Fallout: New Vegas
Review
2026-10-12
I'm crouched outside a caved-in hardware store, Ratslayer, my unique rifle, aimed at a dirt-caked woman wearing a bikini and armed with only a pool cue. I tap the trigger, the camera zooms in, and her head pops off, a gutter Buddha’s serene smile on her face as it sails off into a bin. The game informs me my Karma has increased. Meanwhile the woman's headless body is possessed by the megaton of bugs Bethesda has infused in the Gamebryo engine and it pinwheels at an extraordinary velocity like a Beyblade let loose by an eight-year-old who just chugged a full Monster energy. Welcome to New Vegas.
Turns out that about 15 years is long enough to forget almost everything about this game and enjoy it fresh. I did a little inventory of the achievements on my original 2010 run and was happy to see I completed my first playthrough in Hardcore and apparently did the Yes Man route ("Whatever that is," I mumble to myself). Load up a new game and next thing I'm looking at that ceiling fan and I start laughing because I don't even have to see Doc Mitchell to imagine his haunted, bugged ass floating around, head spinning about like the Exorcist girl got real old and real ugly.
It is funny coming back after so long because New Vegas has taken on a mythological status in the intervening years. I bought this bad boy at launch along with 5 million other people and everyone I knew loved it. So it's odd that every redditor or YouTuber with too much oxygen and too few brain cells feels the need to tell you New Vegas was once unloved and actually only True Gamers will get it. Nah fam, this weren't no undiscovered gem. It was a Bethesda-published game, anointed from the get-go. You weren't fuckin' Christopher Columbus for discovering it. No wait, you ARE Christopher Columbus because just like him, you showed up to a thing everyone already knew about, planted a flag in it, and proudly declared "FIRST!" and then gave everyone your rancid Western Disease, video-essays.
Sorry, had to get that revisionist history bullshit out of my system before I switch gears to gushing positivity for a thing I love.
It's the little things and it's the big things.
The little things like when you wander off the beaten path near the start, you see a sign that says "Warning: Deathclaws Ahead!". Only the first time I played this I didn't see that sign. The main quest folks told me to go south, "Follow the highway to Primm, the roads are safer." I said, "Fuck that." I'm doing the opposite. I'm King Danger. I got a revolver and I'm a cowboy and the three dead twitching raiders in the dust of Goodsprings are testament to that fact. I go north and I sweat a little bit when I fight and kill a Radscorpion the size of a Miata. But I feel good. Damn, they made some challenge for those who don’t follow instructions? What is this, Morrowind? I trudge on.
Out of nowhere the combat music starts. I see nothing, no red indicator on the compass. Then I see a giant mass flying through the air, two long reptilian arms outstretched as if to embrace me, as if to say "Welcome, oh brave traveler! You who have boldly gone against the helpful hints of the designer, I am your shepherd, here to escort you back to where you belong." I hear those three horn notes play and I know I am playing something special.
It's the little things like the storytelling that is clever and deep but happy to be soft-spoken. Mean Sonofabitch's backstory, left for you to piece together yourself. The man at the liquor store tells you he was saved by Tabitha. No quest, no marker. But hours later on a totally different rescue mission I climb Black Mountain and I meet Tabitha, and it all comes together. Wondering why the town's called Novac and immediately understanding why a bunch of illiterate wasters would call it that when I see the sign out front of the motel, "NO VAC(ANCY)". Harland talking about those "fine lookin' Ghoulettes," especially the one with the "yellowest smile". Or just letting you be a horrible bully:
Courier: Are you okay?
10 of Spades: Oh, yeah. F-fine. Just a little st-st-stutter. Had it since I was a kid. Doesn't stop me from k-kickin' ass.
Courier: Are you s-s-sure?
Fuck, man, I cackled at that being an option.
It's the big things like the interconnectedness of the world. The White Gloves quests are interlinked in a particularly delightful fashion. (Spoilers for this quest chain.) Guy outside says there's some cunt baron who rips everyone off inside and he wants his life ruined. You talk to the baron and he's like "Help me find my failson!" So you talk to the White Gloves and eventually find out they're ex-cannibals and that one of them captured the son to feed him to the group to make them cannibals again. There's a lot you can do here. You can convince the guy who wants revenge to just go home with a speech check. Or you can kill the dad. Or the son. Or the dad and the son. Or you can save the son. Or you can kill the son and then scoop up his blood and spatter it over daddy's bed and bathroom and frame him for the murder which then leads to him getting wasted by a RoboCop in the casino. And if you do that last one you in fact end up in a perfect spot if you go down the Caesar's Legion path because Caesar wants the White Gloves on his side and if you do the exact thing I said--which leads to the White Gloves going back to cannibalism--they love you and it's basically a freebie.
To have 3 quests all interlinked on this one thing with all those options spraying out in a kaleidoscope of skill checks is truly incredible shit.
That interconnectedness is everywhere, like when you talk to Arcade Gannon and realize Caesar was a Follower of the Apocalypse.
Caesar, the best villain in any game not named Emet-Selch. But where Emet-Selch needs three expansions and hours of cutscenes to build up a mystery and reveal his motivations, Caesar just needs five minutes of your time. I forgot how riveting it is when you ask him how the Legion got started and it just keeps going and going. Like, yes, brother, tell me about Pax Romana and Hegelian dialectics. It helps that I've watched The Wire since I last played and can appreciate John Doman being the perfect fucking casting for Caesar. Pure confidence and arrogance, calm yet instilling a little terror in you. You are in the lion's den and the lion knows he is stronger than you and he is smarter than you.
It's funny that John Doman is so good because the real star of the cast, Matthew Perry, is stinking up the joint as Benny. Rest in peace, man, but most of his lines sound like he's reading them for the first time with zero context or care about what they're going into. Only when he has the occasional joke in between expositional horseshit do we get a little bit of that charm that Bing'd him into every household a decade prior.
It takes a special kind of mental illness to get the "Win 30 games of Caravan" achievement. It's a game built around fucking over and--implicitly--getting fucked over. After a couple games played for fun where I enjoy unpicking and understanding the twisted logic of using Queens to reverse order, Kings to double the value of cards, Jacks to remove cards, and Jokers to...Jesus Christ lemme consult the Joker Spreadsheet--do something, I eventually make the Cheese Deck of 10s, 9s, and 7s that means I can always form a column of 26, the winning number of Caravan.
I sidle up to No-Bark Noonan to take his smelly handful of schizophrenia caps and start the game by laying down my 10s, one in each column, to start my 10-9-7 combo. No-Bark plays a Jack to remove my 10. Ok, well, I don't have another 10, so I'll just start stacking 9s on my 10s to build up that nice 26. Eventually I get another 10, so I add it. No-Bark plays a Jack to remove my 10. Alright, uh, I'll just play a 9 and then a 7 and then--No-Bark plays a Jack to remove one of my different 10s. FUCK, No-Bark, you twisted hillbilly sonuvabitch. Ok whatever it's fine. I play a Queen on my 7 to invert the direction so I can play another 10 and I'll just wait for another 10. I'm sure I have two more in the deck. No-Bark plays another Jack to remove my last 10. I press Start, load to before the game, open VATS and unload two .308 rounds from my Hunting Rifle directly into his greasy witless head so it turns into a spray of slow-mo pink mist. FUCK. Gathering my composure, I press Start and reload my save to restart the process.
No-Bark will wager first with 200 caps, then after each time you beat him, you whittle his funds down till he has a solitary cap. You beat him one more time and lo and behold he's ready to play again, this time wagering ZERO caps. No-Bark is the only player I found who will play after running out of caps. He's just in it for the love of the game. Me too, brother. Caravan is great. Just know I'm still going to fucking kill you if you play another Jack.
You know my one real complaint? The fast travel points suck fucking ASS. Getting to Caesar, you have to do that whole wiiiindy fucking walk up. Can't just walk up to him, nope. Gotta walk around and then up a cliff then through a gate into another zone where--guess what--we have to walk around some more fuckin' rocks. You'd think I was on a hike in actual fuckin' Zion National Park. And even the Strip, your one option to fast travel to is...the ENTRANCE. That's it. Wanna go to one of the casinos, enjoy walking through 2 or 3 different load screens to get to your location.
And listen, all Bethesda games are like this to some extent. Oblivion has the decency of including a Speed stat and an Acrobatics skill so the worst run to a quest giver is like 20 seconds when you get good. And Morrowind, which has almost NO fast travel, has an even MORE broken speed stat so you can just zip to--and through if you're not careful--your location. But here even building my entire character around the uhhh ONE perk that increases move speed this shit still feels like work.
I could complain about the difficulty being piss easy (just turn it to Hard). I could complain about half of the high-level Speech checks making no sense (Courier: <makes basic observation>, Other Person: <immediately folds>). I could complain about the Pip-Boy being yet another dipshit Bethesda interface completely incapable of supporting the sheer amount of objects you slurp up nonstop into your inventory. I could but I won't.
Because I'm too busy reveling in the bugs.
Lily, the Stealth Lady, has the loudest footsteps in the entire game, and when she turns invisible it makes an incredibly loud sound effect. If you're crouched in combat she'll be spastically going in and out of it as she attacks and it creates this fucking deafening reverb. Heaven help you if you go into VATS while she's doing it which dilates the mini-explosions to seconds of real-world time. I legit had to turn the volume down on my TV. The one lady who's all about stealth is literally the loudest entity in the Mojave.
Or the dog with the head poking through the door. I'm shooting its peek-a-boo-ass head repeatedly when next thing I know the motherfucker phases through the door. I react quickly, slamming the right bumper to open VATS and queue up two 95%-chance headshots with my .50 cal. Point blank they both miss. What can I say, I got outplayed.
But let's pour one out for the King of VATS. I didn't know he was hurting until it was too late.
And the truth is, while the allure of being enveloped in Caesar's rhetoric is what got me to spin up another playthrough, it's the sheer jank that keeps me playing. It's the fact that one quest was never completable because the quest location was under a mountain, the NPC I needed to talk to interred beneath it for all eternity. Or the room where I picked up Ratslayer full of containers melting into the floor. Flying Cazadores, sure, but flying Deathclaws, flying Geckos, flying Ghouls. New Vegas is nothing but a land of possibilities, where any entity can fly, float, or clip through any obstacle in their path. Build a character that can punch an enemy so hard the game crashes. Or just accidentally kill The King. It's all here, just waiting for you. I've seen it all. Again. And I'll be back in another 15 years.