One day, all of my friends started playing Fallout 3. I would sit there hanging out with them while they all took turns playing that game for at least two weeks, and I got so sick of seeing it and hearing those songs over and over again that I was sure I’d never play the game. Fast forward to summer, where I purchase the Game of the Year version of Fallout 3, including every piece of DLC released. I played it obsessively until I beat every last quest, clocking in at over 100 hours. I can honestly say that I completely understand why they were so into it, and have quite a burning passion for that game. Needless to say, I was eagerly awaiting the release of Fallout: New Vegas.

I was a bit worried, since the game was being made by a different developer, albeit the people who developed the first and second Fallout games, back in the day. However, it reminded me of the Call of Duty situation; Infinity Ward and Treyarch took turns making the Call of Duty games, and consistently, Infinity Ward’s Call of Dutys annihilated Treyarch’s. Sometimes, some developers are just better suited to make a compelling game, even if they’re not the ones who created the series originally. Such is the case for Fallout: New Vegas. Don’t worry, though; it’s nowhere near as bad as getting Call of Duty: World At War after the original Modern Warfare.

Fallout 3, for being an absolutely enormous, character-packed, dialogue heavy, sprawling adventure game, was actually pretty simple when you got down to it. There’s already enough to do and explore in that game that the developers didn’t feel the need to bog you down with the small details. Fallout: New Vegas’s creators did. Therein lies my main issue with the game. They made it unnecessarily complex, not in a huge way, but in mundane ways that affect gameplay in ways I don’t like. For example, instead of just shooting people with bullets, you now have normal bullets, armor piercing bullets, and stronger bullets that put more strain on your weapon’s condition. This means that certain enemies have armor that you’re going to have to use these armor piercing bullets on. Oh, but it won’t really hurt them, it’ll just take their armor down, then you have to kill them for real. Also, everything north of where you’re standing? Yeah, the enemies there are way too hard to kill at your low level, so you can’t go over there. It’s a way of forcing a semblance of linearity on the game. Fallout 3 allowed you to go wherever you wanted right off the bat. New Vegas has areas where you simply cannot go, because until you get to level 15 or 20, those Deathclaws and Giant Radscorpions with newfound armor that makes ten times stronger than they were in Fallout 3 will block your way. These little tweaks to the battle system are simply unnecessary in my opinion, and would be better featured if they were only in Hardcore Mode.

In New Vegas, you have to take certain paths to get to certain places. While this was true in Fallout 3, they did it a different way in New Vegas. In Fallout 3, if you wanted to get to certain areas, you’d have to go around, come in from the right direction, or wade through a stretch of underground tunnels to get there. In New Vegas, some areas are simply blocked off, as in you just can’t walk past them. Many times I’ve tried to go up the side of a cliff that would’ve been absolutely doable in Fallout 3, only to have invisible walls stop me from proceeding. This is a cheap way to force players to take certain routes; rather than giving players somewhere else to explore, level up, and loot along the way, New Vegas will make you walk down a barren stretch of highway to get to your destination.

Another thing about New Vegas that irked me, since it would’ve been so easy to get right, was the music. Galaxy News Radio was at least 50% of why Fallout 3 was so great in the first place. New Vegas has a new radio personality named Mr. New Vegas, who is a creepy pervert of an old man that never says anything worthwhile. Three Dog was a god damn superstar, what happened? Yeah, Mr. New Vegas is voiced by Mr. Las Vegas himself, Mr. Wayne Newton. Honestly, though, that does nothing to make him more entertaining. His raspy voice is so much louder than the songs he plays on his station, too, which brings me to my next point: multiple radio stations. Whose brilliant idea was it to make more than one radio station, and spread the songs out over them? One of the stations, Black Mountain Radio, is only accessible within a certain vicinity. The other two repeat the same 5 or so songs each over and over again. Not to mention that there are fewer songs in general in New Vegas. The quality of the songs, however, is pretty much matched in my opinion. The new songs mostly all have a western feel, which gives the game a great, consistent vibe along with the western scenery and bright blue skies of Nevada.

Enough with the gripes, though. For all the negative things I’ve said about New Vegas, it would be pretty hard to mess it up too bad when it’s based on Bethesda’s Fallout 3 engine and format. New Vegas is just as much of a expansive beast of an adventure as the previous entry was. You start out as a courier who has run into some bad luck, as it would seem. You get shot and left for dead in a shallowly dug grave in the small town of Goodsprings. At Doc Mitchell’s, you get to pick your name, character, attributes, skills, and perks, and then off you go.

New Vegas is much more of a factional territory than D.C. Instead of the Brotherhood fighting to keep Super Mutant levels low and attempting to guide the path humanity travels, you have the New California Republic, a civilized, militarized gov’t-esque group, battling with escaped prisoners (Powder Gangers), ruthless raiders (the Great Khans), and tons of new creatures and animals, as well as some familiar ones. You can choose to align yourself with one faction or all of them, as you have reputations in this game amongst towns and groups of people that affect how you interact with them, and whether or not they’ll shoot you up if you come near.

The quests are, for the most part, just as interesting, mysterious, enthralling, and huge as they were in Fallout 3. This part of the country really isn’t much of a nuclear wasteland, at least compared to D.C., so the feel of the entire game is different. It’s not as depressing and dark, which is good and bad, but definitely works within the frameworks of Fallout. This, along with the change in developer, contributes to making New Vegas feel distinctly different from Fallout 3 in very subtle ways. The way they did the dialogue seems like they were trying to make it sound like Fallout 3, but the personality of it is changed. At times it’s as refined as the dialogue in the previous game, and at times it’s a bit more rough around the edges. Either way, interactions are as strong as ever. Speech challenges are different in that instead of using a percentage system, your speech skill has to be at a certain level or else you’ll fail it 100% of the time. I am not a fan of this system. They tweaked the concept of books in New Vegas to help balance this out; there are still books, although far less of them, but there are also magazines, which grant you +10 to a certain skill depending on which magazine it is. However, instead of permanently upgrading your skill like books do, magazines are temporary. They wear off after a short amount of time, as does every item that used to recover HP, aside from stimpaks. I am also not a fan of that system, so now I just sell all my food for stimpaks.

New Vegas is not quite as good as its predecessor in my opinion, but at the end of the day it’s useless to compare them. It’s a different game made by different storytellers with a different story to tell, and their own way to tell it. Aside from the aforementioned complaints, this game is a pleasure to play and will take you right back to the Fallout world that pulls you in so deep you never want to leave. It’s also a great place to start for people who haven’t played Fallout before, because it’s much more immediately accessible than its older sibling. Any fan of adventure, RPG, or FPS games could appreciate this titan of a journey, and I urge you to do so.

tl;dr – New Vegas is as big, beautiful, and versatile as the last Fallout, with lots of new and some unnecessary features. It improves upon Fallout 3 in some aspects, while certain areas, like music and long range travel could’ve been thought out some more. Still so worth it.