Yang2020 Path To Presidency...is another great game. That should already say a lot about it. It's good.
This game takes place in New Ve- I mean, the Mojave Wasteland (Although a big part of the story is settled in New Vegas and it's clearly the main shining dot here). A big lovely desert with all the perks from a post-Great War location, such as: super mutants, giant mutated animals and a constant struggle of power. Lovely! Seriously now. The Mojave Wasteland was and it still is a desert, they nailed that perfectly. There's a LOT of locations to go to. Caves, cities, mountains, underground bases! VAULTS! So many locations with each of them being (mostly) different from each other. A lot of effort was put into them and it shows. So many items and loot scattered and hidden around... it was always nice finding a valuable item hidden between a seemingly empty room. Although it definitely felt boring and repetitive sometimes to just open every container in a room and hope there was something useful inside of them otherwise welp, you wasted time!
The diversity in equipment in this game is simply AMAZING. So many outfits, so many drinks, so many drugs, drank an drugs... SO MANY GUNS!! From the throwing spear to the plasma grenade, from the 9mm pistol to the gatling laser, this game's weapon diversity truly amazed me. And the game's skill system made it really fun to make a character focused on certain weapons, adding even more fun to the whole deal (even if it didn't felt like it actually changed much).
With the exploration and looting being so nice, it's a shame to know that the combat is HOT GARBAGE. The hud feels weird plus, mainly, gunplay feels clunky and actually aiming with guns feels like a chore. Most of time I just found myself either sniping an unmoving target with a shot to the head and if enemies were moving I'd just walk to them or wait until they were close enough to me so I could "aim" at their general upper-torso area and hope they got enough headshots to die. V.A.T.S. Truly is a mechanic made so you could ACTUALLY shoot at stuff. I tried using True Iron Sights during my first hours of the game and it felt so unnatural that I had to switch to the old normal game aim. It wasn't just the guns that felt bad to use, the melee combat was just... ouch. It can be summed in just running up to the enemy and spamming attack on him until he dies or doing heavy running attacks (run + hold attack)/heavy attacks on them until they are forcefully thrown dead to the ground or, if you have companions (why wouldn't you?), just sitting back, relax, and watch your companions slowly poke away at the enemies' health bar while you do cheap potshots at the baddies. Animations mostly for the melee combat are just... not good. Everyone seems way too fast. Looking at your character doing a heavy running attack in third person (or better yet, looking at ANYONE doing a heavy running attack) they move WAAAAAY too fast. It's like they do an action that should take 5 seconds in 1 second. Bodies spin and arms move unnaturally fast. It's off-putting. Combat is basically you just shooting at enemies' weak spots/Heavily bashing enemies repeatedly until they drop dead while in-between drinking 10 bottles of Sunset Sarsaparilla and Nuka Cola while poking yourself with stimpacks... Still. Even with all that being said, I'd be lying if I said I didn't have fun with it. Fun made even better with the equipment and perks I had.
The story is basically: you get shot by this dude. You don't die. You now want REVENGE. but just summarizing it like that makes me feel bad and is in general a bad way to talk about it. You have simply SO MANY CHOICES!! You can choose to do things your own way, ally with others or just plainly kill everyone. It's amazing! Factions and characters all have well fleshed out backstories and there's no "true" way to do things, you are supposed to do whatever you want to do (or roleplay, if that's your thing).
One thing (or MANY things) that hampered my progress were bugs. This game is REALLY buggy and sadly it shows a LOT. It crashed about 30 times for me during all the time I spent with it and I played it for about 130 hours. That's one crash every 4.3~ hours (quick mafs). That's really not good. Now it would be ok if it were just crashes, I save like a maniac anyways, but textures "flashing". Enemies bodies bending and "stretching" infinitely across the horizon, items "re-setting" themselves when you pick something where other items are (now this seems more like an engine thing but I'll still add it to the list) and having the sound slowly disappearing until I couldn't hear anything and it crashing after that. Random crashes, crashes after entering or exiting an area, items noclipping through the ground and other smaller things (killing an enemy and seeing their body fly to the horizon, Companions getting "stuck" somewhere and going around a massive area to get to you, etc). This game is RIDDLED with bugs and even though some were small and funny, saving every 3 minutes because at any moment you could just crash and lose progress is not a fun thing. I had some mods to help ease the bugs too and they still happened. Ouch.
Oh wait. This game has "Vegas" in its name. That's right folks. Gambling, games of chance and casinos! Yay! Everything that I hate. Now this is more of a personal opinion but I just dislike anything gambling-related so naturally with this game having "NEW VEGAS" stamped in bright and shining letters I couldn't help but go "eugh" every time I saw anything gambling-related... which is about half of the game and one of the game's main focus. Ok. Still, I have to say, everything was so well made. Roulette, Slots, Blackjack... I can't help but feel happy whenever I win BIG and end up leaving the place with 5x the amount I put in the machine.
Music: Game music? Eh. It sets the mood and can be ominous and scary sometimes (the one with the laugh in the background is a tad spooky) but I wonder who thought that nails on metal, horns being blared and more cacophonies like that would sound like something good . Radio music, though? FANTASTIC. Some absolute BANGERS there. Big Iron, Ain't That A Kick In The Head, Something's gotta give and many many more jazzy classic old tunes to wish for a nuclear winter to.
Yang2020 Path To Presidency has a lot of problems and it simply felt boring sometimes to do the same stuff over and over again but goddangit was the grind... "fun". Getting better guns and armor, finding secrets, doing actually interesting missions and shaping the future of New Vegas... it was fun. The game does feel dated and "ugly" but it still has charm and I had a nice experience with it.
Good game!
