Sin city

I wholeheartedly agree with EDGE Magazine's excellent review of the Obsidian Entertainment-developed Fallout: New Vegas.

In many ways New Vegas is a stunning game that improves on much of what Bethesda achieved with Fallout 3. In particular, the Mojave wasteland is a far more interesting place to explore and strikes a near-perfect balance between wandering and action. Like FO3 before it, New Vegas is at it's absolute best early on when you're genuinely struggling to survive and every burnt out building or radioactive mine you encounter could be your salvation, or your doom.

The plot and story progression are also far more compelling for me, with a proper branching main quest that you can genuinely influence rather than just blindly follow to the predetermined finale. It also allows you to play the game in a morally ambiguous way rather than just sticking to the usual inflexible paragon/total bastard archetypes that plague most RPGs.

On a far less positive note, EDGE's review eloquently describes New Vegas' unforgivably dreadful technical problems and bugs that interrupt the game on a near-constant basis. Everything from glitchy textures and monsters that fall through the ground to quest-breaking scripting errors and outright crashes are infuriatingly frequent and almost totally undermine it's many excellent moments.

Obsidian have also inexplicably nerfed some of the best weapons from Fallout 3 in the name of balance, thus rendering many weapons skills (energy weapons and explosives, in particular) far inferior to regular guns. I've almost completed New Vegas as an energy weapons character and while it is definitely doable, it was galling to discover that most of the energy weapons are pathetic to the point of being almost completely redundant.

While there have been a couple of patches since launch that deal with some of the bugs, there are many more still outstanding and anyone considering New Vegas as a purchase should probably wait for another a month or two until it's in a genuinely playable state.