You begin by having your face blown off. Then with the help of a friendly neighbourhood doctor you reconstruct your face, select your gender, choose your stats and away you go into the Mojave Wastes. From there you have a whole world to explore full of quests to do, things to find and NPCs to meet. As you explore you'll find various factions such as the New California Republic (the good guys), The Legion (the baddies) and a whole bunch of others all just trying to get by in this crazy new world. They'll be giving you jobs to do and in return you'll be getting cash (known as caps) and respect from the particular faction. Respect builds your reputation in the world and steers the course of how you interact with the factions later down the line. It's not all about being good or evil though, the choices you make never have that obvious dichotomy, it's more about making the best out of the current situation. This might infuriate some players who want to do the whole thing in one play through as seemingly minor choices often close off avenues later on but it all add to building a world that you have an impact on. For me, this is the games best feature and it will keep me coming back for more.
All is not well in the world of New Vegas though. The game suffers from a whole plethora of problems. Some just niggle at the whole immersiveness of the game whilst others downright destroy it.
The play itself brings role playing game elements into a first person shooter environment. The combat is usually intense and you're opponents are quick, often hard to pinpoint with your crosshairs, but this is helped out by the VATS targeting system that pauses the game and allows you to aim at your opponents extremities with varying degrees of accuracy depending on your skill with a weapon and distance from them. If you manage to find a companion they can make combat easier sometimes or they can make it horribly frustrating by walking in front of your line of sight. The speed of the combat is contrasted by your ponderous march across the waste. Though slow it's not too boring, there's all sorts of things to discover out there to prevent tedium from setting in. Ruined cities and bunkers have their own stories that are unravelled through hacking into old computers, reading notes and generally scrounging about the place. Small stores weave together with bigger ones and the greater storyline of the game is pieced together out of little tales making the exploring worthwhile outside of gaining in game worldly treasures.
The whole experience is marred by the games stability though. You'll want to spend hours exploring but game play can easily be broken by the frequent freezes. Nine times out of ten the game will carry on after a second or so but every so often a freeze turns into a total crash forcing you to reboot your system. Having to reload after being mauled to death is one thing, reloading after a crash that is totally out of your hands just leaves you with a bitter feeling about the product.
Total crashes aside the game suffers from many other problems. Sometimes you'll find creatures clipping into the landscape unable to move. The sound suffers from odd screeches and pops. And the graphics, though often stunning, can show signs of the engines strain on the system.
From standing atop a peak, surveying the wasteland to inspecting the crumbling interior of a shack this game can look rather good but in places the graphics start to fall down. Roaming from place to place you'll notice scenery and character models popping up in the middle distance. A billboard fading into existence is a forgivable glitch but when a clutch of deathclaws fades into view 50 metres in front of you after you've surveyed the scene and deemed it to be clear can be rough, especially after they've disembowelled you. Textures have a habit of not loading as you approach. You'll find yourself crossing a sharp line from richly detailed ground to a blurred mess which suddenly remembers your on top of it and changes to the appropriate hi -resolution texture. And if you're playing on a big TV it's easy to notice that this game doesn't go above 720p as you pass a tuft of pixelated grass.
New Vegas is a good game but it suffers from its lack of polish. It seems like creators have put an incredible amount of effort into the world and then rushed to release the game, forgetting to check that the world is playable. When shelling out £40 for a new game you want the thing to feel finished, right now I feel like I'm playing a half arsed product that will eventually be fixed when I buy their up and coming downloadable content.
I want to love this game, but when I start to get seriously involved it just throws everything back in my face. But if you're ready to look past its foibles you can seriously get your monies worth out of this game.
No comments:
Post a Comment