Recent reviews by Grimsby †⸸

Arbitrarily prevents you from running the game on linux.

Really fun card game, was invited to the beta test and fell in love with it.

The game is not and will never be finished. This had the potential to be one of the greatest ImSims of all time but the developer gave up and all we're left with was what could have been.

This is coming from one of the few people who was a huge fan of the tabletop game before the video game adaptation was ever announced; this game is NOT what it advertised

Do not be fooled this game is NOT an RPG, it is a linear action-adventure game(hence why they changed the description right before release). It advertised itself as something like a cyberpunk New Vegas CRPG with branching narrative and player agency but ended up being a very half-assed linear GTA clone.

I don't care how good the anime was, this game had zero right to be awarded "labor of love", it did not turn itself around like No Man's Sky had done as there's almost nothing different about this game from launch outside of a few new apartments and a cosmetic transmog system. I do not care about the bugs and was willing to overlook them at launch but this game could be the most well-optimized bug free game in existence and I'd still feel the same way about it.

it's rough around the edges; The engine runs on duct tape and chewing gum, it's visually quite ugly for the time, the combat is clunky, the map is exceedingly cramped, the legion questline is cut short, and it crashes if you even look at it wrong.

but... Looks can be deceiving.

If you came from Fallout 3 you'd probably assume this is more of the same. After all, it's on the same engine, 90% of the art assets are reused from Fallout 3 as well, and while it adds some improvements to the combat it's largely the same minute-to-minute stale gunplay F3 offers.

But in terms of design philosophy the two games couldn't be any more different. Obsidian entertainment(comprised of ex-Black Isle/Interplay/Troika devs) took the general first person/real time framework of Bethesda's Fallout 3 and made a return to the west coast setting giving us the true sequel to Fallout 2, translating many of the classic gameplay elements from the turn-based/isometric games into first-person/real-time such as perks, traits, weapons, etc. and thoughtful world building and character writing that stays extremely faithful to the lore, tone and design philosophy of the originals

The combat is not great but combat is not the focus of this game, it is instead the player agency, branching narrative and roleplaying freedom almost no other game has ever come close to matching.

To give you an idea of how differently this game is structured from the Bethesda's Fallouts:
-Nothing is assumed about your character other than they eventually became a courier at some point
-The game never makes choices on your behalf at any point in the story
-You can play the entire game start to finish without killing a single person
-Conversely you can go through the entire game and kill any NPC you want, with all the consequences that brings.
-Each faction has it's own reputation on independent positive and negative scales that track your interactions with groups
-Factions are all designed to ask probing questions about the moral compass of your character, none of them are inherently good and none of them are inherently evil. All of them are practical in different ways and the conclusions you come to are determined by your characters general view of the world. Moral/ethical/utilitarian lessons aren't told to you like in a traditional story, they are asked of you and you are expected to come to the conclusion yourself.
-The world has a high level of reactivity to the player; Certain big choices made can have lasting impacts on the game world state, and also be reflected back to the player through NPCs recognizing you/your actions. Killing a character can have a ripple effect through many quests and carries whatever implied consequences of that characters death with it.
-the over 100 side quests are all intricate webs of branching narratives not only in outcome but how you can achieve said outcomes through diplomacy, sabotage, subterfuge, skullduggery or simple brute force all based on your character's: attributes, skills, traits, perks, reputation, moral alignments, previous actions, etc.
-The game's core narrative structure is a political intrigue simulator. Think of it like a billiards game; your initial strike determines outcomes, knocking down some actors and separating stripes from solids. There's 4 main quests, each of them will twist your initial perception in some way to make you rethink your decisions and gives you the opportunity to defect and even play the field as you please until you reach a definitive point of no return being locked out of certain other faction choices for any number of reasons.
-No matter what, you will always be able to finish the game through the Independent Vegas ending no matter who you kill or who you piss off, but you will face consequences for your actions.

Fallout: New Vegas is a contender for the greatest game ever made and the gold standard for what a RolePlaying Game truly is, not adhering to a linear script, but creating a story in collaboration with the game's systems taking the role of a GM that processes the players inputs into plot outcomes. It was truly a miracle NV even happened at all given the circumstances around it's incredibly short, troubled development and current rights holders, we'll probably never quite see a game truly like it ever again.

I truly cannot put into words how special this game is to me, making mods for NV is what got me into game design and in the 14 years since it's release not a day goes by where I don't think about it in some way.
To quote Noah Caldwell-Gervais, who actually has put what I'm feeling into words more eloquently than I can:
"Over and over Fallout [1, 2, NV] has influenced who I am as a person, guided what I did with my life and informed how I engaged with what I discovered along the way, which sounds like a lot to credit a game series with but a person can't control the media that shapes them. When the right piece of media hits a person at the right time it can become a part of them for the rest of their lives."