is the faction that most closely resembles what I think needs to be done in that universe so I aligned with them. The Legion are just too hand-wringlingly, tie-a-woman-to-the-tracks, mustache-twirlingly evil, House is stuck believing the past can live on in his Zombie of Vegas and the Brotherhood of Steel are massive prats.

That's it really… The game is buggy, but that's unsurpri­sing, the game play is generic but the game is anything but. The writing is delightful, even if half the voice acting sounds like it belongs in a high school play, and the other half sounds like a Texas accounting firms production of Gladiator. Obsidian even remedied Bethesda's di­sappointing bull ending and Traditional Fallout end review. In short, if there is to be another Fallout game, I hope obsidian make it, and not Bethesda. After all, Obsidian's writing staff did possess many of those who had made the Good two Fallouts. Which just goes to show that the people who made the good games are a better choice to make the new follow-ups.

Summation: Brilliant