The drinking part is especially painful, as you get thirsty extremely fast and water is hard to come by. You also need to sleep, eat and drink regularly. In hardcore you no longer heal instantaneously nor crippled limbs are healed by the run-of-the-mill stimpacks (so, “Small Frame” is for masochists only). It’s a new thing, for players who like a challenge or got so jaded from “Dwarf Fortress” that not getting killed in a game is not acceptable to them. Also, this instalment of “Fallout” is strangely in love with the Science skill – it’s really a good investment.Īs I mentioned before, there is the “Hardcore mode”. They sometimes influence special options in dialogues and you know that is where the good stuff is. There are no useless skills – except for maybe Survival, Mellee and Unarmed – but you’ll have to spend skill points carefully. Skills are the big players: you’ll be using Guns (an amalgamation of “Small arms” and “Heavy Weapons”) a lot. They can range from damage bonuses and, say, regenerating health in sunlight to the ability to devour corpses and such. Perks are special, mostly passive, benefits gained every few levels. “Weird Wasteland” makes the adventure… interesting at times.
“Small frame” means that you’re more agile, but you break faster (and if you’re playing Hardcore mode – more on that later – it means that you hate yourself). Traits aren’t that important, as you only select two of them. Intelligence is very useful as it gives, among other things, bonuses to experience gains. SPECIAL iš a characters physical build up: strength, charisma, luck, endurance, stuff like that – you set it up at the beginning and, barring experimental extreme surgery, they remain the same. What the Courier can manage to do is determined by SPECIAL, traits, perks and skills. And everyone could use the help of the Courier, who, in turn, needs help to unravel his own mystery. Of course, there are numerous factions and individuals making their own, less global plays. The two factions are at each other’s throats and no one really knows who will prevail in the inevitable struggle for dominance. The Caesar’s Legion is much more interesting: it’s a slave army of 86 subjugated tribes lead by the charismatic Caesar and modeled after the Roman legions of yore. The returning and vastly bigger New California Republic, commonly abbreviated as NCR, is USA in all but name and flag. The Mojave houses the mostly intact Hoover Dam and Helios One solar plant and both of those are of great interest to the two great powers of the wastelands. Of course, not everything is booze and hookers in the restored Sin City.
The city of New Vegas is controlled by the mysterious Mister House (of no relation to certain doctor) and his will is enforced by an army of Securitron robots.
The Mojave Wasteland and the city of New Vegas were largely spared from the global thermonuclear war 200 years ago, so the buildings are as intact as two ages of neglect allows it. But the Courier survived and is now ready to find out why such an inconvenient thing happened to him. Unfortunately, a man with horrible taste in jackets kidnapped you, stole the delivery, shot you in the head and left you in a shallow grave. In Fallout: New Vegas you are the Courier that was tasked with delivering a mysterious package. The TrialĮvery good RPG needs a good plot. As the second FPS RPG in the series, Fallout: New Vegas aims to polish the gameplay inherited from Fallout 3 while making some new additions of its own. Two great new powers are gearing for the final showdown in a fight for New Vegas, while the player has his own story to untangle. This one takes us to the Mojave Wasteland, a place that was only lightly touched by nuclear holocaust.
For those not in the know, it’s the game series that made adventures in apocalyptic wastelands cool. Fallout: New Vegas is the newest member of the popular Fallout franchise.