New Vegas, Con't

Okay, so the main story here is that you're a courier of some sort.  Your latest job gets you kidnapped by a guy in a bad suit, who shoots you in the head and steals your package.  Not nice.  What follows is a long trek across the Mojave Wasteland while you follow this poorly dressed casino man, doing enumerable side quests along the way.  It's the standard Fallout recipe for fun, and I must admit that after all these years it still hasn't gotten stale for me.

I always play my Fallout characters in a certain way:  They are inexorably good, but very independent.  They don't like relying on other people or being part of a larger organization.  Thus, the additional (and required) faction choices in New Vegas makes me bristle.  It's a nice new feature they've added, but I would have preferred if they didn't link them together.  What I mean is, when I do a quest I'm going to get good rep with one faction and bad rep with another no matter which choice I make.  Obviously I can decide which faction gets the positive rep, but I want to be able to choose to gain rep with NONE of them.  Because that's how I play.  It feels too limiting.

Putting this minor annoyance aside, the rest of the game is brilliant.  It looks, feels, and plays exactly like Fallout 3, and that is probably the greatest compliment someone could give to this game.  Because, Fallout 3 was a masterpiece.  There are also some areas of the game that have been expanded upon from the original -- namely, companions and crafting.

You can keep the companions feature.  As I said, I play my characters to be independent wanderers, and have no use for companions.  But I can see people who enjoy Bioware games (Mass Effect, Dragon Age) enjoying this expanded feature immensely.  I enjoy it too.  In those games.  Not here.

The crafting feature is orgasmatic, however.  So.  Many.  Recipes.  One of my favorite things to do in Fallout is simply wander around, explore, and scavenge.  I'm always one looted body away from being encumbered because I pick up EVERYTHING.  And with so many new things to craft in New Vegas, I actually get to USE all these items now!  It's a scavengers dream come true.

I would be a lot further through the game at this point, but I ended up re-rolling my character.  I didn't like some of the choices I'd made, and wanted to take a different path.  If the game is going to force me to choose a faction to side with, I certainly don't want to pick the ones who keep slaves.  Unfortunately, before I realized this, I had already won their favor.  I didn't mind going through the first part of the game once again though, mostly because it's so damned fun.