Fallout: New Vegas DLC - Dead Money

Old World Blues certainly gave me a run for my money this past week, but today I was able to sit down and plug away at Fallout: New Vegas' first expansion pack Dead Money.  Was it as good as OWB?  Check out the review, after the jump!


My first impression was that Dead Money felt a lot more like a survival horror game than that of Fallout - the desolate Sierra Madre Villa and Casino.  So set due the red cloud of pollutants that hangs in the air all around you, making breathing difficult and increasing the survival challenge of the game dramatically.  Whereas in my review of Fallout: New Vegas, I had chided its "Hardcore" mode as anything but, the "Hardcore" mode enabled in Dead Money is downright brutal.  The cloud constantly saps your health and the health of your companions - whose lives, incidentally, are linked with your own.

Lured into a bunker with a radio broadcast promising riches, you have been kidnapped and transported to the Sierra Madre Casino and Villa.  Unlike the Big Empty of OWB, the environment is rather small, containing only six unique locations.  Your captor has fitted you with an explosive collar that will detonate if you do anything you're not supposed to, like letting your companions die.

The Villas are inhabited by Ghost People: men and women who donned what they thought were protective suits to deal with the cloud, who found themselves trapped in the suits and transformed into abominations.  They focus mostly on melee and unarmed combat, which is what you will focus on too, having been stripped of your worldly possessions.

The stripping effect represented Dead Money's most unique challenge, as you were left to craft together your own makeshift weapons and healing supplies, having been robbed of what you once had.

Fighting the Ghost People head on was rarely a good tactical decision, but if you had to, they would revive themselves if not decapitated.  Great.  Getting swarmed by three or four was a sure death sentence.

But that's okay: I'm alright with the difficulty level getting a tune up.

My main complaint, however, centers on the absurd difficulty of locating and disabling radios that cause your bomb collar to explode if you are exposed to them for too long.  The trial and error came with too high a price for a game that punishes death with a load screen and a set back to your last save point.  The difficulty curved to an extent that during the last instance of avoiding the radios, it took my over a dozen attempts to get it.

But that's nothing compared to the reality that this DLC took about half the time of Old World Blues - what a disappointment.  For $9.99, I'd like to see a little more game behind a purchase like that.  And, with only one enemy introduced, the lackluster feeling was only further exacerbated.  I liked Dead Money, but I'd like it more if there was more of it to like...