Written by: Ian

 

 

 

The Fallout 3 DLC was some of my favourite DLC that has been released for any game this generation- so here’s hoping that the New Vegas DLC, "Dead Money" lives up to expectations!

 

 

Dead Money isn’t the DLC for anyone looking to move past one of New Vegas’ endings, but instead presents an entirely new area outside of Vegas, the Sierra Madre casino.

 

Filled with bizarre enemies, a toxic smog, and hundreds of thousands of caps in gold, this is a high stakes adventure that sees your courier team up with some pretty interesting inhabitants of the area in order to take down the mysterious ‘Father Elijah.’

 

Unfortunately, you have to spend ages performing the opening ceremony in the intoxicated villa area before the quest gets seriously interesting in the casino’s interior, but the story was, overall, pretty engrossing, leading me to complete this pretty large DLC in a couple of sittings.

 

 

Dead Money plays, for the most part, exactly like Fallout New Vegas does regularly. There are some twists though, especially for those that like to play on hardcore mode. The DLC is pitched pretty hard, not least because you lose all your equipment to begin with, although the rewards are great (I went from level 25 to level 31 playing through the DLC, thanks to the raised level cap, which is now 35).

 

 

The other major addition is the environmental hazards. For all players, the thick red mist will cause a fairly rapid draining of health; but in hardcore mode, then just being outside will cause a gradual reduction in health, whilst the thick stuff will kill you in a couple of seconds. I found this to be a) really way too hard, given that it takes some time before you get enough Sierra Madre chips to reliably have a large stock of healing items, and b) really annoying, because you end up constantly reloading just for taking a wrong turn. I ended up turning hardcore mode off in the end because I’d have given up otherwise.

 

The other annoyance is your radio collar. At certain points it will begin to bleep- if you don’t run out of the zone, find a radio to turn off or destroy, then you are insta-killed. Whilst it makes for a few interesting moments, again, it’s far more frustrating than cool.

 

The game is more co-operative than most of the main game. Whilst you can only have one follower at a time, most of the game is spent doing something with one of the three new followers, and their unique perks are pretty cool, they also have pretty good personalities, so it’s a shame you can’t take them out of the DLC.

 

 

Talking of which, this is also a one-shot DLC. Once you’re in, you can’t leave the casino until you are done, and once you leave, you can never return, both of which are again, a little annoying. However, you leave having gained a pile of levels, having played through some pretty good quests, and with a load of decent new equipment, so a lot of the positives outweigh the negatives.