Fallout: New Vegas

Last month I previewed Fallout: New Vegas, but wasn’t able to finish the game in the 50-something hours I had spare. I estimated the game would be 80-100 hours from start to finish, playing as a completionist. I was wrong.

Factoring in replayed sections, time spent walking across the Mojave desert with a couple of hundred kilos of salvaged gear, and long hours of shooting stuff in the head, it was closer to 120 hours. That’s 15 days, playing eight hours per day. Value for money? Extreme.

Not once did I come across a game-stopping bug as described by so many reviewers before me – nothing impacted my ability to complete any of the missions, nor did I suffer more than a few crash-to-desktops in my hours of play. (Far less than I experienced in Mass Effect 2, which is a fairly stable title and not nearly as lengthy.)

The story – at least the way it played out for me – was long and deep. New Vegas has a central narrative, but the story you play through, and the ending you get, is determined by the sum of your actions in the Mojave. Side-quests and your interactions with your enemies and compatriots all factor in.

There’s no neat and easy solution to the region’s problems. You’re going to make friends, and you’re going to lose friends. You can’t please everyone, however diplomatic you are. You can kill everyone, but you’d have to be a pretty antisocial sort to even attempt it.

New Vegas starts with a simple courier, delivering a platinum poker chip to a casino on the New Vegas strip. It ends with a PC World Platinum rating, because the journey was just so damn good.