Fallout: New Vegas is the next game in the Fallout series, again developed by Bethesda, this time taking place in Las Vegas and changing the setting pretty drastically from Fallout 3. You take the role as another guy in the post-apocalyptic world who goes out and does big (and not always good) things for yourself and/or the people of the city.
Gameplay: 7.5
Unique gameplay concepts - What drives the game, and what is it similar to?
New Vegas essentially cut and pasted the template from Fallout 3 and created a new game. It features a ton of new quests, new factions, extensive support for partners, even extra game modes to really put your head to the grinding wheel. It does seem like a bigger and better game on the outside, but there are so many problems with this game, it's really surprising it got released in this condition. First, we'll get the typical stuff out of the way.
Fallout: New Vegas is a shooter and an RPG. It possesses RPG traits in the way that your character revolves around events of the story, new story details launch you into different parts of the game, you can level up, customize your character's appearance and abilities, choose to be good/evil and help people you come across, etc.
It's also very much a dungeon crawler where you search for treasures, guns, and other items that will help you conquer the wasteland. The explorable area of the game is huge, there are tons of items, and tons of different ways to be effective in the game.
As is also typical for Fallout games, the way you complete or fail quests has a lot of room for variety. There's always a typical good/evil way to complete quests, and along with that you can help or hurt any faction scattered around the map. There are around a dozen factions, and being buddy-buddy with one faction or another can net all sorts of different perks.
Once again, Fallout has VATS, which is a targeting system to shoot at a person's arm, leg, face, torso, weapon, etc to tactically gain an advantage. It's pretty much the same as Fallout 3, but I use it less in New Vegas for whatever reason - typically because it doesn't seem all that important to use it as opposed to wildly firing at whatever is chasing you.
Now that we have the basic gameplay introduction out of the way, I'll just come right out and say what's really on my mind about this game - I swear it was made by interns. It's one of the glitchiest, unstable games I've ever played. Several points in the game you can walk into scenery and get stuck, like walking inside rocks or cliffs. You can get enemies or your partner stuck between a door, so they're on the opposite side of the door, in the next area no matter which side of the door you're on. Enemies are constantly getting stuck on scenery. The game actually froze on me around 7 or 8 times within the first 20 hours of playing. This game was either thrown together quickly for whatever reason, or they used it as a platform to train new staff or something. I mean, it's still a fine game, but holy crap, there are so many cosmetic and functional issues with this game.
Sometimes their glitches don't even make any sense either. At one point I walked out of a building, and a lady with her 3 dogs from 2 towns over teleported through the door, still sitting down (on the air) along with a few enemies and it made this really awkward fight, followed by "what the hell just happened!?". The glitches are BAD in this game. It makes a mockery out of what could otherwise be called a masterpiece.
It's really about time that Bethesda updates or completely re-writes their engine. This game uses the Oblivion engine which was released what.. six years ago? The gameplay is clunky and everything about it just seems outdated. They really need to get on the ball and realize that they can't have assumed success over and over with such an ancient engine. And the longer it goes on, the more it'll be compared to games released by other developers and look like a worn out mess, and Bethesda will (perhaps deservedly) fade away.
One of the biggest changes in the game's combat is how easily you can find partners and recruit them. On harder difficulties, partners are essential to winning a lot of battles. But, there's also a lot of issues with the partners that can either make the game too easy or make it feel like you're not even playing. Unlike Fallout 3, if your partner gets hurt/killed, they don't actually die, they just become unconscious until the battle is over. I'm sure they made this decision partially because there are a lot of quests where your partner needs to be alive to complete it, but some partners are just so good in battle that you'll take the first shot on an enemy and they'll walk up to them and kill them in one punch, even on the hardest difficulty.
Besides, you can't have more than one partner with you, which doesn't make a ton of sense. It'd be nice if there were some areas that you needed to hire mercs to go take care of the fight, and you'd have to pay them in exchange or something. Your partner essentially becomes your slave that will go anywhere, kill most of the enemies, take most of the damage and carry all of the heavy but valuable equipment. There's also no real requirements to recruiting any of these people other than finding them and saying "K, let's go", so the entire partner system seems tacked on and rather unrewarding.
The battles are also horribly unbalanced. Some enemies take way too much damage and hurt you way too much, draining all of your healing supplies in an instant, and some enemies are as easy as one shot with your weakest gun. This makes a partner almost essential to have - there are several battles in the game that I'm sure I'd never win if I didn't have a partner. And it's not as if the battles have any sort of intricacy, it's basically "kill them before they kill you" while you run around and abuse the AI, while slowly switching back and forth between the game and your inventory screen. It's easy to find way more ammo than you'll ever expend, so for being in a supposedly worn-down wasteland, there's really no element of tactical survival.
The number of quests really is much higher than Fallout 3, but I feel like a lot of the quests are the same old stuff, usually go here, find this. Go here, kill this guy. Very few of the quests and locations in the game actually have interesting sub-plots, especially when compared to Fallout 3. So, there's a lot to do, but not a lot of it feels worth doing. There are also a lot of marked locations around the game that are literally steaming, irradiated holes in the ground. They seem pointless, and that sucks because I'm the kind of person that wants to see everything a game has to offer. Exploring and finding a dried up lake bed or a building that you can't enter makes you wonder what the developers were doing other than throwing darts at a map.
New Vegas also continues the crafting aspect, where you can make rare items out of stuff you find around the wasteland that would otherwise seem like junk. You can now use campfires to make food more effective, re-use ammo casings, and make new chems or just new items that were more valuable than before. Although, I actually think the new crafting system is overdone. A lot of the level and item requirements for most crafts are too high or rare, respectively. And there are so many potential crafts that you'll almost never look for a particular item in order to build it, and even if you can, it's not worth anything. I went out of my way once to collect items to make something, crafted it, and realized that it had a worse value than the parts I used to make it, and didn't help me in any way, at all. If I used it, it would have actually hurt me, a lot.
Anyway, you'll eventually store all of your craftable items in one container and build whatever you can among their ridiculous list, assuming you haven't lost the desire to craft items since most of them are worthless anyway. I saw the items for the classic buildable weaponry (junk launcher, fire sword, dart gun) scatted around the map, but after exploring virtually the entire map, I didn't find a single schematic to build one useful item. What a waste.
They also have a game mode, called "hardcore" mode, wherein you need to pay attention to your food, water and sleep meters. If any of them get too high, you suffer severe penalties and can die. I thought this mode was pretty tacked on and didn't change the game for the better. You can't heal your limbs in hardcore mode without specific items
Fallout 3 had a ton of unique buildings and caves that you could explore to get items or start/complete quests. But, there are even more buildings in New Vegas and navigation in them is terrible. They have a map screen to show the details of the buildings, but they don't take into account which floor you're on, or clearly show important details like doors, walls, blocked areas, etc. It's a mess. I'll often get lost while looking around a building and walk in circles, trying to find my navigation point. Isn't it about time Bethesda wrote a navigation system that's similar to Dead Space or Fable 2, where a clearly distinguishable line appears on the ground to direct you where to go, instead of wandering around and getting confused?
It's so bad at points, even in the open-world wasteland, that you can spend 10 minutes trying to climb cliffs/mountains unsuccessfully, and trying to walk ALL the way around huge, pointless obstacles to get to a particular location. It makes me think that they didn't even approach a thought process at times when designing their quests and coupling that with awful, as-basic-as-it-gets navigation. Unsuccessfully wandering for so long makes you wonder why you're even playing the game if you're not accomplishing anything other than looking around for a way to walk somewhere.
Don't get me wrong, it's still Fallout, so it's still a pretty interesting game. If you played and liked Fallout 3, I'm sure you'll be willing to play through this game, too. A lot of the same fundamentals are there, but it does seem inferior to Fallout 3, to me, for many reasons.
Presentation: 6.5
Graphical and audio presentation (animation, texturing, overall look & artistic style)
Going along with the outdated engine, the graphics and modeling are also really outdated in this game. Sometimes the models just look like crap. Sometimes it's due to lighting so their face looks really green or yellow, and sometimes it's just due to lazy skinning and throwing stuff together to get a game out.
You can see seams all over the models, separating the different parts of them. A lot of the models' clothing screws up during their animations, so the clothing like.. disappears in holes around their joints.
Their scenery looks pretty good.. when it's done right. There have been at least a dozen or more instances in which entire faces of rocks were missing, or they weren't flush with another surface, making them float in the air. Several times your character would also be floating in the air or butting up against an invisible wall that seemed to be there for no reason. There's so much evidence that this game was really rushed or made by people not ready to make games of this caliber, and it really takes away from the overall gaming experience.
The load times and framerate of the game can get really bad, too.. again pointing to the game engine. There are even a lot of points where the audio is way out of sync due to the game trying to load so much content from the disc when it's not ready to.
The absolute worst is when any game feels the need to shake or alter your vision for some reason. That's never fun, and if you're getting bombarded with bullets in this game, you might as well close your eyes and try to fight. The same goes for when your head is crippled - your vision goes blurry about every 20 seconds and I find it completely needless and annoying. Blinding the player is one thing you should never, ever do in a game.
They at least put in some good spots of music, either to alert you about enemies, set a mood or just to be there to coincide with the overall feel of the game.
Theatrics: 7.0
Story, Dialogue, Cut-Scenes and Artistic Use of Camera
New Vegas' story is so unstructured in the beginning. It's as if their first trial runs of the game were starting you off in the middle of the desert, and you're supposed to start playing. Your character is a courier carrying some kind of special chip, and you get ambushed and shot in the head.. then later healed by some doctor. You set your attributes with the doctor and that's it. You're off in the Fallout world. No structure, a pathetic setting, no buildup at all. It was really disappointing compared to all of the other Fallout games, even Fallout 1. The remainder of the story is pretty uninteresting too, it's essentially go here looking for this person. They're not there, so go here instead. Not there either, go here now... etc.
There is one REALLY strange story turn once you find the person you're looking for that is honestly one of the weirdest scenes I've ever seen in a video game. As soon as you come across Yes Man, you'll know what I'm talking about. That entire conversion left me as amused, yet bewildered as possible.
The redeeming factor to their unspectacular story is that their dialogue is great. Voice acting is really good and there are a ton of memorable characters around the map that have interesting things to say. There are a few instances where gameplay can tell a story all it's own, but even the little side quests have disappointing story structure and most of them seem kind of thrown in.
One huge issue relating to the game's setting is that their AI is untouched since Oblivion. Often NPC's will wander around and literally stand and stare at a wall or something, or be out in the wasteland pointing at nothing over and over. They all seem like mindless drones that don't do anything other than wander around aimlessly. Again, this game could be epic and fantastic in so many ways if they got off their current engine or updated the things that make it feel old. A game that has good NPC control is Mass Effect 2 - everybody seems to be doing something important instead of walking 3 steps, looking at a wall, picking their nose, turning around, walking again, going to sleep, waking up, staring at a wall, etc.
Controls: 7.0
Ease of Use and Smoothness of Controls
Again, Bethesda's engine bogs down another aspect of the game. Jumping and moving around can be awkward, and selecting the item you want amongst an array of junk can get really tedious and boring.
They also have skills to determine your effectiveness with guns, which means your ability to land shots even though you're aiming right at somebody. And that doesn't even make sense. Why would a gun scatter more based upon your skill using it, rather than your aim wavering or something. Even still, your aim wavering is annoying, so why have it at all?
Replay Value: 9.0
Total Gameplay Time versus Expected
New Vegas is huge. There's a lot to do and a lot of quest flexibility - you'll feel like you need to play more than once in order to see all of the different possibilities the game offers. If you play through the entire game and see everything there is to see, you'll have invested around or over 100 hours.
That is, if you want to play that much. Many times, the game can discourage you from seeing all there is to see because of glitches, boring gameplay, impossible battles, etc. So while the replay value is high, it's kind of muffled by all of the other problems with the game and you might get annoyed enough to shut off the game and not pick it back up.
Fun: 7.0
What were the most and least fun parts of the game? Overall, how much fun is the game?
There are a lot of ways they could have made this game more fun. Better quest and story design would really help. Better battle balance would especially help. Less inventory management (and better organization) would go a long way. Better interaction with partner(s) and their impact on the game would change it for the better. There are a ton of ways this game could be improved upon to make it a more fun experience.
There are still way too many instances where you're walking across a boring wasteland with nothing to do, or looking at items deciding what to pick up or drop. Too many battles are too hard to do without a partner, but then that partner dominates every other battle making you seem pretty unimportant. There were very rare times that stand out that I'd say I was having a lot of fun. In fact, one of the most fun parts of the game was when I sent an entire area into an uproar and 50+ people were chasing me.. although, as expected, that glitched the game pretty hard almost to an unrepairable state where no town would behave normally and no quests could be done for a while.
Due to really unexciting combat, I deemed the it unimportant to the game, turned it on Very Easy and went on my way after about 15 hours. This is very rare for me to do, too, because I love shooters and I love interesting/challenging combat. After playing so much Oblivion, Fallout 3 and now this, I realized that their combat sucks and paying as little attention to it as possible made the game more fun. That's a BAD omen.
My Overall Rating: 7.1
Complexity Level: Fairly High. This game has a ton of different levels of depth, such as skills, perks, SPECIAL, etc, and a ton of menu screens. Even things like VATS or inventory management might be pretty foreign to newer gamers so I wouldn't recommend picking up a game like this unless you're familiar with games that are similar to it (modern-day RPGs) or if you're feeling adventurous.
Admittedly, as I look back, Fallout 3 suffered from some of the problems that I'm crucifying this game over. You might read that review and think "wait, why is Fallout 3 so high while New Vegas is so low?".. many reasons. One huge reason is the fact that the novelty wore off while the expectations of a new and improved game were there, but weren't met. Fallout 3 had so much more interesting content, a much better story and more control over their game design. New Vegas is very often frustrating, looks thrown together and has pretty poor structure across the board. The problems with New Vegas stack up, and I rarely, if ever, felt the same way about Fallout 3.
Gameplay: 7.5
Unique gameplay concepts - What drives the game, and what is it similar to?
New Vegas essentially cut and pasted the template from Fallout 3 and created a new game. It features a ton of new quests, new factions, extensive support for partners, even extra game modes to really put your head to the grinding wheel. It does seem like a bigger and better game on the outside, but there are so many problems with this game, it's really surprising it got released in this condition. First, we'll get the typical stuff out of the way.
Fallout: New Vegas is a shooter and an RPG. It possesses RPG traits in the way that your character revolves around events of the story, new story details launch you into different parts of the game, you can level up, customize your character's appearance and abilities, choose to be good/evil and help people you come across, etc.
It's also very much a dungeon crawler where you search for treasures, guns, and other items that will help you conquer the wasteland. The explorable area of the game is huge, there are tons of items, and tons of different ways to be effective in the game.
As is also typical for Fallout games, the way you complete or fail quests has a lot of room for variety. There's always a typical good/evil way to complete quests, and along with that you can help or hurt any faction scattered around the map. There are around a dozen factions, and being buddy-buddy with one faction or another can net all sorts of different perks.
Once again, Fallout has VATS, which is a targeting system to shoot at a person's arm, leg, face, torso, weapon, etc to tactically gain an advantage. It's pretty much the same as Fallout 3, but I use it less in New Vegas for whatever reason - typically because it doesn't seem all that important to use it as opposed to wildly firing at whatever is chasing you.
Now that we have the basic gameplay introduction out of the way, I'll just come right out and say what's really on my mind about this game - I swear it was made by interns. It's one of the glitchiest, unstable games I've ever played. Several points in the game you can walk into scenery and get stuck, like walking inside rocks or cliffs. You can get enemies or your partner stuck between a door, so they're on the opposite side of the door, in the next area no matter which side of the door you're on. Enemies are constantly getting stuck on scenery. The game actually froze on me around 7 or 8 times within the first 20 hours of playing. This game was either thrown together quickly for whatever reason, or they used it as a platform to train new staff or something. I mean, it's still a fine game, but holy crap, there are so many cosmetic and functional issues with this game.
Sometimes their glitches don't even make any sense either. At one point I walked out of a building, and a lady with her 3 dogs from 2 towns over teleported through the door, still sitting down (on the air) along with a few enemies and it made this really awkward fight, followed by "what the hell just happened!?". The glitches are BAD in this game. It makes a mockery out of what could otherwise be called a masterpiece.
It's really about time that Bethesda updates or completely re-writes their engine. This game uses the Oblivion engine which was released what.. six years ago? The gameplay is clunky and everything about it just seems outdated. They really need to get on the ball and realize that they can't have assumed success over and over with such an ancient engine. And the longer it goes on, the more it'll be compared to games released by other developers and look like a worn out mess, and Bethesda will (perhaps deservedly) fade away.
One of the biggest changes in the game's combat is how easily you can find partners and recruit them. On harder difficulties, partners are essential to winning a lot of battles. But, there's also a lot of issues with the partners that can either make the game too easy or make it feel like you're not even playing. Unlike Fallout 3, if your partner gets hurt/killed, they don't actually die, they just become unconscious until the battle is over. I'm sure they made this decision partially because there are a lot of quests where your partner needs to be alive to complete it, but some partners are just so good in battle that you'll take the first shot on an enemy and they'll walk up to them and kill them in one punch, even on the hardest difficulty.
Besides, you can't have more than one partner with you, which doesn't make a ton of sense. It'd be nice if there were some areas that you needed to hire mercs to go take care of the fight, and you'd have to pay them in exchange or something. Your partner essentially becomes your slave that will go anywhere, kill most of the enemies, take most of the damage and carry all of the heavy but valuable equipment. There's also no real requirements to recruiting any of these people other than finding them and saying "K, let's go", so the entire partner system seems tacked on and rather unrewarding.
The battles are also horribly unbalanced. Some enemies take way too much damage and hurt you way too much, draining all of your healing supplies in an instant, and some enemies are as easy as one shot with your weakest gun. This makes a partner almost essential to have - there are several battles in the game that I'm sure I'd never win if I didn't have a partner. And it's not as if the battles have any sort of intricacy, it's basically "kill them before they kill you" while you run around and abuse the AI, while slowly switching back and forth between the game and your inventory screen. It's easy to find way more ammo than you'll ever expend, so for being in a supposedly worn-down wasteland, there's really no element of tactical survival.
The number of quests really is much higher than Fallout 3, but I feel like a lot of the quests are the same old stuff, usually go here, find this. Go here, kill this guy. Very few of the quests and locations in the game actually have interesting sub-plots, especially when compared to Fallout 3. So, there's a lot to do, but not a lot of it feels worth doing. There are also a lot of marked locations around the game that are literally steaming, irradiated holes in the ground. They seem pointless, and that sucks because I'm the kind of person that wants to see everything a game has to offer. Exploring and finding a dried up lake bed or a building that you can't enter makes you wonder what the developers were doing other than throwing darts at a map.
New Vegas also continues the crafting aspect, where you can make rare items out of stuff you find around the wasteland that would otherwise seem like junk. You can now use campfires to make food more effective, re-use ammo casings, and make new chems or just new items that were more valuable than before. Although, I actually think the new crafting system is overdone. A lot of the level and item requirements for most crafts are too high or rare, respectively. And there are so many potential crafts that you'll almost never look for a particular item in order to build it, and even if you can, it's not worth anything. I went out of my way once to collect items to make something, crafted it, and realized that it had a worse value than the parts I used to make it, and didn't help me in any way, at all. If I used it, it would have actually hurt me, a lot.
Anyway, you'll eventually store all of your craftable items in one container and build whatever you can among their ridiculous list, assuming you haven't lost the desire to craft items since most of them are worthless anyway. I saw the items for the classic buildable weaponry (junk launcher, fire sword, dart gun) scatted around the map, but after exploring virtually the entire map, I didn't find a single schematic to build one useful item. What a waste.
They also have a game mode, called "hardcore" mode, wherein you need to pay attention to your food, water and sleep meters. If any of them get too high, you suffer severe penalties and can die. I thought this mode was pretty tacked on and didn't change the game for the better. You can't heal your limbs in hardcore mode without specific items
Fallout 3 had a ton of unique buildings and caves that you could explore to get items or start/complete quests. But, there are even more buildings in New Vegas and navigation in them is terrible. They have a map screen to show the details of the buildings, but they don't take into account which floor you're on, or clearly show important details like doors, walls, blocked areas, etc. It's a mess. I'll often get lost while looking around a building and walk in circles, trying to find my navigation point. Isn't it about time Bethesda wrote a navigation system that's similar to Dead Space or Fable 2, where a clearly distinguishable line appears on the ground to direct you where to go, instead of wandering around and getting confused?
It's so bad at points, even in the open-world wasteland, that you can spend 10 minutes trying to climb cliffs/mountains unsuccessfully, and trying to walk ALL the way around huge, pointless obstacles to get to a particular location. It makes me think that they didn't even approach a thought process at times when designing their quests and coupling that with awful, as-basic-as-it-gets navigation. Unsuccessfully wandering for so long makes you wonder why you're even playing the game if you're not accomplishing anything other than looking around for a way to walk somewhere.
Don't get me wrong, it's still Fallout, so it's still a pretty interesting game. If you played and liked Fallout 3, I'm sure you'll be willing to play through this game, too. A lot of the same fundamentals are there, but it does seem inferior to Fallout 3, to me, for many reasons.
Presentation: 6.5
Graphical and audio presentation (animation, texturing, overall look & artistic style)
Going along with the outdated engine, the graphics and modeling are also really outdated in this game. Sometimes the models just look like crap. Sometimes it's due to lighting so their face looks really green or yellow, and sometimes it's just due to lazy skinning and throwing stuff together to get a game out.
You can see seams all over the models, separating the different parts of them. A lot of the models' clothing screws up during their animations, so the clothing like.. disappears in holes around their joints.
Their scenery looks pretty good.. when it's done right. There have been at least a dozen or more instances in which entire faces of rocks were missing, or they weren't flush with another surface, making them float in the air. Several times your character would also be floating in the air or butting up against an invisible wall that seemed to be there for no reason. There's so much evidence that this game was really rushed or made by people not ready to make games of this caliber, and it really takes away from the overall gaming experience.
The load times and framerate of the game can get really bad, too.. again pointing to the game engine. There are even a lot of points where the audio is way out of sync due to the game trying to load so much content from the disc when it's not ready to.
The absolute worst is when any game feels the need to shake or alter your vision for some reason. That's never fun, and if you're getting bombarded with bullets in this game, you might as well close your eyes and try to fight. The same goes for when your head is crippled - your vision goes blurry about every 20 seconds and I find it completely needless and annoying. Blinding the player is one thing you should never, ever do in a game.
They at least put in some good spots of music, either to alert you about enemies, set a mood or just to be there to coincide with the overall feel of the game.
Theatrics: 7.0
Story, Dialogue, Cut-Scenes and Artistic Use of Camera
New Vegas' story is so unstructured in the beginning. It's as if their first trial runs of the game were starting you off in the middle of the desert, and you're supposed to start playing. Your character is a courier carrying some kind of special chip, and you get ambushed and shot in the head.. then later healed by some doctor. You set your attributes with the doctor and that's it. You're off in the Fallout world. No structure, a pathetic setting, no buildup at all. It was really disappointing compared to all of the other Fallout games, even Fallout 1. The remainder of the story is pretty uninteresting too, it's essentially go here looking for this person. They're not there, so go here instead. Not there either, go here now... etc.
There is one REALLY strange story turn once you find the person you're looking for that is honestly one of the weirdest scenes I've ever seen in a video game. As soon as you come across Yes Man, you'll know what I'm talking about. That entire conversion left me as amused, yet bewildered as possible.
The redeeming factor to their unspectacular story is that their dialogue is great. Voice acting is really good and there are a ton of memorable characters around the map that have interesting things to say. There are a few instances where gameplay can tell a story all it's own, but even the little side quests have disappointing story structure and most of them seem kind of thrown in.
One huge issue relating to the game's setting is that their AI is untouched since Oblivion. Often NPC's will wander around and literally stand and stare at a wall or something, or be out in the wasteland pointing at nothing over and over. They all seem like mindless drones that don't do anything other than wander around aimlessly. Again, this game could be epic and fantastic in so many ways if they got off their current engine or updated the things that make it feel old. A game that has good NPC control is Mass Effect 2 - everybody seems to be doing something important instead of walking 3 steps, looking at a wall, picking their nose, turning around, walking again, going to sleep, waking up, staring at a wall, etc.
Controls: 7.0
Ease of Use and Smoothness of Controls
Again, Bethesda's engine bogs down another aspect of the game. Jumping and moving around can be awkward, and selecting the item you want amongst an array of junk can get really tedious and boring.
They also have skills to determine your effectiveness with guns, which means your ability to land shots even though you're aiming right at somebody. And that doesn't even make sense. Why would a gun scatter more based upon your skill using it, rather than your aim wavering or something. Even still, your aim wavering is annoying, so why have it at all?
Replay Value: 9.0
Total Gameplay Time versus Expected
New Vegas is huge. There's a lot to do and a lot of quest flexibility - you'll feel like you need to play more than once in order to see all of the different possibilities the game offers. If you play through the entire game and see everything there is to see, you'll have invested around or over 100 hours.
That is, if you want to play that much. Many times, the game can discourage you from seeing all there is to see because of glitches, boring gameplay, impossible battles, etc. So while the replay value is high, it's kind of muffled by all of the other problems with the game and you might get annoyed enough to shut off the game and not pick it back up.
Fun: 7.0
What were the most and least fun parts of the game? Overall, how much fun is the game?
There are a lot of ways they could have made this game more fun. Better quest and story design would really help. Better battle balance would especially help. Less inventory management (and better organization) would go a long way. Better interaction with partner(s) and their impact on the game would change it for the better. There are a ton of ways this game could be improved upon to make it a more fun experience.
There are still way too many instances where you're walking across a boring wasteland with nothing to do, or looking at items deciding what to pick up or drop. Too many battles are too hard to do without a partner, but then that partner dominates every other battle making you seem pretty unimportant. There were very rare times that stand out that I'd say I was having a lot of fun. In fact, one of the most fun parts of the game was when I sent an entire area into an uproar and 50+ people were chasing me.. although, as expected, that glitched the game pretty hard almost to an unrepairable state where no town would behave normally and no quests could be done for a while.
Due to really unexciting combat, I deemed the it unimportant to the game, turned it on Very Easy and went on my way after about 15 hours. This is very rare for me to do, too, because I love shooters and I love interesting/challenging combat. After playing so much Oblivion, Fallout 3 and now this, I realized that their combat sucks and paying as little attention to it as possible made the game more fun. That's a BAD omen.
My Overall Rating: 7.1
Complexity Level: Fairly High. This game has a ton of different levels of depth, such as skills, perks, SPECIAL, etc, and a ton of menu screens. Even things like VATS or inventory management might be pretty foreign to newer gamers so I wouldn't recommend picking up a game like this unless you're familiar with games that are similar to it (modern-day RPGs) or if you're feeling adventurous.
Admittedly, as I look back, Fallout 3 suffered from some of the problems that I'm crucifying this game over. You might read that review and think "wait, why is Fallout 3 so high while New Vegas is so low?".. many reasons. One huge reason is the fact that the novelty wore off while the expectations of a new and improved game were there, but weren't met. Fallout 3 had so much more interesting content, a much better story and more control over their game design. New Vegas is very often frustrating, looks thrown together and has pretty poor structure across the board. The problems with New Vegas stack up, and I rarely, if ever, felt the same way about Fallout 3.
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