More DLC Like Dead Money, Please!
For the first time in, I dunno, six weeks I found myself with an unusually empty weekend. I was meant to be packing for my big move to the city next week (which only dawned on me earlier today that it is in fact, next week). Instead I polished off Fallout New Vegas’ DLC, Dead Money. Let’s just get the fact I’ll likely refer to it throughout this post, in err of course, as Blood Money out the way. Hitman seems to have had a lingering effect.
I usually turn a blind eye towards DLC. I find it rarely delivers in terms of content, often feeling like a watered down level(s) of the game, consequently meaning I begrudge spending almost a tenner on it. Meh. Dead Money was massively challenging, therefore felt considerably lengthy for a game add-on. Basically, I felt I got my money’s worth with all the time I put into it, and the locations felt quite varied, too. The only real disappointment being the Achievements totaled a mere 140 Gamerpoints.
What makes Dead Money so challenging? Okay, let me be a total douche, as always, and throw the fact I was playing the game on Hardcore out there (I feel I have to justify this for all the people who play on Easy and will comment telling me I’m rubbish at gaming for finding it tough). But on top of that, your character is fitted with an explosive collar around their neck, which is regularly disrupted by radios and alarms leading to combustion and, of course, immediate death. Add to that a hazy toxic cloud that has settled in many parts of the location, eating away at health rather quickly when you inevitably pass through it, and lethal holograms that will instantly kill you upon detection, there’s a lot of reloading earlier saves to do! Well, at least there was for me.
AND THAT’S OKAY. This is the exact type of DLC I would love to see more of.
If Dead Money has set the standard for New Vegas’ forthcoming expansions, then I’ll definitely be downloading them. Especially as I had completed Fallout New Vegas and was close to retiring it to my cardboard box (‘cos I’m moving, remember, so everything is in cardboard boxes), I felt I wasn’t going to get much else out of it. I mean, I’ve been chipping away at it for four very busy months.
Which reminds me, when I leveled up in Dead Money I decided to unlock the perk of uncovering all locations in the Mojave wasteland. I was a bit apprehensive about doing so, it kind of felt like cheating; shouldn’t I have simply done a bit more exploring? But I figured that since I was done with the main quest, it was going to help me squeeze a bit more out of the game yet. And it has done. It turns out there were still a ton of locations, and therefore quests, to discover.
So, I’m still not quite done with Fallout New Vegas. I think there are another three add-ons due to be released, by which point I’ll hopefully have not grown tired of the Mojave wasteland. I mean, I have spent over 70 hours there already…
. I think I stopped playing around 30-40 hours in, not sure why, I think it’s Dragon Age 2 that has kept me occupied for a while but then again I’ve been playing less and less video-games lately. It’s a bit weird.
The Tomb Raider series means a lot to me, and while I admit it has lost its footing in recent years, I’ve always stuck by Lara. The latest Tomb Raider, however, has been completely re-imagined and – at some points – doesn’t even feel like a TR game. It’s a welcome change, though, and has me well and truly hooked.
Christoffer Radsby