izigame.me

I'm an avid Fallout player, and I've spent countless hours on New Vegas back in the day, when it was newly released on the Xbox 360, but never played the DLC. I finally got around to starting on it now, and I highly recommend AGAINST Dead Money, despite my love for the series.
Let me tell you the positives first, to get them out of the way:
- A great setting and a decent story: A spooky, abandoned casino enveloped in a mysterious red mist, with promises of Old World extravaganza, is clearly a setting that's very well made.
- Great characters: The characters you meet along the way are interesting in the same way a lot of other more fleshed out characters in New Vegas are.
- A couple of interesting weapons (mostly melee, though).
- Interesting idea of having an enclosed economy that encourages survival a bit more (or a lot more, rather) than the regular game.
However, there are some crucial gameplay design elements that hinder this experience from becoming fun to play through in basically any way:
- There's no enemy variety: The same ghost type enemy, just with different weapons. Okay design for sure, but boring to see nothing else.
- And when you DO see something else in terms of enemies: They're unkillable holograms that you're supposed to sneak around, in this game that's very much not designed to be a stealth game as its main focus.
- The red mist: Soft blocks off areas that you want to explore by draining your health when you enter it. It also clouds the area so much that it's sometimes difficult to see what's around. At the same time, it's difficult to see where it starts and ends, given that it's literally a misty smoke and thusly not very clearly defined in terms of boundaries.
- Worst of all, however: You are forced to walk around on tip-toes, fearing for a beeping sound all the time. You can't be in proximity of certain radio frequency emitters. If you are for too long, you'll just explode. It's incredibly un-fun to have to quickly dart around while you hear beeping until you either find a radio to turn off or you explode and load all over again.
- On Hardcore mode, you are furthermore challenged by constantly draining health, broken limbs from an enormous amount of regular traps, without relatively easy access to Doctor's Bags. Which is fine, but combined with the above, you are forced to play a game of "walk a couple meters ahead, kill an enemy or disarm a trap, then save". You'll be saving like you never did before. And it kills the pacing on top of it all.
While I only played it all the way to see the experience through, and get my achievements (on Hardcore mode, even), I longed to return to the comfort of the Wasteland almost every minute of it. I have hopes that the other expansions for New Vegas will be better. It honestly wouldn't take much.