Tuesday my pre-order copy of Fallout New Vegas unlocked. Due to demands on my time, I wasn’t able to play it until Thursday, so there it was, sitting on my Steam Library page, mocking me.
I could hear it: Mocking me.
So, finally, Friday morning, I got the kids out the door with almost unseemly haste, and loaded it up.
Six hours later I surfaced from the retro-1950′s SF world, and went to the modders pages at Fallout New Vegas Nexus and found some files to enhance my experience.
The Caravan Deck fix.
A fix to remove the brown SFX overlay and give back the desert glare and almost pitch black desert nights.
A Jason Vorhees hockey mask.
And of course, being who I am, the nude patch.
I loaded back up my hero, the sniper rifle toting, Jason Vorhees mask wearing, nudist Aveliene, and reentered the wastes.
Fallout New Vegas is an excellent return to the wastelands we became so familiar with in Fallout 1 & 2.
A canon and story progression, times has moved on since your Vault Dweller faced The Master, since his descendant faced the evils of the Enclave, and while this is happening, your Fallout 3 character is exploring the Capitol Wasteland in a search for their father.
So, let’s hit the non-spoiler points, shall we?
Interface: The interface is fairly clean, although it does have a slight learning curve. The main interface is quick to master, since it consists of the WSAD keys, the E key to use things, and the mouse to steer and shoot. Unfortunately the manual and the hints don’t tell you that holding down the R key puts your weapon away, and holding down the TAB key turns on your Pipboy light, but if you played Fallout 3, you know that.
Story: I’m only about 10 hours into the game, with almost no progression on the main storyline. I prefer to search the open almost sandbox world and experience the Wasteland for myself. So far the story is interesting, but to be honest, I’m far more interested in exploring the Nevada Wasteland looking for trouble.
Visuals: The way it looks, frankly, is fantastic. I’ve spent time in Nevada, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and the Persian Gulf, so the fact that the desert is starkly beautiful. The ruins are believable, reminiscent of the 1950′s construction and weathered, damaged, and plundered in a believable way. The robots are 50′s chic, the weapons aren’t the streamlined weapons we are used to in other games, but almost crude, except for the normal pistols and rifles, but those are all weathered, beaten, and obviously hammered by the apocalypse.
Voice Acting: Video games have long lagged in the voice acting department, and while New Vegas has better voice acting than many games, I still wish that it had been better. Maybe voices for my character, but hey, it’s a minor complaint for this game.
Backstory: The backstory is what make the Fallout games what they are. In an alternate world, our history diverged following World War 2, and the vision of the future that the more masculine writers of the sci-fi of the 1950′s came to life. Eventually the US, an isolationist nation more concerned with keeping its citizens happy than its presence in the world, had annexed Canada, and hoarded its oil resources while draining the rest of the world dry. Finally the Chinese invaded Alaska, and the bloody Last War began. Then, the Two Hour War, where everyone threw everything they had at one another, and the world ended in fire. Like all 1950′s Sci-Fi, the world wasn’t completely eliminated, and some segments of society were preserved, hence, Vault-Tec and the Vaults. Those who leave the Vaults, complexes designed to ensure people survived the ATOMIC HOLOCAUST so they could rebuild America. But there was sinister plan in there, and I’ll leave that for you to discover.
Game Backstory: Is pretty simple: I’m looking for the man who shot me in the face. There, live it up.
Now, the game has a few notable bugs. First, the spinning head bug, which you can see on YouTube, and a save-game glitch that grustrated all of us until it was patched, and finally the “Caravan Bug” that prevents the cards you buy from being added to you Caravan Deck. (Caravan is a Faro variant, believable and fun, a game easy to learn if you read the holotape but hard to master and requiring skill and craftiness over dumb luck), and a desktop crash that I think has to do with Direct X11.
How good is it?
Here’s some visuals for you!
This is Pre-Dawn at the Nevada/California Border.
Daytime, at the top of the CA border pass. Check out the bomb crater center right. It’s about an hour before noon, and already the glare and heat are up.
Our hero, dressed in her traditional killing garb, with her silenced varmit rifle.
I run a dual core AMD, 16GB RAM, Windows Vista Ultimate, dual ATI Radeon 5000 series cards, and have had no slowdown problems, no lagginess.
All in all, because of the frustrating bugs, and a few other small mission bugs, I rate the game a 9.0 out of 10.
If you have the cash, buy it. Buy it, play it, mod it, play it again, and enjoy.
Welcome to New Vegas. Now gimme all your caps, sucker!
Leave a Comment
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
