With their recent track record, Bethesda Softworks is becoming one of the most trusted companies in producing quality video games. How do make that claim? Look at what they've done since 2006. Oblivion, Fallout 3, plus several promising games for the coming year.
This brings me to a Bethesda produced (but not developed) title that ate up most of my spare time last fall: Fallout: New Vegas. While it wasn't as great as it's predecessor, New Vegas still gave the addictive, enjoyable experience only a Fallout title can bring. And it looks like fans will receive plenty of encouragement to continue playing with all of the downloads this summer. In case you haven't heard, Bethesda recently announced three...that's right, three New Vegas DLC's for the month of May, June and July 2011. So let's dive right into Honest Hearts.
Honest Hearts takes place in Zion national park, which is located in Utah. (If you've never been, you should check it out. It's gorgeous.) You'll receive a radio signal at the beginning of the DLC that invites anyone willing to work for a caravan company. Once your caravan reaches Zion, they're ambushed by the vicious White Legs tribe. As the only survivor of the attack, you're taken in by the Dead Horses tribe, led by the Burned Man.
If you've played through New Vegas' main game you'd know that the Burned Man is the former general of Caesar's Legion. After he failed to take Hoover Dam from the NCR, Caesar had him burned alive and thrown into the Grand Canyon. Yet only in something as absurd as a video game could the Burned Man somehow survive that fall and make it to Zion. Anyway, the Burned man recruits you into his fight to save Zion from the White Legs.
Along the way you'll have a couple different companions, including a cliche "Indian companion" with an accent so offensive that every time I hear it it makes me think to myself, "We stole their land." There's also a few new weapons to pick up, some new achievements to unlock, and the level cap has been raised to 40. However, you won't be able to begin this adventure until lighten your load to 75 or 100 pounds (depending whether you have the Strong Back perk), and you'll also have leave your regular companions behind.
The missions themselves are honestly kind of boring. It's about seven hours of pretty straight forward kill this guy, find this thing and bring it back, blah blah blah. And I don't know about you, but these DLCs feel less interesting when all of our stuff is still with us. What I liked about Dead Money, as well as a few of the DLCs from Fallout 3, was that all of our gear was taken from us and we were given new gear. This gave players the chance to challenge themselves and try to play the game a bit differently. It became more about survival and less about slowly becoming a walking tank.
Probably the biggest improvement Honest Hearts has following Dead Money is that, once you finish the main story, you can actually come and go as you choose. One of the most frustrating things about Dead Money was that you couldn't go back to the Sierra Casino once you left. Thankfully, that's not the case this time around. Also, there's a lot more plants to harvest in Zion than in the Mojave Wasteland, but that might just be because Obsidian Entertainment wanted to encourage you to make lots of healing powder at campfires because it fits no nicely with the Indiansploitaton (did I just make up a word?) theme of the DLC.
The level design is also pretty nice. The scenery is beautiful, and (like the main game) it kind of made me want to revisit the place it's based off of. Zion is somewhat depicted as a maze, with lots of different elevations to shoot people from.
I was also a bit disappointed about how the Burned Man character was handled. Like Father Elijah in the previous DLC, the Burned Man was the mysterious central character of Honest Hearts. However, he seemed a little too mysterious. And the way the developers tried to indirectly portray him as a vengeful Christian (kind of like a wannabe Boondock Saint) made me a bit uneasy when he talked about how he was serving as a "missionary" to the Dead Horse tribe.
I'd say that if you enjoyed playing Fallout: New Vegas and need excuses to keep it up, go ahead and download Honest Hearts for $10 through the XBL Marketplace, PSN Store or Steam. However, I'd advise you to keep your expectations low, because with the quality of the story and missions, it probably could have been a bit cheaper. Here's hoping next month's DLC will be better.
Rated M for Mature. Produced by Bethesda Softworks, developed by Obsidian Entertainment.
Image provided courtesy of JeuxVideo.com.
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