honest hearts |

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Developer: Obsidian Entertainment

Release Date: 5/17/2011

Available On

It seems the New Vegas DLC just can’t balance itself, right? First Dead Money was full of cramped environments and brutal difficulty with game designs that worked against the game. Honest Hearts has a very open area to explore, but the characters are pretty underwhelming, as is the overall story. You meet some travelers who are part of a caravan trying to get across Zion National Park, and they hire you to protect them. Of course, there’s more than that, so when you enter, you see three rival tribes fighting against each other. You have the dead horses, white legs, and sorrows. The White Legs want to prove themselves so they can work for Caesar’s Legion, but the Sorrows want to stay, and the Dead Horses are a rogue “extra” tribe. Of course, in Fallout, there’s some sort of third-party hand in the pot, and that’s where Daniel and Joshua Graham come in.

Joshua wants to fight the white legs, and Daniel wants to run. Without getting into their backstory too much, you help each other out on various missions, but most of them are fetch missions and aren’t very inventive. I was really disappointed with this and kept expecting some more exciting missions. Even Dead Money had some exciting missions, despite its major flaws. The characters seem interesting at first, but after the initial dialog stuff, when you meet them, you never do much more with them. This is due to the DLC’s short length, running at about 10–12 hours. There are hardly any side missions, and it feels like the huge area gets wasted since you don’t really get to explore it much.

The area is full of huge canyons and cliffs that surround a lake and a couple of rivers. The area is a pain to navigate because it’s hard to find how to get to high-up areas due to all these layered cliffs. Some of the areas are great to see, and they really captured the national park feeling with abandoned camps and cars on the road right when the bombs fell. So there is a nice charm about the area, and seeing some trees and rivers is a nice change from the dried-up Mojave. Other than that, the environment is full of vicious animals instead of just people, so that’s also a bit different than the Mojave and Dead Money.

Other than that, the DLC is worth a purchase, but don’t expect 15+ hours and tons of new weapons or extra stuff. It’s the best New Vegas DLC so far, but it’s also not the best it could be. I hope the third and fourth DLCs are a lot better and are finally on par with the excellent Fallout 3 DLC add-ons.