I do articles on film, television...so why not do video games as well? I'm going to need to change the name of my blog I think! It's becoming more and more evident that I have way to much free time on my hands and I don't spend that time wisely by going on hikes or helping the needy. No, I spend it wasting my brain cells in front of screens of various sizes all day. I'm not ashamed of it. I'm not the most active person in the world, but I get my exercise in, and I see daylight often.
I know "Fallout: New Vegas" is a fairly old game in the grand scheme of things. New games are released every week and games become "old" in a matter of weeks. New Vegas came out in 2010 and it was a sequel to the 2008 Game of the Year "Fallout 3". Well I just played Fallout 3 and beat it and I loved it and then I immediately played New Vegas. It took me almost a month to beat the game (which was about 43 hours of game play). The general gist of the storyline: You play a courier in the Mojave wasteland several hundred years in the future after nuclear holocaust has destroyed our planet. The land is overrun by giant mutated creatures like massive scorpions, ants, etc. It's also full of different clans of people, some bad some good. There are groups called powder gangers, Caesars Legion, the NCR, fiends, etc. You have the choice to either help some of these groups or work against them. If you piss them off, they will come after you and try to murder you, ha! But you play this courier (you chose male or female) who travels this wasteland trying to figure out why you were shot on your most recent job and who was responsible.
I should let you all know, I am not gaming guru. I play a lot of XBOX but I am not good at any games I play. It's as if I don't adapt or learn from other games, but I suck. It takes me a long time to complete games. If I play games like "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3", I'm the guy who you all hate when you play online. I die about 20 times and get maybe 10 kills per match. I play games for fun, not for sport. Video games are just a form of entertainment for me. I play them a lot, but I do not dedicate my life to them.
So now you know why it takes me a month to beat a game like Fallout: New Vegas. But also, this is an open world/sandbox game. A sandbox game is one where there isn't a linear path to take from beginning to end. Linear games are like Call of Duty, Battlefield. There is one storyline and you go from point A to point B, bada bing, bada boom. I love sandbox games because you are a character put into a vast open world and you can roam wherever you want. You can put the main story on the back burner for several hours as you explore and do tons of side quests. My favorite game of this kind is by far, "Red Dead Redemption"...but that's for a whole other blog. New Vegas has hours and hours and hours of extra quests and missions. There is always something to do outside the main story.
Starting with the drawbacks I have about the game. It's tedious. Fallout 3 wasn't as head ache inducing as this sequel. If you are like me and enjoy doing all the side stuff, then you will have a LOT to do in this game. Sometimes though, it got to be way to much. Each side mission seemed to consist of side SIDE missions to complete the initial quest you were given. You have to travel all over the freaking map back and forth doing mundane tasks. For the most part, I liked this aspect of the game but a lot of the missions story lines were lacking any entertainment value. I ended up skipping over half the dialog just to get to the part where I have to do something. The main story was alright and I paid attention to the dialog involved with that, but man, those side ones got frustratingly boring at times. It got to a point where I gave up doing them and just finished up the main one just to beat the game. 41 hours of game play in my head couldn't take the slow pace and tedious tasks anymore. They weren't ALL that bad...but most were. Although, I like the fact that you can jump to a location on the map once you discover it instead of having to walk all the way there. It helps.
I also didn't like how the health boosts worked in this game. Previously if you didn't have "stimpacks" (which is what gave you a major increase) you could drink water or eat a food item and that would just give you a certain amount of health boost (each item gives different amounts). In this game though, those food items give you a very small health dose over a particular amount of time. It wasn't helpful in dire situations. Especially when you are being attacked by a particular creature that takes off a third of your health with each swipe. There was also another creature, a flying bug thing that when it stung you it took off a big portion of health but also poisoned you. The poison slowly drains your health and there is no easy remedy unless you had "anti venom". Otherwise you have to keep using your health items until the poison was done. This game though, did allow you to enlist a partner on your travels. Someone who would follow you and fight with you. They died to quickly though half the time which got annoying.
I liked the upgrading aspects of the game. When you level up you can update your characters attributes. Making it easier to hack into computers and pick locks. You can update your abilities with guns. I liked to upgrade the Speech attribute so that I could lie to people easier and convince them to do certain things. The speech aspect made beating a lot of the missions so much easier. You were able to bypass some minute tasks which was cool. It didn't really seem to take much time to level up either. By the end of my game I was at level 24. In Fallout 3 I was at level 18 at the end. So they made it less dificult this time around. Score!
This game made me more frustrated than Fallout 3. I died a shit load more times this time around. And it sucks when you forget to manually save your game every so often so that if you die, you have to go really far back and do everything over again. That's more of a user error though. There were also some annoying glitches. When you use there V.A.T.S. or there slow motion action device to attack an enemy for more hit points...it would sometimes freeze and not let you attack your enemy but they were still able to attach you. That happened to me about 10 times throughout game play and it pissed me off.
It sure sounds like I hated this game huh? Truth is I didn't. I didn't care for a lot of the technical aspects of the game and some of the minor changes they made. Overall though, I found this to be a great time filler game. I had fun playing it. I liked Fallout 3 a lot more because it was more of a balanced game with not as many tedious tasks. But I enjoyed the open world aspects for the most part. It killed a lot of empty time for me. I would probably never play it again though.
I know this little review is about 2 years to late...but hey I just played it so sue me. I wanted to test out my gaming review abilities. I know this isn't perfect, but it's my first attempt. I'm also not some crazy avid gamer so I'm not at that nerd level to examine every single detail of a game.
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