Back to the Vaults!
Many of the elements from the previous installment of Fallout will be familiar to players here: big environments for exploring, lots of characters to interact with and decidedly so-so combat. Additionally, some new wrinkles have been tossed into the mix: You can craft recipes and make ammunition, gamble away your hard earned bottle caps, and in hard-core mode, sustain your food, water and sleep levels to keep healthy.
While I enjoyed the basic Fallout experience in this version, I found Fallout New Vegas lacking in polish, particularly when too much is happening at one time. As others have noted, this game is as buggy as a basement full of rad-roaches. Tearing textures, floating characters, frame-rate jitters, game crashes - you name it and it's here. Not enough to spoil the game, but enough to give the impression that budget constrains limited the testing.
Ultimately, though, the most disappointing thing about Fallout New Vegas is that it is just not very interesting. Setting the story only 50 years in the future and in the southwest desert limits the level design, and even a trip to the Strip, punctuated by mind-numbing load times, is on the dull side (although it was fun to watch random npc's stagger around drunk). The story itself is uninspired, so much so that when you do find out what happened to you, you don't care much.
The Fallout series is suffering from a been-there, done-that malaise and is in need of a jolt or two of imagination. I suggest a return to the vaults, and a jump forward two or three hundred years. Let's see what that post-apocalyptic future holds in store - maybe the rad-roaches will be running things when we get out!