Set four years after the end of Fallout 3, New Vegas puts you in the role of betrayed courier, the victim of a delivery gone south and left in your own grave with a bullet in your head. Rescued by a robot and patched up by the local doctor you begin your quest for revenge.

A few months after its release, Fallout New Vegas as a game is similar to its central protagonist. Launched with many fatal bugs to the head it stumbled and lurched terribly in the face of early reviews that, quite rightly, blasted it for being a mess.

Some of those critical bugs have now been squashed and although I experienced several game-breaking moments during my 40 hours, the well-written and jewel-encrusted world of New Vegas started to shine through brightly.

More of the same?

Essentially New Vegas is merely an expansion pack for the original Fallout 3. That is until you realise that Obsidian have improved on Bethesda’s reboot in nearly every way possible. From minor tweaks to the interface, to a central storyline peppered with interesting and hilarious characters, Fallout New Vegas feels like a proper sequel.

The same controls and V.A.T.S. systems are in place, there are new perks etc. But everything that felt good before feels just as good now with some extra additions and improvements.

Obsidian are good at story, bad on design – discuss

Ungh. I guess that rings true for New Vegas despite being a little too sweeping. The characters you meet in the Mojave are better written than those in Fallout 3 and the main story feels a little more gripping than the oversimplified, emotional mechanics employed by Bethesda’s effort.

Revenge and retribution are a good themes to use in a videogame as its easy to connect and put them into a ‘dude firing a gun’ context. It adds a sense of urgency to your task in the first dozen hours or so and although you can break off anytime to explore the wilds, it feels more appropriate to do so at a certain point in the game.

Best Quest?

New Vegas itself is a wonderful blend of squalor and decadence with many quest-lines providing some biting social commentary and devilish black humour. Out of these the one involving the White Glove Society is easy to single out. An exclusive club that hides a dirty secret it was one sequence of events that I could have taken in a variety of ways. This was an excellent showcase of Obsidian’s talents.

Sounds like you’ve got a case of But face.

Yeah. For all that innovation and excellent story-telling it was let down by some breaking bugs. Although I had the opportunity to take the White Glove quest anyway I wanted to a certain character wouldn’t follow me at a critical time and ended up breaking the entire quest chain. In the end a live frag grenade placed into his clothing was the only way of resolving the problem – spectacular and hilarious but ultimately unsatisfying.

What about atmosphere? Is it the same as Fallout 3′s wasteland?

This is where New Vegas gets better in my opinion. I personally found the Washington wasteland and the endless, bloody underground systems to be both depressing and annoying. The Mojave is no less cruel and inhospitable, but it feels like a place more suited to life than those nuclear dead zones back east.

With rolling hills and green vegetation it’s a little less jarring on the eye but manages to convey that feeling of destruction in much the same way as Fallout 3. It meant that this was an environment I was eager to explore and discover its secrets.

Does it manage to screw up the ending like Fallout 3 did until the DLC?

Right, the ending is a hard stop just as Fallout 3 originally was. It’s better at telling you when you’re entering the linear conclusion (mostly because a big prompt comes on-screen to tell you so) but the ending is still final.

It makes sense that it would be this way thanks to the main story and fiction… but it’s disappointing nonetheless. I can see the path that Obsidian could take to open up the world again but according to their developers that might not happen for a while… if ever.

So it is worth buying?

Obsidian have fixed a lot of the problems experienced after release and New Vegas feels much more stable on all platforms. It’s worth purchasing (as it’s pretty cheap for a new copy anyway) for the DLC that will come out as the year goes on. My initial playthrough clocked in at 40 hours and I didn’t do half the quests I could have attempted – so as a value proposition it’s well worth owning.

And you can totally have a dog with its brain in a jar as a companion. How can you not love this?

Fallout New Vegas - Review, 10.0 out of 10 based on 1 rating