Goatmoose

I hardly write anything anymore. One thing I can usually be counted on to write is a review of a Fallout DLC. And folks, today marks the release of Honest Hearts, the second DLC expansion pack for Fallout: New Vegas. And much to my dismay, I am sorely underwhelmed.

Let me preface by stating that I played through the Honest Hearts story, got both endings and bagged all 120 achievement points in just over three hours. That’s $3.33/hr. And I even did all the optional missions that have no relevance to the actual plot. Let’s take a look…

Looking back in time, the Fallout 3 DLC packs were grand, exciting things that not only added to the story and the depth of Fallout 3′s main track, but provided excellent discoveries and characters along the way. When Dead Money came out for New Vegas, I was expecting the same. Instead what we got was a Saw-esque scenario that not only lacked relevance to the main story, but failed to capture the spirit of Fallout the way the DLC packs for its predecessor did. It was, however, at least something that you could spend more than a couple hours working on, which is more than I can say about Honest Hearts.

Honest Hearts puts you in front of Joshua Graham, the famous Legate of Caesar we’ve been hearing about the whole game. He was forced into retirement after the battle of Hoover Dam when Caesar had him covered in pitch, burned, and chucked into the Grand Canyon. Turns out he lived and has been hiding out in Zion National Park with a couple gangs of folks, has a bandaged face and is a relatively likable guy. He’s revered by his followers and wants you to help him protect them from another group of nutjobs that pretty much look and act the same as Graham’s followers, but we’re told they are bad. That’s essentially the point. Nothing really made me give a crap about him or his people, or the fate of Zion for that matter. I’m just told to help him, and for some reason I do. After hearing about The Burned Man during the entirety of Fallout 3, I was really looking forward to meeting him and diving into his story. It’s very impressive how they managed to take such a mysterious and interesting character and end up making him so boring. Oh, and if you choose to shoot him in the face instead of offering to help his crew (or if you choose to shoot the scrawny fellow that takes you to him thirty seconds after you start), the DLC pretty much ends right there and you’re left to wander Zion with even less purpose.

The missions are essentially fetch missions – go here, get this, go shoot some folks here, then we’ll team up and kick bum. The environment, while vast, amazingly well-designed, littered with tons of areas to roam and explore and completely perfect for the Fallout universe, is equally underused by the DLC. Honest Hearts forces you to traverse only a small amount of the land – and while it does give you the ability to return to it after completion (which is different from most), there really isn’t much reason to. Sure, there is plenty of terrain you can roam and look for things and be all Fallout-y, but there isn’t a whole lot there to find. I guess if you really wanted to walk around for 8 hours shooting mole rats and young cazadors, it’d be the best DLC ever, but I’m more into usefulness. It’s all very thin.

Honest Hearts provides a couple new weapons and armor offerings, as do all DLC packs, but it doesn’t really give you anything to write home about. When I went back to the Mojave Wasteland after beating the DLC for the second time, I kept using the same weapon I took into the DLC to begin with. A quick trip to Gun Runners netted me a few caps for the junk I brought back from Zion, but even that was hardly worth it.

As a Fallout fan so devout that I’ll continue to buy DLC and play no matter what the quality, these words hurt me to write. I may have radiated water in my veins, but the New Vegas DLCs are 0 for 2 in my books. Even if you subscribe to Graham’s story and are interested in the character of the Burned Man, I feel there isn’t enough there to counter the game’s tiny story and pace. Zion is expansive and awesome, but an environment alone can’t carry a lackluster… everything else. On the contrary, if you’re only contemplating a play for the 120 achievement points, you should definitely give it a go. You basically get one for starting the DLC, two more during the story, then one for each of the two endings. If you save at the right place before the story branches, you can get both endings with less than 10 minutes work each from the branching point.

At least the next DLC should be out in a month… third time’s a charm, maybe?