New Vegas is definitely the best 3D Fallout game, and one of my favorite games of all time. Still, it's not flawless. The gunplay is janky, travelling without fast travel is boring and tedious, and the graphics and animations were outdated even on release. Oh, and the game is unstable as hell, there are a ton of bugs. But New Vegas has the guts to be amazing in spite of all this. The narrative is the backbone of the whole experience. The world and its people are written super well, and you'll get lost for hours in the stories they've got for you. The range it offers you go from generic action pieces (which fall a bit flat due to the janky gameplay) to political intrigue to hilarious black comedy and satire of our real world. A nuclear apocalypse happened 200 years ago, and society has more or less rebuilt itself. You are put into a very special position, where you get to choose the direction where it grows. This is why I think New Vegas is an interesting post-apocalyptic story: it doesn't dwell on the apocalypse too much, but instead asks how we can move on from it. While the action elements of this action RPG are more than lacking, the RPG elements more than make up for them. You really can make any kind of character you want, and the game has unique reactions to nearly every character type. Each narrative element is very interactive, and you can change almost every storyline to fit the story you want to tell. I think playing New Vegas can be compared to making and telling a story to yourself. It's really hard to break the narrative in any way, because the developers have really accounted for nearly everything you can do at any moment of any quest. If you can get past the awkward gun fights, the outdated visuals, and all the bugs the game has, this is going to be one of the best action RPG experiences you'll find. Highly recommend. And this game has a huge and active modding community, so you can always try to mod the flaws away. Do yourself a favor and try it.
