Rolling the Dice With Mixed Success

“It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday.”

Words made famous by legendary boy band Boyz II Men, but they’re also the exact ones many hardcore fans of the Fallout series will have when playing Fallout: New Vegas. While the melody is a familiar one and will still devour hours of your time, there are several small missteps that keep it from being anywhere in the same league as Fallout 3.

Several of the changes made to this game from the previous one add more depth to the story and gameplay on the whole, but ultimately don’t work out the way they should. Add in a host of bugs that require you to do everything from shut the game off and restart or change even the way you play, Fallout New Vegas will ultimately be remembered as a solid game that would have benefitted from an extra month or two in development.

For example, dressing up as the enemy works out great while you’re trying to get into their camp, but given the fact that even your allies will attack you if you’re dressed a certain way, this new feature is a bummer. The same thing goes for all the additional groups and factions in the game, a definite plus over the “Enclave vs. the Brotherhood of Steel” angle from “Fallout 3.” However, in spite of so many awesome new characters being introduced, there are too many choices to make and so many different groups to be a part of. As a result, you never get that sense of belonging the other games give you as the story develops.

Graphically and gameplay-wise, New Vegas is so remarkably similar to Fallout 3 that if you were locked away after “Mothership Zeta” [the last DLC for the title] was released, you might think that New Vegas was an expansion of Fallout 3. Sure, the map is exhaustively huge and there are a plethora of side quests and things to do, but overall, there isn’t a freshness added to the overall gameplay.

However, that doesn’t mean that it’s stale. If you spent dozens of hours of your life playing through the last game, you’ll do the same thing here. While many of the quests, even the larger ones, require way too much gopher-type gameplay [running from one location to another, performing mind-less tasks like delivering messages and items], the times when you have to kill large groups of people [killing off the Kings and the Legion for example, will leave you with dozens of dead goons covering the floor] make up for this somewhat and round out the overall experience.

It’s not enough to up the excitement to where it needs to be though; especially considering this is a title that needs your complete and undivided attention for over 50 hours. Again, it’s an immersive and well-told story, but there are too many times you’ll scoff at the little things- the same things which ultimately make up the essence of it all.

In the end, it’s a tale that stakes its rightful place in the amazing franchise, but fails to completely live up to all the hype.