When you’re about to enter a casino during the post-apocalypse, the last thing you want to surrender at the door is all your firearms. Who knows if you’ll need your handy assault rifle to gun down some errant mutants or nutso military extremists. But as we start our hands-on time with Fallout: New Vegas, we realize we have to do just that.

Wandering an abbreviated section of the famed Vegas Strip — complete with drunken 9-to-5ers frolicking in a water fountain — we hop into Tops, a nearby casino, only to be greeted by a clerk behind the front desk. Absolutely no weapons are allowed past the entry point, but with our Speech skill artificially inflated for demo purposes, we manage to talk our way in with our pistol. The greeter will “overlook” the pistol if you play your cards right, but any bigger guns have to be checked in.

Once you’re inside the joint, you’re free to ignore any mission markers on your map display and wander the gambling floor. You can lose wads of chips at everything ranging from slot machines to roulette to Black Jack. If you win too many times, though, prepare for the casino’s muscle-bound management to swing by and “urge” you to cash out your winnings. We try our hand at various different games, and the Obsidian rep on hand mentions that in the final game, you can go up to the in-house Aces theater to watch “live” shows if you feel like it — and even pick up some nifty quests in doing so. For example, if you talk to one of the theater managers, he might ask you to keep an eye out for any good performers during your wanderings in the wasteland.

After we cash in our chips, we move to a different area and find ourselves in the desert outside the Strip. We discover a war zone fought over by the rival factions of the Wasteland-protecting New California Rangers (NCR) and the brutal, slave-trading Caesar’s Legion. Our goal is to make nice with the NCR at their makeshift military installment, Camp Forlorn Hope.

If you’re rooting against the NCR, you can sneak into the camp if you secure the right uniform, but for this runthrough we’re going in with no allegiances, so the coast is clear. You need supplies, and they need help. After talking to the camp’s captain, you’re sent on a few errands to earn their trust — like visiting a nearby power plant to reroute electricity, as well as assisting the resident doctor tending to injured soldiers. After dispatching a few Fire Geckos on the path to the power plant and wrapping up an amputation or two for the doctor (thanks to a high-enough Science skill), we find ourselves with a brand-new armed companion!

With our buddy in tow, we’re able to take down a nearby Caesar’s Legion outpost. Our sights are set on eliminating the head goon in charge, and with some rather skillful ducking, dodging, and weapon handling, we get it done. Afterward, we head back to the NCR camp to reap the supplies we came for in the first place.

We’re told we could’ve played it the other way around and aligned ourselves with Caesar’s Legion by wiping out all the goody-two-shoes soldiers in Forlorn Hope, but we’ll sate our dark sides when New Vegas ships. For now, we’re happy to be playing it at all, and with its refined controls and crazy amount of side quests, it’s turning out to be one of the highlights of the coming Fall gaming season.