One thing is for sure, Fallout
New Vegas is not going to win any beauty contests. It’s aging game engine
is the game coding equivalent of Susan
Boyle smeared in Bisto. But this game is perfect for showcasing what video
games are really about. While the current trend in the games biz is to make
everything look as brown and life-like as humanly possible (Yes, Gears of War, we look to you) New Vegas is a master class in atmosphere,
storytelling, level design, and humour. Also,
Fisto, the sexbot. More on him later.
Fallout: New Vegas
is a melting pot of American counter-culture.
A role-playing, open world game, blending together bat-shit sci-fi, with
swing dance; Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, the Beat generation, and drug fiends right out of Naked Lunch melded irrevocably with pew-pew laser guns and robots
with names like Mister Gutsy. You are
‘The Courier’, a nobody who becomes a somebody when a routine delivery job goes
a bit off-rails, after a smooth talking
gangster in a white check suit named Benny (voiced by Matthew Perry) shoots you in the head and puts you
in a shallow grave. I hate it when that happens! Luckily, a robot named Victor,
who resembles a toaster with the sentimentalities of something out The Guns Of Navarro, sees the whole
thing and delivers you to Doc Mitchell. Soon enough you are right as rain
(somehow), and after entering some inevitable character orientation menus, you emerge into the fledgling backwater of
Goodsprings. But as you soon learn, this is just a speck of the huge, richly
populated world of New Vegas.
The latest in Obsidian’s Fallout series, the same developer
behind the legendary Elder Scrolls
games, New Vegas is a series
highlight. Fallout 3’s setting of Washington
DC eventually left you feeling rather exasperated, with the miles and miles of
endless grey. A silly comment to make,
considering the game is set in the aftermath of a huge atomic war, with your
character emerging into the wastes of the capital to find your dad (then again,
when your dad is Liam Neeson, who wouldn’t
face an atomic wasteland to find pops?). And while that first step out of your
underground home, Vault 101, into the blowing wind and bright, soapy light of
the DC wastes, is probably one of the most arresting spectacles in gaming
history, it has to be said, the endless shades of grey got a bit trying by the
end. No such problem here. Though the
chronology of the two games is a little muddled, New Vegas takes place sometime after Fallout 3, and New Vegas
trades the Capital for the sun scorched dystopia that is the Mojave
Wasteland. But this Wasteland is
downright beautiful; the desert landscape stretching before you is awash with
dark red canyons, snowy mountain peaks and even patches of green where plants
and flowers grow, as the earth recovers from the war that ended the Old World.
This greenery can be picked and collected, a la Red Dead Redemption, and makes up a large part of the huge new
crafting options on offer. You can set up a campfire and cook different
foodstuffs to make up those spent health points, some of which are much sought
after, like the Wasteland Omelette. But
this new feature is just the teeniest tiniest peak of the iceberg.
The Mojave is massive, and what New Vegas does best is let you wander it
as you please; go exploring for loot, chat with the locals, anything you like.
Just be ready for a fight or two. You are never alone long in New Vegas. The baddies range from
gangsters and ranchers, to raiders and drug fiends. But beyond them the world
is teeming with beasties trying to take a chunk out of you. These start off
with the likes of stray dogs and bloatflys. But this cushy start doesn’t last
long, and the creatures in New Vegas
are utterly ferocious. Many a time you will find yourself backed in a corner,
desperately pumping your shotgun at a huge Radscorpion as it scuttles towards
you, its massive stinger ready to punch a hole in your face (Those beady eyes,
oh god, those beady eyes). There are
newcomers too. Cazadores, red-winged insects the size of wheelie bins,
regularly descend in packs from their mountain nests to mess up your day. Also
making a new start are the Nightstalkers, coyotes with the face and tail of a rattlesnake
that are just as terrifying as they sound.
Luckily you are well equipped to
defend yourself. The sheer level of armaments in New Vegas is staggering. It really serves to highlight the weird
marriage of The Wild West, B-Movie science fiction and Clockwork Orange. Winchester’s and repeaters pop up amongst laser
guns and plasma grenades, along with a slew of melee weapons, as well as some insanely powerful options,
like the grenade machinegun. While the combat in F3 was fidgety, and guns had all the accuracy of a sling-shot made
of toffee, the gunplay in New Vegas
is much more intuitive. A welcome inclusion is the ability to aim along iron
sights, making accuracy a possibility. Furthermore, new bullet variants spice
things up a little; some working better on armour, other others on soft targets,
and some just set the poor buggers on fire. The hot key system is still a pain
on console, without a keyboard to work with, but this is a minor issue. And the ability to pause time and highlight
particular areas of your targets, in the beautifully over the top gore of
V.A.T.S, is still as glorious as ever. There is nothing like watching a
low-level scamp brandishing a Dress Cane jog laboriously up to you, only to
nonchalantly target a buckshot at their face and blast their cranium off to
mercury.
You will spend most of your time in
the Mojave doing quests, many of which are ancillary to the story. This is
where the game really shines. While you start off with simple fetch-quests and
introductory skirmishes, things soon get a lot more interesting. One early
example of just how expertly crafted the quests in New Vegas are, is Come Fly
With Me. Things start off simple enough. Some townsfolk moan to you that
they suspect some Ghouls have holed up at an old rocket launch site up the road.
You agree to go have a shufty. Ghouls, making a reappearance from Fallout 3, are those unlucky souls who
let the gamma radiation get the better of them during the aftermath of the
nuclear holocaust; essentially zombies. Sure enough you find them around and
about; skeletal Gollum-like creatures who try and eat you the second they see
you. You blast your way through them and get into the building. You reach the
top floor, and are greeted by more ghouls, except these ones are still civilised,
and have hatched some plot to launch the remaining rockets at the site into
space, in keeping with some far-out religion they’ve cooked up. They tell you
they need you to clear out some bothersome mutants in the basement.
These turn out to be Nightkin;
hulking buggers with big hammers and cloaking devices who lurk in the tight
hallways and mash you to a pulp at first sight. You get to their leader, who,
after talking to a cow skull for an extended period, reveals that they are there to get more Stealth Boys,
the devices they use to remain hidden. Another Ghoul is in the other room, preventing
anyone from getting to the goods. So you walk in and you soon discover this
Ghoul, civil like the ones upstairs, is actually looking for his girlfriend,
who the Nightkin have imprisoned. What was once a simple task has become a
quest, within a quest, within a quest; multi quest-ception. And you can choose
to help or hinder any of these three as you please. But say you get the
Nightkin to leave, after discovering there are in fact no Stealth Boys,
developers at Obsidian leave in one detail that is just utterly devious. As you
go to the viewing platform to see the religious Ghouls blast into space, you
can choose, after all that goodwill, to press a button on a nearby console
altering the flight plan, causing the rockets and their happy cultist cargo to
sputter and crash into the desert. This
is just one of the many memorable adventures you embark on during your time in New Vegas, and it is the freedom and
sadistic wit imbedded in these tasks that make them so utterly addictive.
Beyond these side quests, the main
storyline sees you follow your would-be killer, Benny, to the New Vegas Strip,
where the pre-war Las Vegas has been rebuilt. Here we meet the enigmatic Mr
House, the shady de facto ruler of New Vegas, who has big plans for the Mojave.
He commands an army of Securiton robots (obviously) who keep order on the
strip. Or do they? Certainly, everything
is not as it seems. The main plot thread trails through the first half of the story,
but as we pass the halfway mark, things get very interesting, very quickly, and
the plot builds up real traction as the plot unfurls before you. Again, this is
a marked improvement over F3, where
the main story meandered along until the very end, where you could either be
killed (The good ending, believe it
or not), or let some poor sucker die for you. And that was more
or less it. There are various
factions vying for control of Hoover Dam, the only intact source of power in
the region, and the key to controlling the Mojave. Do you help the well-meaning, but overly bureaucratic
New California Republic, a contingent of conscript and volunteer soldiers,
attempting to rebuild the region to Old World specifications? Or do you help
The Legion, a tribal army of slavers, based on the Old Roman Empire, with, who
else, Caesar, at the helm (a theme perhaps stemming from Caesar’s Palace casino). Then, there is Mr House, your effective employer,
with his robot army. And then, on top of that, there is Yes Man, one of Mr
House’s robots, who can help you take the whole lot for yourself.
You can trek the Mojave alone, but
half of the fun is having some companions to back you up. The AI in New Vegas is pretty terrible, but the
characterisation is excellent. There are
somewhere around 8 different companions you meet who are willing to help you.
There are stoic solider types, cowgirls, doctors, to name a few, though one
standout is ED-E, a plucky little Eyebot, who bobs at your side, blasting recorded trumpet fanfare whenever you
get yourself in a scrape. Then there is Rex, a part robotic German Sheppard,
with a glowing brain jar between his ears.
Rex isn’t without his quirks; he hates hats, and rats, for no discernible
reason, which led to several reloaded saves after Rex went bananas and mauled
some poor sod guilty only of wearing a moth-eaten trilby. The wide range of
counterparts available makes traversing the Mojave that bit more unpredictable;
thankfully, in a good way. There are of course endless bugs and glitches,
some of them funny, some of them
anything but; on more than one occasion my game simply crashed and I had to
reload. Other times quests didn’t work properly, or, upon entering a building,
the AIs just glitch in a ball in the centre of the foyer, looking like the QWOP man trying to fetch a digestive
from the bottom of the biscuit jar. The aging game engine must surely have
enjoyed its final outing with this one, and often you see it labouring to catch
up, with pop-in backgrounds, and rather punishing loading screens that occur
much too often. But it is hard to let these issues get in the way of what is a solid
game.
Obsidian’s 2010 effort is one of
their very best. The world of New Vegas
teams with life, diversity, opportunity, and sheer inventive zest. There are shortcomings, and areas for improvement;
most centrally, some form of getting about, like maybe a little sci-fi
motorbike or something. But New Vegas
is the best Fallout yet. It is so
jam-packed of memorable moments. Take the afore mentioned Fisto, a squat little
robot, who on calibration into a sexbot, makes you his first customer (to which
you can reply ‘I can’t feel my legs!’.
Totally necessary). Or when a clan made up of 50s housewives right out of People magazine and names like ‘Irate
Ida’ and ‘Rancorous Ruth’ besiege you with rolling pins. This is one of those rare games where it is
not the ending that really matters, but the long, illustrious journey that gets
you there. I made the mistake of getting hooked on this during exam season.
This games design teases out the obsessive-compulsive side of you, leading you
to dig deeper and deeper into this rich world. And yet often you will hardly
skim the surface.
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