Fallout: New Vegas - Honest Hearts

There's a fascinating tale to be told about this place, so it's a shame that Honest Hearts doesn't really offer much to sink your teeth into where quests are concerned. It's mostly a selection of slim fetch quests, none of which are optional. There are a couple of side quests, but nothing particularly robust.

Most disappointing is how perfunctory the main quest line feels, boiling down to another simplistic binary choice - what I like to call the Platoon Dilemma - between two surrogate leader figures; one a bloodthirsty killer, the other a hand-wringing pacifist. This being a video game, whichever one you choose to follow, the result still involves shooting lots of people in the face. Ho hum.

There are a lot of highbrow influences swimming around in Honest Hearts' thin narrative soup, most notably Apocalypse Now and The Mosquito Coast, so it's a real shame that any interesting moral questions or themes are shoved to the background in favour of rote mechanistic missions that send you scuttling through the scenery, shooting and scavenging, while never requiring you to engage with its inhabitants in any meaningful way.

Your time is far better spent exploring in your own way, making use of the extended level cap to try out some of the new perks or attempt a couple of the new ambient XP-boosting challenges. Indeed, the best story in the pack is actually hidden away, out of sight, in the numerous cave systems that worm through the red rock mountains.

Six survivalist stashes can be found, each one accompanied by booby traps galore and a series of diary entries that spin a melancholy tale of a refugee from the nuclear war, and how he came to be woven into the superstitions of the local tribes in the following years. It's a sad and poignant tale, told simply but efficiently, and it stands in stark contrast to the blunt comic book posturing of the tribal quibbles you're expected to solve in order to make it back to the Mojave in one piece.

But find your way back you surely will, in around four or five hours, depending on how much nosing around you want to do. The Zion Valley remains open to you after completion, and success also grants you a nice bonus stash of armour and weapons to go along with whatever else you've nabbed along the way.

As a side story to the main event, Honest Hearts is forgettable and predictable. Where it justifies its asking price is in the takeaway benefits it supplies to the long-term wasteland wanderer. More levels, more perks, new weapons and new enemies - this is what really benefits the game, and Honest Hearts delivers more than enough to make it a worthwhile diversion for players of all levels. It would just be easier to recommend if the story wrapped around the gameplay additions was more compelling.