Fallout 3 was one of the biggest games a few years ago when it was released, and took the Fallout universe, and action RPG games, to new heights. Fallout New Vegas builds up on that, or rather it’s supposed to build up on Fallout 3. But it wasn’t developed by Bethesda, and that’s evident in the polish of the game: there is none. Meaning that the game, despite its huge campaign and lots of features, is quite buggy. At times, so buggy that it prevents you from enjoying the game.

Fallout New Vegas takes place in Nevada and Las Vegas, and your job is to explore the world, do quests and so on, just like you’re accustomed to in Fallout 3. You can team up with factions and do jobs for them in order to gain their trust, or you can attack them and try and beat them in order to steal their resources. The main portion of the action takes place at the famous Las Vegas Strip, which is, of course, reduced to apocalyptic levels, and the Strip is controlled by rival factions where you have to figure out how to approach each faction and what to do. While that’s quite immersive, the main story isn’t as deep as in Fallout 3, but the side quests are quite interesting, and there are a lot of mini-games as well. In fact, on a whole, there’s more to do in Fallout New Vegas than in Fallout 3.

The basic gameplay mechanics are the same as in Fallout 3, and unfortunately, so are the visuals, which look quite dated — mostly resembling Fallout 3, but Fallout 3 came out years ago. The cut scenes are okay and the dialogue is comparable to Fallout 3. Which means that if you hated listening to all those conversations and what not, well, there’s plenty more of that in New Vegas.

What there also is plenty of are bugs. From technical issues like crashes, to loading issues where the game at times can take forever to load — literally, forever, to a point where we gave up — and to specific game issues, like an enemy disappearing into the thin air, or even teammates. We even lost our save games at one point because of an error in loading the game. That’s a big no-no, where we wasted a good hour of gameplay. There are even quest specific issues, where the game wouldn’t register that a specific action had happened, so you were stuck there, unable to move on. Which can be fixed by reloading, but takes time and is annoying as hell. Overall, New Vegas has a few things going for it, but the game is hampered by lots of bugs and technical glitches. It feels very rushed, and probably required several more months of development.

The Good:
Plays like Fallout 3
Lots of side quests and things to do
Good atmopshere

The Bad:
Lots of bugs
Even more bugs
Even more, more bugs
Dated visuals
Cory dialogue

Overall score: 6/10