Fallout New Vegas & Dead Money DLC

I am a huge fan of Fallout 3 and when Fallout New Vegas was announced I preordered immediately and waited in anticipation. When it arrived, I started playing right away and...

O.K, socks still firmly attached to feet. Not bad but ...different. Still, I started my long journey of exploration and trying to solve the mystery behind why the Courier was in the Mojave wasteland. It seems to me that there are a lot more crashes and serious glitches in this one as compared to Fallout 3. I have had to restart and reload a few times so I would highly recommend saving the game freqently and before you do anything major. I also have found there are more places where you can get stuck in rocks and actually in one spot, leave the map and get stuck.

The first downloadable content was announced in December - "Dead Money" - and being a bit of a fan boy, I got it when it came out.

Now for the bad part.

After playing through Dead Money, I have to say in all honesty, I didn't like it. I like the bump in level up to 35, but the actual game, meh. If you haven't bought it yet, I would recommend waiting until some of the other DLC comes out. If you want to spend the money to get five more levels then go ahead, but maybe hold off on playing through it because once you start, you can't jump out and come back. Once you finish, you're done with it and you can't go back. At least in FO3 the places added in the DLC allowed you to travel back if you wanted too.

I won't go into too much detail about the actual game in case anyone who reads this is thinking about playing it. But I will recommend you have a fairly high level with good lockpick skills - the higher the better - also, high speech and high computer hacking ability. Don't bother bringing your favorrite load out, you don't get to bring your toys. The game itself is pretty linear. You won't do a whole lot of exploring and frankly, you won't want too. The enemies are very tough but they are basically three different versions of the same creature with different weapons. You have the common switch throwing problems with getting some NPCs to go to different places to set off a series of events to gain access to the main target.

Once you reach that point, you have a couple of ways to play through but the series of events remain the same. There are a couple of new weapons with one decent one and a couple of O.K ones plus you learn to build a couple of new items.

Lots of rewards / caps for the bold but when you leave - you're done. After the summary ending narration, you're back in the wasteland.

I would rate this DLC a 4 out 10.

Now some other issues I have with Fallout New Vegas:

Why can't I make a freaking dart gun? All the parts are available and as far as killing Deathclaws go, its the best way to even the odds.

Whats with the the Karma loss issues? I can kill an entire camp of legionaires with no Karms loss but open a freaking footlocker and help my self to caps - lose Karma. Hell, I just killed the SOB but taking his caps is what screws up the cosmic order?

Oh well, its back to New Vegas and spend some caps.

I got spurs that jingle jangle jingle..