Fallout: New Vegas (Xbox 360) review "Remember to collect those special Sunset Sarsaparilla caps, kids!"

While it was far after this point when I bought Fallout: New Vegas, I heard that it had quite the rocky beginning where deadlines caused it to be released as a buggy mess. This led to a number of its initial reviews to be a bit critical, which resulted in the staff at Obsidian losing out on bonuses tied into its aggregate score being at a certain level. And, if my occasionally-faulty memory is working this time, there also was the hilarious side effect of at least one outlet using this as justification to eschew attaching numbers to their reviews because they apparently felt guilty that their rendering a less than excellent score to a less than excellent product resulted in a less than excellent outcome for designers.

All of which makes me happy that it’s a rare occasion when I snag a game the instant it hits the market. Sure, I might not be Mr. Breaking News, but at least I’m playing games after they’ve been mostly fixed over the course of a dozen or so patches. When I played New Vegas, it wasn’t perfect. It crashed more often than I considered cool and there were a fair number of little glitches such as enemies getting stuck in scenery to give one the visual of a partial scorpion carapace twitching from a rock wall, but I got through it and had a good time without that much more angry muttering than my usual gaming experience brings out of me.

For New Vegas, Obsidian took the reins from Bethesda and made a few changes to the Fallout 3 formula. While it is an open world game, it likely won’t feel like one in the early going. After your nameless courier character gets put back together after a bullet to the face doesn’t quite kill him, he’ll quickly figure out one thing: The guy who shot him and absconded with the package he was delivering was heading to New Vegas, which is only a brief jaunt northeast of the village of Goodsprings, where you’re currently located.

The thing is, you’re not meant to go directly to New Vegas. I mean, you can try, but it just so happens that a number of this game’s most deadly forms of wildlife just happen to be between you and there. For example, take a quick walk over to the mining town of Sloan and keep following the road northeast to New Vegas and you’ll wind up perilously close to a quarry that’s been taken over by the ferocious and deadly Deathclaws. I remember playing Fallout 3 and thinking those guys were kind of overrated. They might have been tougher than the average monster, but I was able to mow them down pretty effectively. Well, New Vegas adds this damage resistance stat where the damage that can be caused gets weighed against the opposition’s armor. Deathclaws are both extremely powerful and have very durable natural armor, making it very difficult to damage them in the early going, while one swipe of their claws will deliver death to you.

Avoiding their lair probably won’t make things much easier for you, as you’ll likely blunder into a nest of absolutely gigantic scorpions or get assaulted by a cluster of oversized, quick-moving and very poisonous wasps. No, if you want to reach New Vegas, you’ll have to take the long way around, going south, then east and finally take the long road all the way north.

By doing this, you’ll get an education into how this game works. Right from the beginning, you’ll learn that there are a lot of factions you can juggle relations with. Hell, after you’ve gotten your life saved and helped back on your feet by the good residents of Goodsprings, you can immediately betray them to the local gang of bandits known as the Powder Gangers. Or you can decide to be those guys’ personal grim reaper, saving Goodsprings from them and then traveling south to both kick them out of the nearby town of Primm and then exterminating them at their headquarters in the local prison. Keep traveling south and the major factions come into play. An NCR base has noticed strange stuff going on in the town of Nipton, but due to trying to maintain a presence over more land than their numbers and efficiency can legitimately hold, they can’t spare anyone to investigate.

So, you hike over there and find that nearly every resident has been killed horribly because Caesar’s Legion came upon the place, found its residents lacking in virtue and decided to send a few messages — that their fearsome and massive tribe has arrived and that the NCR just might be powerless to stop them. After a (hopefully) cordial chat with a high-ranking Legion officer, you’ll soon head north, make it through another town and eventually reach the outskirts of New Vegas, where you’ll likely have to earn someone’s favor to actually make it onto the Strip, where you’ll then meet Mr. House, an enigmatic chap who chats with you via a computer screen about plans to remove both the NCR and Legion from the vicinity. But then, you’ll also soon meet up with a particular robot who offers you a chance to take out all those powerful entities and make New Vegas a truly independent land. What to do?!?

Well, if you’re me, that’s a pretty easy question to answer. I wandered around the game’s world, doing as many quests in as many locations as possible because all those guys could wait. There is just a ton of stuff to do in this game. You can pick up a number of companions, some of whom have pretty in-depth quests that likely will introduce you to other, smaller factions. Virtually every town, base and camp has at least a couple people needing your help in something. This game will keep you busy and, when you’re exploring, you’ll also be regularly fighting all manner of things. That’s another reason to keep on good terms with as many people as possible for as long as possible. With all the hostile animal life and radiation monsters scouring the land, a person really doesn’t need to also contend with NCR or Legion death squads.

Combat and exploration are done much like in Fallout 3. You’ll have all sorts of guns and melee weapons that you can use to attack freely, or use the game’s V.A.T.S. system to stop time and allow you to pick what body parts to aim for, with the screen helpfully showing the likelihood of your attacks connecting. By scavenging corpses and boxes, you’ll gain ammo for those weapons, as well as healing items, goods for crafting stuff at workbenches and various junk that may or may not have any actual use beyond weighing you down.



Gain levels and you’ll get points to put into an assortment of stats that will effect how your character gets through the world of New Vegas. Some improve your proficiency with the various means by which you attack foes, while others can help you find other ways to get through confrontations, whether it be talking your way past foes, hacking terminals to turn their turrets against them or by other means.

There’s a lot to see and do in New Vegas — an amount that might reach the “too much” level when you add in its four DLC campaigns. I guess this game probably is kind of like Borderlands 2 where you should create one character for the main game and another to focus on the DLC, because if you try to do them all on one file… Let’s just say that I did the long walk around and up to New Vegas, where I accessed the Honest Hearts DLC. After finishing that, I walked back down to the Nipton area and played through Old World Blues. And when I’d finished those two, I’d gained some killer equipment and a bunch of levels. Suddenly, I could blast through most enemies with very little trouble, while also being able to pass nearly every possible stat check in case I felt like taking another option.

However, when it comes to open world RPGs, I have simple tastes. Give me a large world loaded with stuff to do. Allow me to get lost in it, forgetting about the actual plot because Farmer John over there needs someone to do something about those bandits extorting him and then take care of that cave full of hungry animals preying on his livestock. Tell me that I should do things this way, but if I want to do something completely different, that’s cool. Sure, I might make a few enemies, but I also might get rewarded for being an utter bastard because that’s how life works in the wasteland.

New Vegas pulls that off. By today’s standards, its “Sponsored by the Color Brown” palette might not be the most appealing and it still is a bit glitchy, but it provided me with a lot of stuff to do and a lot of ways to do it where I had the freedom to make as many friends and enemies as I desired. Where I could liberate New Vegas or place it under the firm control of a dictator. Where I could bring order to lawless towns and anarchy to bastions of discipline. Where I could help rebuild a formerly great faction or gleefully pound that final nail into its coffin. The freedom to do all this and much more kept me invested in this game, causing me to put off its finale until I’d depleted what had been a mammoth list of quests. It might not have been perfect, but the experience was memorable.

Community review by overdrive (November 07, 2025) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.