My Big Fat Game Review
What Gets Nuked In Vegas...
...mutates into a radioactive-feral flesh-eating-ghoul-reaver in Vegas. Which luckily you'll have to take out in the most gratuitously violent way possible. Vegas has all the goodieness of the previous Fallouts and more. It seems somebody was paying attention to the modding community after Fallout 3. A lot the great mods found at Fallout Nexus are replicated in Vegas. For instance weapons mods have been added giving you the ability to add scopes, extended mags, silencers and more. Hardcore mod has also been added which gives weight to everything (almost) and requires you to eat, sleep and drink in order to survive (like real life). There are also a lot more available companions, eight in total, and you can have two at a time if one of them is Rex or Ed-E. One of my favorite new additions is the ammo bench which allows you to breakdown and build and your own ammo. Nothing better than blowing the head off a Deathclaw with a .50cal incendiary round. Although Vegas came out with a lot of bugs initially (pretty much all of which have been fixed, for the pc anyways) it is overall far superior to Fallout 3. The map has a lot more towns and characters to interact with than 3 did. Also and more importantly the majority of missions tie into each other and the main mission. It's much more intricate than the very simple main mission of 3 and it's scattered smaller mission that had no relation to the main story. The other fantastic change is reputation. How and which mission you do will effect your overall rep with different factions, but also with the smaller communities involved. This allows more versatility in your character than good, bad, neutral. Allowing you to be good on the side of bad, or bad on the side of good, or good on the side of good or bad on the side of bad the choice is clear. Part of the reason Vegas is so different and better than Fallout 3 is due to the location. Vegas avoided a direct nuclear strike unlike DC so there is a lot more civilization, as well as being packed 20+ factions unlike the measly two factions in Fallout 3. Don't get me wrong I loved Fallout 3, but in hindsight it was simplistic and rather desolate compared to Fallout New Vegas, as it should have been because of being a primary nuclear target. So yes Vegas is better. I got about 110 hours of game play out of Vegas, exploring every location and doing almost every mission. The other big difference is there are a lot more random encounters in the wasteland and lot more run ins with creatures and people. I give Vegas three mutated thumbs up, it rocks the Fallout genre giving you what you expect (dark humor and weirdness) and more. If you are playing on the PC you'll want to look into the mods available at www.newvegasnexus.com. My personal favorite is Nevada Skies which adds some very massive and very cool dust storms.