Fallout: New Vegas PC
Fallout: New Vegas is the next in line for the Fall out role playing game and continues the main story of a post apocalyptic world and your small part in it but does not keep the same story as the previous games.
Ratings:
Graphics & Audio: 18/25,
Gameplay: 20/25,
Creativity 22/25,
Fun 18/25
Total: 78/100
Fallout: New Vegas takes a new story in the same game world of previous Fallout games with you playing the role of a waste land courier paid to make your delivery. The game starts you with some tutorial missions wandering around doing some simple jobs and getting used to the game, weapons and other factors.
Once you get into the games main story things pick up but with role playing games they never get to an actual high level of excitement like FPS shooters can. Your main objective and the plot of New Vegas is finding out who shot you in the head right before you started the game and ends with a battle at Hoover Dam.
Regardless of your choices in the game you will have to fight in this battle and getting some good weapons and the skills to use them is a major portion of the game. You will also do a lot of small objective based missions that fill in the story and world of New Vegas that are fun as well as tedious.
Fallout: New Vegas takes place mostly in the Las Vegas area desert and gives you a post apocalyptic world to explore and fight in that works out well. New Vegas does take the same vein of most role playing games with character building then exploring on smaller missions leading up to a big fight that fills in the story and final objective of the game.
Along the way throughout the game you'll get to try your hand at mini games that continue to add a realistic touch to the role playing genre along with other aspects. Gaining weapon proficiency, getting better weapons and improving other skills are major objectives and the usual game choices affecting later events works well.
New Vegas will take more than the usual ten or so hours to play with at least fifty to sixty to get to the main story conclusion but with side missions and general fun in the wastelands of New Vegas you can take a lot longer. You can do plenty of exploring and this is a great part of the game as you need to find those hidden treasures like better weapons, bottle caps that are used as money and the general sustenance you need to survive.
Exploring the world will take time but on the medium difficulty you don't have to take the tedious chores like eating and sleeping, just the fun stuff of roaming and fighting. The hard difficulty does have you worrying about food and sleeping as well as tougher enemies and the usual daily grind to make the game not only more realistic but more difficult.
The game has an aiming enhancement called VATS that allows you to aim and pause the action while doing so but this did not make things much easier in fights. This aiming does help a little but mostly it just breaks up the action if you need to, I found it easier to forgo the help and just plug away at my enemies.
I was not too happy with the combat system and amount of damage my weapons would deal right from the start but it becomes less of a problem the more you work at it. I found out quickly the problem with fighting when I hit a farmer's animal and he started shooting me then ran into his house.
Just for fun I ran after to kill him and could not, it took more than several shots to kill him which was odd, I restarted from my saved point and tried again with the same results. I tried several different methods of head shots or constant body hits and had a very difficult time simply killing a slow moving farmer with my 9mm pistol or varmint rifle.
This repeat performance of very hard to kill enemies continued to the point of exhaustion so until you do get some better weapons and skills with them you need to do more exploring than fighting to start. While this was not that big a problem I found it very off putting in the game to have to use so many bullets to get rid of a person but humans were not the only problem.
Coyotes and larger rodents, insect and other creatures also take a lot of punishment before being able to put most enemies down in New Vegas, more than is realistic. I also found others who agreed with this general observation in the game but it does not detract from the game all that much, just some.
You do get to improve weapons along with making tools and other devices in the game with a great crafting system from all the various junk you can pick up. Other in game help comes from the people you meet but again it depends on how you deal with them, the game does use your decisions in how you interact for further game play.
You do have a great looking environment and good sound but a few glitches mar the game somewhat but not enough to further detract from your enjoyment. While textures and graphics are a bit lower key New Vegas does look good enough but it does have that role playing game feel throughout.
Audio is also good with some great voice acting but again you get the role playing game feel but this is much better than graphics. The game overall looks and sounds good enough but again you have the same role playing game feel throughout, I wish they could make the role playing games look and feel more like first person shooters.
Fallout: New Vegas does what you would expect from a role playing game and does everything well enough but the game does stay in the same style of not only Fallout but role playing games in general. If you enjoyed Fallout 3 or other role playing games this one is different enough to hold interest but not so much to interest non role playing fans.