Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Best in series"

I have played a total of 82 hours of game play when it came to Fallout: New Vegas. I honestly never got a chance to complete the game before I took it to GameStop for a trade-in. However, it doesn't diminish my ability to review on this game.

Story: First-and-foremost, I rather enjoyed the story. This version didn't start off as slow as Fallout 3 previously did, and for that... it helped when it came to trying to keep the player entertained. Right from the get-go you know what you needed to do. The only problem was you had was... How?

Characters: Throughout the entire wasteland you find character after character, faction after faction trying to survive. This version gave you a lot of options when it came to how you wanted to go with you interactions with new characters and factions.

Factions: This was new. I personally loved it! It made you chose how you wanted others to look at you. If you wore the particular body armor of one faction, that factions enemies will attack you without warning. It also gave you the option to how you wanted to interact with the other factions as well. You could remain neutral and stay out of their engagements. Or you were given the opportunity to assist them reach their goal. I personally worked a lot with the New California Republic, or also known as the NCR.

Music: Fallout has always been about old-style music from the 50's. I personally didn't listen to the radio much because it always interfered with when I would talk to someone listening to another radio station in their bunker, etc.

Graphics: Honestly, it doesn't look as if they added much to the graphics, but then again... this is a MASSIVE open world environment. I didn't have anything negative about the look of the game. I was perfectly fine with how it looked.

Weapons/Equipment: You have a lot of options when it comes to what weapon(s) you want to use. They don't break as easily as they did in Fallout 3.

VATS: Nothing has really changed about VATS with this installment. It works exactly the same as it did in Fallout 3.

Downloadable Content: I played "The Divide" and it was very entertaining! I enjoyed the story behind that version.

The only issue I had with the game was the further I progressed and discovered more locations, the slower the game got. There were times when I would go into a location I had already been to earlier in the game and it would slow down almost to a "... ... ... ... step ... ... ... ... step experience" because there were more than five people walking around in the location. The game literally would freeze every 30 or so minutes the further I got. Before it would freeze, the game would do the skipping experience I just previously described. It was a major annoyance!

All-in-all... New Vegas was a very good game! I wish I would have been able to finish the game, but the freezing and skipping became such an annoyance that I couldn't even start the last mission because it would slow down so much.