As the victim of a raw deal you must work alongside three other captured wastelanders to recover the legendary treasure of the Sierra Madre Casino. In Dead Money, your life hangs in the balance as you face new terrain, foes, and choices. It is up to you how you play your cards in the quest to survive.

So begins the new round of Fallout DLC – this time exclusive to the Xbox 360 (until it isn’t) – and Dead Money certainly bigs itself up from the get-go. With dark moody streets to explore and a ghostly casino to rob will Obsidian provide content worthy enough to live alongside New Vegas’ main game?…

So this fixes the ending right?

No, this doesn’t ‘fix’ the ending. Dead Money takes place before the end of the game so you’re gonna have to reload a previous save if you’ve completed New Vegas. At this stage it doesn’t look like any of the DLC will ‘fix’ the ending and make it open-world again but hey, if enough of us complain maybe it’ll get altered.

What Dead Money does add is five new levels, raising the cap to 35 (it recommends that you be about LVL 20 to play) and in terms of loot you’ll get some sweet new melee weapons if you get out of the Casino alive. There’s also a rather nice dress which Veronica will croon over if you get it back to her as well as open up a few more lines of dialogue for her character.

What the theme of the DLC?

Once you receive the distress call from the Sierra Madre Casino and find its location (through a hole in the ground, naturally) you’re immediately stripped of all your possessions, fitted with an explosive collar and sent to gather three other unfortunates under the antagonist (Father Elijah) guidance/duress. From there you gain entry to the old world casino and eventually crack open its hidden vault – where all manner of treasure (apparently) will be there for the taking.

Sounds simple enough, what’s the catch?

Apart from the explosive collar which can be set off via old radios and speaker systems, new enemies make your job all the more difficult. Ghost People are the demented remains of former Sierra Madre inhabitants and are very hard to kill – only staying dead if you sever a limb or two (helloo Dead Space). Life doesn’t get any easier once you’re inside the casino either – security holograms are impossible to kill and send out fatal beams of death if you alert them.

This change of enemies forces the gameplay to tuen into a stealth/survival-horror experience. Sounds awesome on paper, doesn’t work so well in practice as skulking around the villa’s streets turns into a dull and repeititve four hours. The stealth sections inside the casino are ok but really, the combination of collar beeping, tough as nails enemies and dark visuals makes this a dreary and uncomfortable piece of content.

Is there anything to like about it?

It has a certain atmosphere and the casino itself, thanks to the art deco furnishings, brings back memories and feelings of Bioshock. In this respect it’s very different from New Vegas and goes a little way to alleviating the wretched minute to minute gameplay. The interior of the buildings just reek of old 50′s Casinos and although you can’t actually play casino there, everything else feels just right.

The characters are also pretty damn cool. There’s a Super Mutant with a split personality – one called Dog who’s a murderous beast and the other, God – an erudite character who struggles to keep Dog at bay. This one example shows the expertise of Obsidian’s craft and how richer the world of Fallout is in their hands.

The other characters are good – Dean Domino is a suave charmer and a performing star of the casino you’re about to break into. He’s also a Ghoul, which is cool. And then there Christine – a bald, mute girl whose backstory is the most fascinating of them all.

This mix of characters kept my interest going and made sure I reached Dead Money’s conclusion long after the point where it became annoying.

So this is bad Fallout DLC?

In a word – yes. The premise and atmosphere are really good but are let down by really poor gameplay that gets irritating and repetitive after the first hour. The story to Dead Money is interesting but stumbles badly at the end with execution and I was left puzzled after its conclusion with the feeling that I’d missed out on a critical chunk of story-telling. The characters are also worthy of note but quite frankly it’s asking a lot of someone to suffer through eight hours of tedious gameplay to experience something that was better executed in the main game. It’s a real shame that Obsidian dropped the ball here because Dead Money had the potential to be something cool – I can only hope for better in the future.