You know you're in for a rough time when your journey begins with a bullet in the head and a dirt nap. Fallout: New Vegas sees you in the role of a courier who, after recovering from a near-fatal encounter, must travel through the futuristic Mojave Wasteland and piece together
the details of who shot you and why.
It's an engaging action-RPG with some very clever firefight mechanics. Being able to slow the action down, pick a body part and pop a cap in it is very cool - but far from flawless - as is being able to make friends or pick a fist fight with anyone you like.
There's something a little odd about the way you can dismember your enemies, though. If I shoot someone in the thigh, why does the leg pop off below the knee? If I'm correct, this is a wasteland - not Legoland.
Unless you can fight and forage for yourself, try to stay on the good side of karma's ledger. With so many temptations - things to steal, locks to pick, lost souls to exterminate - the game presents a multitude of moral dilemmas.
Reports of glitches are common, but I've yet to see anyone have the trouble I had. After rushing into a gun battle and getting the swiss cheese treatment, I respawned at the beginning of the chapter only to find that the right stick had been disabled.
I could move in all directions, but could look in only one. With hopes of playing further being dashed, I wiped the saved game and started from scratch.
Not cool.
Verdict: Glitches aside, New Vegas works on multiple levels. The story is gripping, the battles are tense and the world is real enough that you'd want to live there if being an amnesiac Bear Grylls is your thing. The environment is gritty, dusty, and utterly real.
It's also vast enough that you can get lost in the wilderness quite easily, taking "time waster" to previously unexplored extremes.
New Vegas is not game of the year by any stretch of the imagination - the glitches alone guarantee that and the dodgy combat doesn't help - but it's a fine game for a rainy day.
Rating: 3/5
Format: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Classification: R18
