Post-apocalyptic sightseeing in 'Honest Hearts'

Be very, very quiet we're hunting rabbits. Oh sweet Jesus, that was no rabbit. Yes, in fact there are no rabbits or really anything that constitutes normal game animals in 'Honest Hearts', the second 'Fallout: New Vegas' DLC. The premise of this expansion is that your character is contracted to serve as security for a trade caravan and that en route to the destination everything goes hilariously wrong. And by 'hilariously wrong' I mean the entire caravan (except for the player character) is slaughtered by a warlike group of Native American wannabes somewhere in a post-apocalyptic version of Zion National Park in Utah. After a brief initial conflict you're contacted by one of the two less aggressive Native American-esque tribes in the region and you're off.

The funny thing starting off is that the criticism leveled against 'Dead Money' is actually the one I would turn around and level at 'Honest Hearts'. Namely that it doesn't feel like a 'Fallout' game. It's sunny. There aren't that many freakishly mutated creatures. There's very little sense of tragedy born out of greed and/or corruption. I mean, you're in a pristine national park and the only thing to worry about are a weird band of tribals who, if the player character headed the level warnings before starting the DLC, pose exactly zero threat to competent players. Hmmm, thinking about it I would definitely say that that was one of the things bugging me about this entire DLC. It was way too easy. In that unless you're trying to deflect bullets with your face you aren't going to have too many issues cruising through the enemies you encounter. This little warning actually struck me pretty early in the DLC as there was a brief in game cinematic for the appearance of a Yao guai (a mutated bear thing) that seemed to tout it as the regions apex predator. Now, these things appeared in 'Fallout 3' and unless there where a lot of them they weren't much of a threat to mid-level characters in that game either. For $9.99 I'd like at least maybe some kind of challenge or something.

'Something' brings me to the other issue with 'Honest Hearts'. It's really short. By far the shortest DLC. This is due to the fact that there aren't any areas that are especially difficult to access but also because as already mentioned there aren't any enemies that pose a threat thereby allowing the player to breeze through encounters. Hell, the toughest (as far as I can tell) creature in the entire DLC is part of an optional side-quest. But back to the length. What is a good length? See for me it really depends on the experience. The other DLCs in 'Dead Money', 'Old World Blues' and 'Lonesome Road' provided sufficiently compelling experiences that even if they'd been shorter than they where I would have still liked them. However here the player character is thrown into a storyline in which they themselves have no stakes and into an area with no threats so for me at least it would have helped if they'd compensated for this with a little more volume. More areas to explore. More unique stuff to find. Something. Anything really.

At this point it's pretty easy for me to say that 'Honest Hearts' was the worst of the 'Fallout: New Vegas' DLCs. It has a few moments. Being in a region in which you can actually make out the environment clearly is a nice change of pace but it doesn't really fit in with the rest of what the game is doing. Additionally it doesn't really advance the side-story, a more in-depth explanation of your character's back story told in bits and pieces in the other DLCs, at all. If you where going to skip one of the 'New Vegas' DLC expansions it should, in my opinion, be this one. See you all next week.