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Fallout 3 wasn't a bad game - far from it - but its successor Fallout: New Vegas was most definitely better. This was a sequel that righted Fallout 3's few wrongs, setting players loose in a grittier, grimier, morally murkier nuclear wasteland, a world far removed from the Disneyland apocalypse of its predecessor, where the light side was zany and the dark side was only ever awful rather than crushingly bleak. New Vegas was more mature and morally challenging. It was also, depending on your personal feelings about the politics of the main factions, utterly chilling.I'm talking about moments such as Caesar and his Legion. I hated these retrogressive, unnecessarily savage bellends from the moment I first saw them at Nipton, and I hated them because what they represented was genuinely scary. The Legion lifestyle seemed far more horrific than Eulogy Jones' little operation in Fallout 3. Slavery was just one of several ingredients in Caesar's awfulness cake.
Yet the set-up never seems overly sensational, or underscored with villainous cliche. When you meet Caesar, he's terrifyingly sane. His vision is clear, his actions informed by persuasive logic, but his idea of Roman standards of human rights becoming the dominant moral philosophy was repugnant. In 2015, given the shocking brutality in the Middle East, it feels scary in a far starker fashion. Swap the Mojave desert for that terrifying stretch of Syria and Iraq, and Fallout New Vegas becomes tragically prescient.
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