This game is superb in almost every way, except one.
This game is the 4th installment of the Fallout series, and not including the first 2 which a can't talk about because I've never played them, are one of my favorite game series of all time. Fallout 3, I thought, was a great game, but I could never beat, because the game kept locking up during a story critical mission, and Fallout: New Vegas is more of that, with more additions, and less game ending glitches.
The story is: you are a courier tasked to deliver a chip to New Vegas, a post-apocalyptic version of Las Vegas, when some theives steal the chip from you and shoot you in the head. You wake up in a doctor's office, and everyone thinks you'll want revenge for this. While all of the main missions are to help getting your revenge, the courier can really get destracted from his steaming revenge by side missions and mini-games, like he has ADD or something.
The main story isn't the focus here, and if it was, this game wouldn't have lasted the title screen with me. The main story takes a back seat to other characters and side missions, like the Elder Scrolls games. Which makes sense, because they're both from Bethesda, but, I like Fallout more than Elder Scrolls, and here's why. The Elder Scrolls have a complex leveling up system where training in certain areas level those areas up only, and leveling in certain areas can be a real pain, like leveling durability means taking hits to toughen yourself up. This means it takes alot more time to start playing the way you want to play. Fallout is more straight foward. When you level up, you set your stats where you want and then you pick a perk to go with your level and stat setup. Plus, you can set your main stats when you start the game, so you can start out playing with your style to start with, and the perks can compliment your style.
Also, there is always a certain enemy in the game that can give you a problem, but never got too hard or frustrating to stop playing, or bang my expensive electronics together. For example, I was a durable, powerful, but slow unarmed and explosive expert, and a friend of mine was an agile, but weak stealth, melee, and slight gun expert, and he had no problem with Deathclaws, which are basically demons, where if I had no landmines, I was going to take a 3 foot claw up the mariana trench, but I had no problem with Cazadors, which are a giant butterfly and wasp mixed, but my friend was busy sucking on poison thorax for most of the time.
The side missions are all nicely varied, as well, and give the game a ton of replay value. BUT, there is a pretty big flaw, that I was saving until now. Remember when I said that the game has less game ending glitches than Fallout 3? Well, there are no shortage of glitches in this game, and while most are funny, some are frustrating. Glitches are rampant in this game, and one of the more annoying ones is with a weapon called the Archemedes Ray. You only get one shot per day with it, and it's essentially a f%@# everything up button. A giant beam of death drops from the sky and kills anything that you point it at. The problem is that it's slow, and takes a while to lock on, but sometimes it wont lock on to a spot properly and just keep almost firing. Once I got this glitch and it kept randomly trying to lock on to the spot I was aiming at, but didn't fire until I was in New Vegas, and just happened to be looking at the ground at the time. Half of my health was gone, everything around me was dead, I lossed reputation there, and everyone was trying to kill me.
There's alot of other glitches, but most of them are funny, like dead enemies fusing to the ground and having floating seizures. One kept following me, and didn't stop, until the beam of death erased it from existance. I also have a few nitpicky problems with it, like why can't you get inside your partners? But none of these are deal breakers, and this game is great, despite it's flaws, and I highly recommend it to any RPG or FPS fan.