


You interact with a wide range of characters, and the way you treat them can come back to haunt or help you via karma. If you mostly stick to the story, the game is meaty at fifty-plus hours, but with side missions and general exploring, you can easily spend days upon days with the title. As you complete missions and dispatch enemies, you level up, quickly at first and then more slowly as you approach the games conclusion. Over-the-top, intensely graphic kill scenes punctuate the combat. You can play the game almost exclusively as an FPS if you so choose, but it helps to use VATS, a system that pauses the action and allows you to fire a few shots RPG-style. You explore an open world from a first-person perspective, completing a variety of story and side missions. All the core aspects of Fallout 3 are intact, right down to the HUD, the lock-picking and terminal-hacking minigames, the Pip-Boy interface, and even the dialogue font. However, once you hit the streets of Las Vegas - ahem, New Vegas - and start wandering the surrounding Mojave Wasteland, youll feel immediately at home.

This opening sequence transpires much more quickly than the childhood scenes did in Fallout 3, and thats for the better.

Your first goal is to figure out who shot you, a mission that requires a fair amount of gunplay from the get-go. After setting your starting stats and (if you want) going through some tutorials, youre on your way. Fortunately, the injury isnt fatal (that would make for a short game), and youre taken in by Doc Mitchell, who nurses you back to health. The game begins with your character, a courier, receiving a bullet to the head. However, New Vegas offers an extensive new setting, a great new story, and plenty of small tweaks, making it a good buy for fans of 2008s groundbreaking FPS/RPG hybrid. Fallout: New Vegas isnt technically a sequel to Fallout 3, but it may as well be: the two games use the same engine, and the basic gameplay is almost identical.
