I finished playing "Fallout: New Vegas" the other week. It is the 2nd time I have played thru it and I
played all of the DLC. I decided to play "Skyrim" a bit and it is
good, but I miss playing Fallout. It is just a more interesting universe. Fallout, for those who do not know is a dark
comedy action RPG, it is set in a post-atomic war wasteland, but contains technology
that is akin to a 1950’s vision of the future, personal computers that have
black and green displays, robot security guards that look like Robbie the Robot
of “Forbidden Planet”, an emphasis on the “Golly Gee” era of television, and
Norman Rockwell like fashion.
Fallout has laser weapons straight
out of sci-fi b movies of the 1950’s, and it makes lots of commentary on social
engineering, forms of government, and perceptions of who people are, what they
believe, and why they believe it. While
the 1950’s is key to its foundations the post-apocalypse angle is also at the
forefront as ruins dot the wasteland of the old world, most of civilization is
based around scraping together resources from the past, and making due with
what they have (for instance, the currency of the wasteland is Bottle Caps,
because they last for a long time, and are difficult to replicate).
Until the
upcoming “Fallout 4” due later this year, I guess I will just talk about the
four DLC adventure packs for the last game with each of their positives and
negatives, because none of them are flawless… And some of them are more slag
than ore.
Let’s have some categories for
evaluation: Story (which considering how this is an RPG and writing is probably
the biggest draw, it is pretty important), Environment & Characters (because
Fallout has always been about exploration), Enemies and Loot (who do you kill
and what do you get from their corpse), and lastly any Gameplay issues (cause
it is a game and that is a big deal).
"Dead Money": I both love and loath this thing. |
Story:
The mad scientist ex-leader of the
Brotherhood of Steel has located a massive technological wonderland from before
the nuclear holocaust. The Sierra Madre
Casino was cloaked in poisonous gas the day of the Nuclear War and since that
time it has remained untouched by the outside world, hidden in its mysterious
cloud. The mad scientist, named Father
Elijah (who is referenced as a major character in the game proper, but is not
seen until now) has gathered you and 3 others to “help” him break in and take
control of the Sierra Madre, using its wealth, defensible location, and an
elaborate resource system he will be able to create his own little kingdom in
the wasteland.
This is a great pitch for a series
of adventures, it is a heist with a team that you cannot trust and are forced
to work with by an unseen villainous asshole.
Your equipment is taken from you to keep you from being too hard to
control and you are strapped with a bomb collar to keep you from ditching the
mission.
I guess the use of bomb collars
makes some sense, because the main villain is a thunderously large asshole
about the whole enterprise, especially when he could have just politely asked
for help in exchange for a share of the spoils, people would have helped him,
lots of people work together in the wasteland in situations just like this
without the need for bomb collars.
"So all you want is the Facility? We get the money? Yeah, okay." |
Environment & Characters:
Sadly the
environment is as unpleasant as they come.
You start out in a Mexican villa style resort village outside the
Casino, and it all looks the same.
Boring repetitive architecture randomly choked with brown poison fog and
the occasional vending machine.
Inside the
casino is a little different, but it too gets very same old same old. There is also the issue that the automated
vendors in the game use pre-Nuke money, not the standard currency of casino
chips that the vending machines use, and not the bottle cap currency of the
rest of the wasteland, but the game still uses bottle caps to do exchanges, so
if you want to sell off some useless gear rather than just having the game
figure out how much pre-nuke currency or chips to give you it instead forces
you to figure out how much pre-Nuke currency to ask for, so I hope you like
doing algebra where finding “x” means how much fake money you have to ask for
in exchange for a 200 year old 9mm handgun.
There are
four speaking characters, along with an elaborate background story to what
happened to the Sierra Madre. I feel
that the main villain, Father Elijah is competent, driven, and dangerous, his
voice actor does well, but I see a few holes in his plan. The rest of your team is full of colorful
characters, though their dialogue is really repetitive, I liked the final
resolution to their stories, but only liked interacting with the mute woman
because she had no dialogue to repeat endlessly (though even that had issues
because when you talk to her they have text to describe what she is miming but
the descriptive text is not on screen long enough for you to read all of it).
"...a mysterious blood red cloud began to roll across the Mojave, then West toward the Republic, no one knew where it had come from. Only that it brought death in its wake." |
Enemies & Loot:
The only
enemies that you will regularly encounter are giant cockroaches (which are piss
easy) and the Ghost People, who are mysterious jerks in hazmat gear that live
in the sewers beneath the Sierra Madre.
The GP leave traps everywhere so be prepared to have your legs crippled
every time you walk thru a doorway. The
GP also regenerate and pretend to be unconscious to ambush you later, so you
have to dismember them or burn them to dust to make sure they don’t get back
up.
They are very creepy for a while, unless you know how to use a spear. |
The loot is
alright, you are given a steady number of casino chips to spend in vending
machines, and the Ghost People have some rather brutal weapons, like a gauntlet
with a bear trap affixed to it that cripples your limps. The real issue with the money comes in the
final confrontation (SPOILERS for the
rest of this paragraph) in which you are forced to leave behind a few dozen
gold bars (each worth 10,000+ caps) in order to escape the casino’s lock down,
otherwise you are entombed and lose the game.
It kind of plays into a story theme about letting go, and being dragged
to hell by the weight of your own greed.
You might just end up feeling like you went on a grand adventure just to
leave (mostly) empty handed.
Gameplay:
And this is
where it all goes to pot. The bomb
collars are the WORST. They can go off
because you are too close to a radio or speaker that is playing a strange
signal, you have a few seconds to back up before you are killed… But you often
have to go thru an area with a speaker and you have no way of figuring out
where it is if the thing is hidden behind a wall or stack of shelves, so you
often have no chance to shoot out the speaker/radio. You will die A FUCK TON. I think I died 40+ times from this bullshit.
The Ghost
People would be interesting bad guys, but quickly become boring, they just lack
variety. And if you have the “Bloody Mess” perk which causes people killed by you to explode in gore, they the GP’s
only clever feature of getting up after pretending to be dead to be a
non-issue. And the whole mission gets
even easier if you have a lot of ranks in melee weapons which are all over the
place and will be the default way of killing things, and the GP are
aberrations, so if you have the “Purifier” perk which gives you a melee weapon
damage bonus against aberrations then you will go thru them like butter. And nearly all of the traps that serve to
soften you up and slow you down are rendered close to useless if you have the
“Light Step” perk. If you have the
“Them’s Good Eatin’" perk then the whole thing becomes fantastically easy
because you will have plenty of time to recover from injury by eating all the
sausage you will find.
This image does a lot to encapsulate the humor of the main game. |
Overall Final Verdict:
I might
have lied about loving this. The more I
think about it the more flawed this becomes.
It is claustrophobic, lacks variety, and is excessively oppressive
without enough dark humor to balance it out.
And the cherry on top: you can never go back, all the other DLC’s allow
you to return to their environments to fully explore them, get more gear, and
other fun little completion activities, this one doesn't.
So the game basically tells you, “and stay out” as soon as you exit,
like it didn’t even want you to play it from the get go.
______________________________
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