After a save, I stumbled across two small gangs fighting it out.

The world goes about its business, delivering some amazing random encounters. Whacking the view distance up to max is chilling: futuro-'50s buildings poke into the air, a giant wireframe cross stands on a hill, and at night Vegas glows on the horizon. Two years to stay exactly where you were.įallout's world of cracked asphalt and rolling deserts can still impress. New areas, characters and factions, but the same clunky inventory and character models. But while it's good to be back, the leap from one game to the other isn't nearly as large as it should have been. I've long wanted more of the same from Bethesda, and this is the hand that New Vegas deals. Wandering the wasteland now, two years on from Fallout 3, I'm both happy and disappointed. It's the triathlon of New Vegas, a gruelling slog designed to sap your strength as you play. Oh, and you should probably avoid Hardcore mode for that first runthrough. Even the final bosses can be chatted into submission if your stats are high enough. My advice: New Vegas is so skewed towards dialogue that, for the first run-through at least, you should put as much as you can in Speechcraft and Barter skills. I plumbed for my usual mix of lockpicking and stealth skills, eventually regretting my Thief-centric approach to character creation. If I found the people I was dealing with personally repugnant, I'd give them Wasteland justice. Lady Buck, I decided, was simply going to be an extension of me. What would Clint do? Or, in my game, an athletic, red-headed lady I named 'Buck'. Do you track down the man who put you in the ground, explore the desert, beat up some nearby gang members, or look for a faction to join? Crafty Buck Shot in the head, buried and presumed dead, you're caught up in a revenge tale that turns into a battle for control of the region, with you in the Clint Eastwood role.

New Vegas might be cleaner than Fallout 3's Washington wasteland, the Mojave desert having got off relatively lightly during the nuclear apocalypse, but it's still a game about survival.

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