I've played both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. I enjoy those games to a point. My biggest gripe with Fallout games in general is that they are legit just depressing. They are dark, gloomy, and everyone is bad. It ended up just putting me in a bad mood because nothing good ever happened and the world was never going to get better.
Fallout: New Vegas is *sort of* different than this. There are certainly more colors than any other Fallout game I've ever played. They have the Vegas Strip, complete with lights and hotels and all kinds of interesting things to look at. But the same overall feel is still there; everyone is bad, there are no good guys, the world is a morbid, awful place where everyone kills everyone else for a minor personal gain, and the world shows no signs of getting better regardless of what you end up choosing. It ended up depressing me just as much as any other Fallout game, and I should probably just give up on the series.
But, this game, after 10 years, is still buggy as hell. I am honestly kind of baffled that a game this old is still absolutely full of bugs. I shouldn't have to download a billion mods on my PC to be able to play a 10 year old game without it constantly bugging out. Quests broke, NPCs got randomly stuck on things, and it was full of minor annoyances with the graphics, lighting, and your character just getting stuck indefinitely on some random object, requiring you to restart the game. The game is big...but not big enough to justify the amount of game-breaking bugs this game still has.
Additionally, the map absolutely sucks. It looks like it's just trying to appear to be big, but it's full of dead ends of places you can't access without giving you any sort of idea that you can't go there until you are already there. You will see a quest marker and it looks like you can easily walk over there, but turns out it's blocked and the map doesn't even show it. The pace you move is so slow that just the process of getting from point A to point B is extremely tedious, and it makes it so much worse that you can't even access places you should be able to because the map is complete garbage.
Luckily the game is saved by the great plot, which lets you side with multiple different parties to decide the fate of the Vegas Strip, which is actually fun and interesting. Your decisions really do matter, and messing around with who you want to help or backstab is very enjoyable. The sidequests are hit or miss, but some of them are very entertaining and give you great items or perks for completing them.
Overall, the game disappointed me based on all the glowing reviews I have read. I felt that the story and average combat system (it has VATs, you can slow time and shoot certain body parts, other than that it's an average FPS-type situation and doesn't change the formula of Fallout at all) were weighed down by the bugs and the trash navigation.
7/10