Review by: Todd Brakke

Fallout: New Vegas is an unusually difficult game to categorize. It is confounding and wonderful. It's wholly competent one minute and hopelessly inept the next. It has stability and UI issues, quest lines can be tricky to manage, and Bethesda's implementation of the Gamebryo engine that powers it, as it did Fallout 3 and Oblivion, looks more antiquated with each passing year. You will spend an inordinate amount of time just running around. Yet, when all is said and done, the sum of the experience makes the effort entirely worthwhile.

You will find characters that stay with you long after the 30-minute closing credits sequence. You will be forced to make decisions where you don't necessarily know what the implications are or what is right and what is wrong. You will have to choose among a variety of deeply flawed and nebulous allies and enemies, not necessarily knowing which will have the best result; for you or for New Vegas. This game is everything for which the developer, Obsidian, is known: brilliance and slapdash quality, although, a bit more of the former than the latter in this case.

New Vegas, at its core, is about self-determination, and the skillful way in which it weaves its story to fulfill that theme is, by far, the game's greatest strength. Fallout 3, which was ultimately about self-sacrifice for the greater good, provoked a sense of awe and wonder as you took those first tentative steps out into a gloriously devastated world, but the disappointing way that it rode this idea right off the rails with clumsy dialog and storytelling really hurt the sum of the experience. New Vegas is the opposite of this in almost every conceivable way.

When you step into the world of New Vegas there's absolutely nothing magical about that experience, especially if you've already played Fallout 3. Part of that is just the decaying game engine at work, but really, the world Obsidian has put into place just isn't immediately remarkable. You're just some guy; a hapless courier. There's very little sense of urgency or purpose. It's not until you get to know the inhabitants of this world, and the complicated politics of it, that this game comes to life but that takes time to work itself out. Not everyone will stick around for the full ride.

I once had a college professor tell us that Moby Dick was a wholly painful novel to read for the first time; that its greatness could not be understood or appreciated until a second read-through. New Vegas has elements of that in it. At times while playing this game I was bored, frustrated, and just plain mystified as to what was going on and what I should be doing. But seeing it through to the end, in retrospect, creates a new reality and appreciation for the effort put into getting there. Suddenly, these disparate groups – the New California Republic, Caesar's Legion, The Great Kahns, Mr. House, etc. - all have a much more interesting place in the world and the way the game subtly moves you from hapless pawn into the position of kingmaker is really something I can appreciate. I may not have liked every step of getting to New Vegas's resolution, but I can tell you I'm far more likely to revisit this world again for a future playthrough than I am to return to Fallout 3. And when I do, I'm confident I'll enjoy the experience that much more.