Really Bethesda? You really felt the need to release this expansion pack for £40 pounds and on another disc instead of the agreed upon method of releasing it on Xbox Live for £10. Your need to be different displeases me. However the joke's on you. I only paid £15 after trading in Fable 3. A worthy sacrifice in my opinion, because this game is truly a diamond in the rough. I can't tell you how much I wanted to hate this game so I could blast it mercilessly while gleefully sucking the dick of Fallout 3. Unfortunately, this game is really excellent. But nobody likes it when I'm being nice about things so let the ripping begin!
I'm going to start with the one thing everyone will notice; the graphics. They are really the main reason that New Vegas feels like a large expansion pack. In two years Bethesda still hasn't managed to change the fact that everyone you meet looks like they've taken more than a couple of shovels to the face in their time. Also, the texture pop-in is back with a vengeance. Sometimes you can't tell whether that is indeed a building you're looking at or an oddly shaped rock...with a door in it.
The story is very strange in that it is both barely there and also completely impenetrable. I just didn't give a crap about the guy who shot my character in the head and buried me in a shallow grave. I was far too busy picking wildflowers and capping raiders in the genitals to bother with that. Now, I can't really give a full review of the story as I haven't actually finished it yet due to my drastic underestimation of how long it would take me. Let's just say I don't care about the story and you probably won't either. That's not to say you won't care about your character. Despite him having the depth and charisma of damp toilet paper, you really want him (or her) to succeed.
The main reason I haven't completed yet is because of the exploration factor. You see, I hated this game up until about halfway through the first main story mission (which is a few hours long). I got up to a certain point and the difficulty curve went up so fast it had a freaking overhang. This forced me to explore to gain levels. I then became so enthralled with it that I didn't complete that mission until I could breeze through it without dying once.
This is one of the main problems with Fallout in general. While you're at a low level prepare to die again and again and again. This is where exploration comes in... unless you can't find a decent path to take in which case you'll either be poisoned by Radscorpions, sliced up like a prison inmate by Deathclaws or killed to death by the various raiders and mutated animals. You see the game pretends to be extremely open ended and it achieves this to some extent but really it closes you in to one path by placing hard to kill enemies on each side of you.
My main gripe about the exploration though is the sheer length of time it takes to find enemies. In Fallout 3 I couldn't go 30 seconds without finding enemies to chew on my bullets. In Fallout New Vegas this is completely reversed. Now I can wander around for 10 minutes without finding a single enemy to kill. I loved hunting down enemies and putting them down with a single bullet to the head. Admittedly making enemies few and far between adds some realism to the game but really how realistic can a post-apocalyptic game where the Americans and Russia nuked China and vice-versa be?
On the subject of realism, there's a new mode in New Vegas called Hardcore Mode. This means you have to sleep, eat and drink to live, healing packs take longer to heal you, you have to pay doctors to heal crippled limbs and (get this) ammo has weight, but the components of ammo doesn't. For a game mode that's supposed to make the game harder this was a blunder. It means a savvy gamer can take his excess ammo and break it down into it's original parts, then rebuild it later when needed to reduce his weight. It seems like an afterthought added by one of the developers. Imagine this if you will, one developer thought, "I know, I'll add in a mode that makes the game even more needlessly realistic." The thing was that not all the other developers agreed so this one lonely developer had to add it in secretly at night. However, just as he was adding in the finishing touches the other developers walked in and, like a teenager caught watching porn, quickly shut it down unfinished.
This streak of unfinished-ness is present throughout the game. There are enough glitches to cause Y2K every year for the next millennium. Bear with me for a second. You're walking through the wasteland, minding your own business when suddenly and inexplicably you start losing health at a horrendous rate. You look around wildly, trying to see who hates you that much. You see a red dot on your radar and follow it until you're practically on top of it but you still can't see your enemy. Then you die, and the camera pans to who killed you. Some little sniper rifle wielding fucker floating 3000 feet in the air. This isn't the worst one though. You don't know annoyance until you've spent 3 hours exploring and gathering loot only to have the game decide to freeze on you. To be fair though the devs did try to combat this by auto-saving VERY regularly, though this just leaves one wondering, if you did that then why didn't you just fix the bugs?
Anyway the sound in the game is very good, the various radio stations you can get offer quite diverse styles of music. Of course, the real genius is that it doesn't interfere with gameplay. It's subtle, ambient, angelic and ... I'm slipping back into liking this game again.
But this is always going to happen, because I can't hold it back. I love this game, I think that despite all the glitches and issues it has it deserves to be a game in it's own right. I recommend Fallout: New Vegas.
This has been SixString, thanks for visiting.
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