As the first game of the season I was eagerly awaiting, I got Fallout: New Vegas as soon as it came out and played it religiously for 27 hours. In that time I estimate that I probably finished around 60% of the side quests before finishing the main story. It gave me an overview of the wasteland in and around the strip, and most of the quests available to carry the story along. The game is available for the PC, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3. So, is it worth your time? We give you our thoughts in our full review.

As I finished, I realized that I was somewhat disappointed. First, the overall game is very much like Fallout 3. It runs on the same engine, has very similar graphics, gameplay and so on, and on those fronts it’s a great game. If you liked Fallout 3, you will find yourself at home from the get-go. It however also shares some of the technical issues that plagued Fallout 3, although I myself haven’t encountered any severe ones. Some of the ones others reported include models that didn't appear correctly, crashes and save game corruptions. Fortunately, updates have been quickly coming in to fix those issues.

My first real issue with New Vegas was that for the first half of the game, there’s a lack of purpose behind what you’re doing. There’s no visible reason to work up your faction with NCR, Legion or any other group. Fortunately, once on the strip, the reason becomes clear. As for the factions themselves, it’s not exactly a choice between two factions when one is ever present, has camps and patrols everywhere and a host of quests, while the other is a small group of dressed up raiders who seem out of a Halloween party. I wish they had expanded the faction system more.

Once the events were set in motion, and I was doing some of the more interesting quests, there were good times. There's a lot of action, combat and dialogs to keep you occupied for quite a while. However, another issue I had is that at one point my log had well over a dozen quests I couldn’t complete because of lacking skill levels like Repair, Speech or Lockpick. For some reason it seems like the quests depend on those far more than Fallout 3 did.

Finally, they learned nothing from Fallout 3’s initial ending, and repeated the exact same mistake, which boggles my mind. Without saying too much, let's just say you should finish all your side quests before going into the last part of the game. Fortunately they warn you when you're about to reach that point. I’d say for any Fallout fan this is probably well worth playing through, but between some of the weird design choices, technical issues and poor ending, it could certainly have been better.