Visiting the city of sin has never been more fun in Fallout New Vegas! With charm as captivating as its story, Fallout New Vegas hosts a cast of loveable characters and periodically good voice actors, just great enough to overshadow the many bugs, it deserves an opening to match and it delivers!

The opening starts in the heart of Vegas inside of the lucky 38 to the tune of Frank Sinatra's blue moon as the camera leaves the lucky 38 and Blue moon fades out, a NCR veteran ranger sitting atop the fabulous Vegas sign pulls out a sniper rifle and fires at a bandit the camera follows the bullet showing us how the end of the civilized world treated Vegas. the camera is obscured by sand as the shot moves further out. a band of legion slavers move out. Then a man in a checkered suit and some other less sophisticated looking men, one is digging a hole while the others look on to a person, the player character, in farmers clothes. The man in the suit lights a cigarette and the screen goes black. a slideshow voiced over by Ron Pearlman goes over basic backstory of the game, a few of the factions, and how you ended up in this situation, but it doesn’t go into details about your past other than you took a courier job, as the game wants you to make your own backstory. It cuts back to the man in checkered suit whose name is benny and is voiced by Matthew Perry (yeah, the guy who played Chandler in Friends). He gives a monologue about the situation and how he's sorry you got mixed up in this but not sorry enough to not immediately proceed to put 2 bullets through your head and bury you in a shallow grave.

The first act of the main quest consists of you chasing Benny across the Mojave and discovering factions, stories, and locations. While you can try to go from Goodsprings, your starting location and the place you were shot, straight to New Vegas but the path that way is filled with radscorpions, cazadores, and deathclaws. So instead you head towards Primm. New Vegas uses each of its locations to introduce factions and how they act. Primm introduces the powder gangers, and the New California Republic. The Mojave outpost explores the NCR and its relationship with trading caravans. Not far from the Mojave outpost lies Nipton which was over taken by Ceasers Legion and shows The Legions ruthlessness and fondness of crucifixion. The next location is Novac Which used to be a tourist attraction because of its giant concrete dinosaur which now is used as a sniper post by Boone if you talk to him and do his quest you learn about the morals of the NCR and more evil of The Legion and gain him as a companion. The final town is Boulder City a mostly destroyed town from the first battle of Hoover dam in the ruins the Great Khans and the NCR are having a stand off the khans have hostages and the NCR has cornered the Khans. You find out that the men who helped Benny were these khans. You can kill the khans and gain bad reputation with them and good reputation with the NCR  or get the khans to release the hostages and the NCR lets them leave and gain good reputation with both. After Boulder City is free side and New Vegas but that’s getting to far into the story for a review.

The big issue with New Vegas is the bugs The main quest is generally bug free but the side quest , which are the best part of the game , have many issues that can cause quests to be unable to complete which is always frustrating. And the game itself crashes frequently I played on an older Xbox 360 in 2017 the game stopped receiving patches to fix bugs before then (it has since revived one patch to reduce load times which are still pretty bad). New Vegas was my first game other than a Lego Batman game, but New Vegas crashes so much that when I bought another game and I didn’t crash at least once an hour I was genuinely surprised because I started to believe that my 360 just was a bad console. 

Fallout New Vegas is a first person shooter game and a role playing but it excels at being an RPG and largely falls flat with the FPS elements. The guns are better than Fallout 3 with the ability to use iron sights as opposed to the screen just zooming in, which is definitely an improvement but it still feels bad to use( fallout 4 runs on a better engine and has much better guns but less RPG elements. your courier has stats and also S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats (which are Strength Perception Endurance Charisma Intelligence Agility and Luck) you pick your stats at the beginning and they affect your gameplay in not just combat but speech interactions.

The downloadable content for New Vegas is some of the best. Each of the 4 story dlcs have connections to the main game for example in “dead money” one of the characters is the ex girlfriend of a companion and their story is a very sad beautiful one. Not only does each have connections to the main game but the 4 dlcs have an overarching story if your going to play them play them in order of release ( Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road). There are 2 other dlcs but they are less important, only adding items but the dlc ”gun runners arsenal” has one of the better guns : the battle rifle. But I also like the bozar it looks nice, and my favorite looking melee weapon the Nuka breaker.

Overall I think, even though it’s bugs are awful New Vegas is a great RPG worthy of the 15 dollars on XB1 and 10 dollars on steam. And it will give you many hours of exploration and fun.