And that is how you start your grand journey into the Mojave Wastelands. After going through the normal process of crafting your character's features, stats and perks, you're released to explore every corner and crevice of this desolate desert. If you have any experience with Fallout 3, then you're probably already familiar with the interface and game play, but there are some new elements this go around. To start, more of your actually skills play into a player's dialogue options and choices. Once of the early quests you can encounter, for example, involves you gathering up support to help protect the town of Goodsprings from the Powder Gangers. During the quest, you have to option of sweet-talking some dynamite off a crazy old dude. If your explosive skills is not high enough, he says that you're more likely to kill yourself than to kill anyone else, and you get squat. This is welcome addition to the regular speech check, and really motivates the player to advance all of their skill at least a little bit.
FORE!!! (Image courtesy of Joystick.com)Another welcome addition to the series (or should I say a welcome return)is the ability to have multiple companions. The Courier is allowed to travel with two item-slaves, I mean companions, one humanoid and one non-humanoid. Their AI seems to work a bit better than it did in Fallout 3, and you can now interact with them using a wheel of options, similar to the weapon/abilities select wheel from Mass Effect. This makes using stimpaks on crippled comrades much easier, and it allows you to tweak their inventories without having to swim though dialogue that gets old after the second time you see it.
The companions themselves are quite impressive this go around. Obsidian Entertainment really outdid Bethesda in this respect. From Rex, the faithful dog obtained from The King, New Vegas's premiere Elvis impersonator to "delicate" nightkin Lily Bowen. Searching them out was a great adventure in and of itself, as they are scattered all across the map. There are eight in all, and searching them out nets you a cool trophy (or achievement on the XB360).
All eight companions, together at last (Image courtesy of Fallout.wikia.com)The key storyline seemed to be a much better motivator in New Vegas as opposed to Fallout 3. As I mentioned earlier, you're out on a quest for revenge, and as you make you way through the wastelands, The Courier juggles the interests of three main factions: the New California Republic, The Legion and Mr. House. Each factions has something different to offer the player: the NCR are more or less out to bring order to the Mojave (even if that means breaking a few, say, hundred eggs/skulls), the Legion are a ball of chaos for those who might be felling a bit froggy, while Mr. House is perfect for loners like me that like calling all the shots. The final ending revolves around sided with one (or none) of these factions, but there are several more scattered through the game, such as the Brotherhood of Steel, Powder Gangers, the Boomers (and their arsenal of Howitzers) and the White Glove Society, just to name a few. Not to downplay Fallout 3 too much, but I just didn't give a shit about trying to find my dad in that game. Maybe it's just a personal thing, but the quest for revenge seemed much more interesting and engaging than the overarching plot for FO:3.
Other new additions include a new game mode called Hardcore, where you must keep track of how much you eat, sleep, drink water and nearly every item now has weight assigned to it. Companions can die in this mode (in the normal mode they simply pass out), and every healing item is a HOT (oh sorry, heal over time), including stimpaks. The game features new music, a cache of new weapons and items, gambling, one the coolest new traits in "Wild Wastelands" and standard level cap of 30 (I expect that to go up with DLC in the future).
Welcome to the Luck 38 boys! (Image courtesy of IGN.com)As much as I loved FO:NV, it does have it problems. First and foremost, the glitches. It's hard to play for more than two hours before the games bogs down and freezes, which is quite the pain. While this can be mitigated with frequent (and numerous) saves, the fact that I can't just sit down a geek out without the constant fear of having to restart the game every couple is troubling. I mean, you would thing that they would fix this issue, since it was a bit a a problem even in FO:3. It was never this bad before, though. And the patch that was release, didn't fix shit, it only made some elements worse. I'm locked out of two quests ATM simply because the NPC won't talk to me, for no reason. WTF?
Aside from the glitches, the radio sucks. Hardcore. There are only two real stations to choose from, and they play the same crap. There are supposedly 27 songs, but I swear I've heard ten of them loop constantly. I can't even play with the radio on anymore, because if I hear "Ain't That a Kick in the Head?" one more time, I'm going to have pierce both of my eardrums with plastic sporks. Actually ther is one song that is pretty good: Big Iron.
That's some killin' music right there.
Some of the old FO:3 problems still exist, like NPC suicide, missing items every now and then (I think some of my companions have stolen Nuka-Colas from my safehouse. :-/) and the occasional get-stuck-inside-a-rock-for-no-f@^king-reason moments. Otherwise the games a good solid 8.5/10. It's not perfect, but there is a shit ton of items to locate and quests to undertake. The replay value is very high, since you'd have to be kinda crazy to take on Hardcore on you're initial play through. If you can bear though the glitches, then the game is amazing, but they are so persistent and annoying that it's hard to look past them all.
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