Is shipping and selling a game as broken as Fallout: New Vegas okay? It clearly shouldn’t be, but it’s not unprecedented. For a long time, PC gamers regularly dealt with the annoying fact of life that publishers sold bug-laden software with the implicit promise that upcoming patches would make it all better. One reason I embraced the modern console era was because I was so damn sick and tired of that nonsense.
Nevertheless, we have Fallout: New Vegas, a game I was aching to play and bought on day one. Day one was great. As I wrote about it earlier, it sucked me right in, and I loved it.
It was day five when everything went to hell. Saves were corrupted, and my Xbox 360 crashed and froze a dozen times. I spent an hour on hold waiting for Bethesda customer service. They were very nice and had many suggestions, but none helped. I had to revert to an old save and go from there.
Playing Fallout: New Vegas hasn’t been that bad since- just irregular crashes, freezes, glitches, and broken quests- but nothing that killed a save or cost me more than a few minutes of game time. I finished the game (well, sort of, see below), and I am a satisfied customer. I recommend that you buy it if it sounds interesting to you.
However, I began this review harping on the game’s bugginess because continual patches aside, this is some bullshit. Also, I want to urge you to save early and save often. They let you have 100 save slots. Use all of them.
Fallout: New Vegas isn’t a sequel to Fallout 3 but a sort of expansion. “Companion Game” would be a better description. Fallout: New Vegas is just as vast as Fallout 3, a full-fledged game offering hours of interesting gaming. There have been some tweaks to the older companion systems, especially when dealing with your followers, but they’re mostly minor changes.
The bigger differences come in the setting. New Vegas and the surrounding Mojave Wasteland are more varied and alive than bombed-out DC, featuring more foliage, established settlements, and a lot more neon. The two great foes in the game, Caesar’s Legion and The New California Republic (NCR), are whole civilizations gnashing at one another’s throats. This is a wasteland on the mend, and your role is determining what course society will take.
The biggest and best innovation in Fallout: New Vegas is the Reputation system, which mostly supersedes the Karma system of the first game. Karma is still here (and still stupid about the context of your actions), but I noticed zero impact from it on my game. Reputation, on the other hand, is front and center. Each community, gang, or group in the game has a view of you and your actions. Help a town out and they can come to idolize you. Shoot down gang members on the street, and they’ll hate you.
The choice can eventually become mutually exclusive with the big groups, like the NCR and Caesar’s Legion. Helping one pisses off the other, which is how it should be. Become beloved, and you’re showered with gifts, access, and allies. Earn eternal enmity, and people send assassins in the night for your head.
Like Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas rewards players who spend a lot of time with it. Also like Fallout 3, there is a strong central plotline that resolves in an appropriately epic climax, but unlike the previous game, this one doesn’t feel as much like a railroading. It centers around your character’s decisions and more sensibly unfolds at the pace that you set and according to the priorities that you set for yourself. That’s a good thing; both of these Fallout games are at their strongest when they turn you loose on the characters and locales of the wasteland.
The Mojave Desert region is full of quests, sticky situations, and fierce rivalries for you to throw yourself into the middle. Some are funny, some tragic, some lame, and some are challenging. On balance, the good experience outweighs the bad, and you’ll seldom be short of things to do. Yes, there’s still more walking than some might be comfortable with, and scrounging through every toolbox and garbage pile might not be your idea of a great time (although some of us love it). Still, if you put yourself in the right frame of mind and let the game’s milieu inhabit you just as you sink into it, it’s a game you can quickly lose days to.
At a certain point, I plowed through to the end, primarily to write this review. Like the original Fallout 3, this ending also ends the game. You must revert to an old, pre-finale sequence save to explore more. It was smart of the developers to undo that same terminal ending in Fallout 3, and it’s weird that Bethesda chose to do it again here (although this ending is much more satisfying).
Recall the above advice to save 100 slots? I’m glad I did – because there’s still a lot of Mojave for me to explore in Fallout: New Vegas. I might wait for at least one more patch to come out. You might want to, as well.