By Justin Tam
Staff Writer
“Fallout: New Vegas,” a role-playing game taking place in a post-nuclear Mojave desert, is a simultaneously tedious and fantastically engrossing addition to the “Fallout” series.
The game plays off of the incredible success of the “Fallout” series. It engages the player by constantly introducing new and interesting characters while maintaining an oddly futuristic 1950s vibe. However, its positive elements are sometimes overshadowed by the more monotonous elements of the game, such as traveling.
To those not familiar with the game, the “Fallout” series takes place in a post-apocalyptic United States and features vast open-ended game-play. Features include innumerable side stories and bizarre characters with a compelling but ultimately unoriginal main plot and storyline.
The story is fairly straightforward; the player is a courier who is shot while delivering a package to the dystopic environment.
The player survives and must then find the man who shot him, the reason that he was shot, the importance of the package in the grand scheme of the Mojave Wasteland and the mysterious proprietor of the Strip, Mr. House.
However, the main draw of the Fallout series is the small quirks and characters in the wasteland.
For example, there is an influential gang of Elvis impersonators just outside of the Vegas Strip who, if the player so chooses, can help the player onto the Strip in exchange for a few favors. The ebb and flow of power in the Mojave Wasteland is all based upon the player’s decisions.
“New Vegas” is hardly different than other games in the series, simply expanding upon the eccentricities of the wasteland established in its predecessor. “Fallout 3” contained another post-apocalyptic open world in the ruins of Washington, D.C., (otherwise known as the Capital Wasteland).
It could, in fact, be argued that “Fallout: New Vegas” is merely a rewrite of the original model of “Fallout 3,” which is both a blessing and a curse.
This is a blessing in that the quest, reward, exploration and combat systems used in “Fallout 3” were almost flawless (although they did require a few minor tweaks). The Mojave Wasteland, as it is known in “New Vegas,” is a vast desert, exponentially larger than the Capital Wasteland, with countless landmarks and distinctive characters.
With so many distractions to the player, it becomes incredibly easy to disregard the main plot. Oddly enough, this is not a problem because the game is very open-ended.
One of the most significant weaknesses of the game is that the engine used to run it is four years old and, thus, the game looks outdated graphics-wise. Some of the visuals are jerky and textures often fail to load as the engine tries in vain to create the great vistas of the wasteland.
Also, many glitches and bugs in “Fallout 3” weren’t addressed by the developers of “New Vegas.” The game often freezes periodically or crashes completely as it did in the former.
The vastness of the desert is also problematic due to its incredible size and it becomes very tedious to traverse the wasteland as the player must do during many quests and mission in the game.
In “Fallout 3,” this problem was recognized in the midst of development but seems to have also been overlooked in the development of “New Vegas.”
Despite its technical difficulties, “Fallout: New Vegas” proves itself a worthy sequel to the fantastic “Fallout 3” and, if the player is looking for an equivalent experience, “New Vegas” brings more of the same.
“Fallout: New Vegas” is available at most major retailers that offer video games as well as Amazon.com for $59.99 for Xbox 360 and PS3 and $49.99 for PCs.
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