It’s looking good, guys. It really is. After a couple hours with Fallout New Vegas, I can tell you that the game looks like a whole new wasteland, and that’s more of what we like from Fallout now.

The enemies look pretty different this time around, with some old holdovers like radscorpions and bloatflies still stalking the wastes here. The official take on geckos are animated pretty well I have to say. Combat options are more or less the same; you can take on your enemies in FPS mode, aiming from the hip or down the iron sights, which, by the way, actually makes your character aim down the iron sights ala Call of Duty. It’s a neat little touch. You can also call upon the awesome cinematic kill-powers of the VATS system again and make those tactical crippling leg shots or that one awesome headshot that sends the head model spinning off into the distance trailing blood globules.

The immersion options within the game are also increased: you can still make junk weapons at a workbench, but for those people who eschewed those and stuck with the tried and true firearms, there’s a Reloading Bench available for making different types of ammo for your guns that have different effects as used on enemies.

The hardcore mode adds a whole new dimension of challenge to the game. When you turn it on (a choice at the beginning that cannot be reversed later),  no longer can you just run around living off of stimpaks alone. Now, doctors actually serve a purpose, food and drink satisfy hunger and thirst meters in addition to just restoring trifling amounts of health, and your priorities at surviving in the wasteland just got more complicated than just gathering stimpaks and ambushing the most powerful enemies in order to grab their sweet, sweet loot. Survival becomes exactly that: survival. It’s these things that realistically send a smart player off in search of civilization instead of cruising the Wastes as either fresh meat or an implacable engine of destruction.

That said, if just exploring the post-apocalyptic world is your thing, you can just have a separate game with hardcore turned off. The world doesn’t suffer for any lack of challenge.

Now that said, there are some things that New Vegas lacks in comparison with its predecessor. They’re all minor things, little lapses in attention to detail that Bethesda Softworks didn’t suffer, but they betray Obsidian’s checkered history as a developer. The beginning isn’t very compelling, and there’s really little to compel you to forge on ahead with the main story. Additionally, the supposed gray areas of morality that this game was to introduce still function alongside the black/white karma system the previous game functioned on. Based on what actions with what faction add or subtract karma, you can figure pretty easily who the good guys and who the bad guys are.

There are also countless bugs that are in the game, but only a few of them are really game-breaking, they’re more just curious or hilarious things that happen at random that really aren’t supposed to happen. As of this writing, clips of these bugs are popping up on YouTube with some embarrassing frequency. I personally haven’t run into any of these bugs yet, I’ve only noticed a few niggling animation issues with NPCs and how their running speed isn’t very smooth or constant, but then again that just seems to be a bug left over from Fallout 3. If this appears to be a dealbreaker, don’t worry too much about it. Bethesda is coming out to address these bug problems themselves, so you can be pretty well assured these issues are going to be fixed if you weren’t comfortable with Obsidian’s programming track record.

If you are experiencing any problems with your game, check out Fallout: New Vegas Game Fixes

Overall, the first hour of New Vegas has looked, for better or worse, like a whole new campaign out of Fallout 3. I strongly suspect it’s for the better.