Fallout: New Vegas - Dead Money Review (Mr. Dangerous)
The average for this game is "mixed", and I honestly think that's an accurate representation of the DLC quality. The story and characters are decent, but the concept is amazing, but the execution can get very questionable. And before anyone tells me to git gud, I didn't find this DLC to be too hard, I just thought it was poorly designed and those poor design choices made it less fun than I was expecting it to be.
Let's tackle the big divisive topic first. The radio system is an interesting design choice with a bad implementation. The radios are deliberately hidden in obtuse places, making finding them a game of hide-and-seek. The worst part is, some of them can be broken, and some can't, and there's no consistent way to tell which one is which until you're staring it in the face, at which point you are almost certainly dead if its indestructible.
I think the radio system could work, restricting player movement and introducing risk/reward mechanics based on physical location is a good idea on paper, but in practice the player lacks enough information about the radio to make a real decision that isn't quicksaving, sprinting, and praying. In my opinion, that isn't very fun.
I would fix the radio system by having destructible radios and indestructible radios give out distinct frequencies or beeping. Make it subtle, the player should have to stop and listen to find the distinction, but knowing whether or not you're supposed to find and break the radio, or run as fast as you can through a section, would be a massive quality of life improvement to the DLC.
Another fix I would suggest is to make a better implementation of radio frequency relative to the player location. I wore good headphones for the entirety of my Dead Money playthrough, and not once did I feel like I could accurately locate a radio based on the sound it was playing. I shouldn't need a surround sound speaker setup for this fix to work. I should be able to use regular stereo headphones to accurately deduce radio locations. If the "ghosts" can accurately find my location based on noise I make, I should be able to accurately locate radios based on their noise.
Something else that is kind of iffy in Dead Money is the combat. Fighting ghosts using the game's rather boring melee or unarmed combat system quickly becomes tedious since they have so much health and you do so little damage, and since you're always using melee weapons, it's never that much to ask of the player to hit them an extra time after they're downed so they stay down. I can imagine players scrambling to finish off ghosts when they're fighting multiple at once, but in any situation where you fight more than 2, it's ALWAYS better to run past them, making it a moot point.
I think this DLC could've used a couple unique melee/unarmed combat mechanics to spice up the gameplay and make it more fun. Off the top of my head, they could've had some kind of stagger system where you can push one ghost into another and they both fall over temporarily, kind of like classic Resident Evil. The player would need to make the choice between running by large numbers of ghosts, or attempting to setup a domino-like stagger of them together, making them vulnerable and potentially earning them more resources.
Last big complaint here. The quicksave system removes a majority of the tension from this DLC. Having some way to limit the ability to save and quicksave would've MASSIVELY improved the survival horror atmosphere of the Sierra Madre. An idea you could implement is turning quicksaves into a resource the player has to manage, like only letting them buy quicksaves at machines. Then you could severely limit when and where regular saves can happen. This would force the player to actually THINK about what they're doing, try to CONSERVE resources, and actually have to solve problems that may arise from unexpected mistakes or bad encounters, instead of loading yet another save. This would also disincentivize save scumming for the perfect ending, which would help to drive home the DLC's core theme about letting go of obsession.
All in all, the DLC is beautiful, moody, exciting, and disappointingly poorly executed.
Dead money gets 7/10