Playing to its own weaknesses
The first DLC for Fallout: New Vegas has great character, but too much of gameplay is bulid around making this addon pain in the ass to play.
Fallout: New Vegas isn't game that was made good primarily by it's gameplay. It was game mostly about giving you a goal, and lots of ways how to complete it. And the core game was designed around this strength. Sadly, in the DLC realm, the creators focused too much on the basic gameplay of run'n gun and, here and there disarming traps and trying to find your way in maze like designed maps. While you go trough the first part of this DLC, there is also nothing to look at - it's the same, old Fallout NW look, just tinted yellow or red instead of brown.
Thankfuly, this piece of content, has one saving grace. And a really big one at that: it's characters. While there's only about five of them (well, one of them has dual personality so, I guess that makes them six, doesn't it?), that come to play prominently in the storyline, all of them are wonderfuly detailed and very well voice-acted - you really start to feel that, you are interacting with three-dimensional characters, and that, with nice visual design of the later half of the DLC makes Dead Money worth your time.
And you will spent quite a lot of it here, around 4 to 6 hours, and that is, for a price of admission of ten dollars, quite a good deal.
So if you are a Fallout fan and you have a high-level enough character, this add-on might be just right for you.
