Fallout: New Vegas Previews

Fallout: New Vegas is available for hands-on time on the Eurogamer Expo floor, and a couple of sites have tried out the title in order to share their impressions. We Do Network.

When I played New Vegas the character was borderline Level 2 ranking and was right out in the middle of the desert with some shanty town near by. Graphically the game has improved very little from Fallout 3, but the change is scenery is a much welcomed change. I wanted to get into the action to see if V.A.T.S and the Pip Boy were messed around with and I can confirm to my delight that neither have been messed with by Obsidian. V.A.T.S feels as good as it did in Fallout 3 and the Pip Boy looks very much the same except the Pip Boy you have this time round seems a little newer or at least someone bothered to take good care of it. I ran into a few bandits whom were stronger than me by default, fortunately I happened to have some dynamite on me, so swooped into V.A.T.S and took the bastards out. When viewing the game whilst queuing there seemed to be a nice variety of guns on offer and hand guns especially seem to be particularly lethal this time round and easy to acquire forceful 20+ damage Magnums straight off the bat.

BeefJack.

Bodies lay on the ground in Primm. It’s bleak, but in a different way to Fallout 3’²s desolation. The sky is blue, for a start. Nothing’s particularly ruined: the place simply resembles a ghost town, repopulated by the bad guys. But the hotel is dark and troubling, run down, the power long cut to this place. The mood New Vegas establishes is subtly different to that of its predecessor, but equally effective.

There’s more variety, though. Hop over to a smaller town nearby, and you could just be in a quaint settlement in the Mojave Desert for real. Big, neon signs hang above saloon doors, while sand-dwelling vegetation springs out of the dusty ground. Life is more normal here, it seems. People are getting on with stuff. It’s just that they’re living in an America where the rest of it has basically been a wasteland for nearly 200 years.