[JemyM]

Fallout: New Vegas DLC2 Honest Hearts
The second DLC for Fallout New Vegas allows the player to explore the Valley of Zion among tribals.

Story
Mild spoilers for the first 15 minutes of gameplay may follow.

The Courier accept a call to join the Happy Trails Caravan into The Valley of Zion (Zion National Park). Right from the start the caravan is lost, attacked by tribals and leaving only the courier as survivor. The Courier is met up by Follow-Chalk of the Dead Horse Tribe who lead the way to their camp. Here the Courier meets Joshua Graham, better known as the Burned Man. If you engaged with the Legion in Fallout New Vegas you have already heard of this legend. What follows is a series of quests related to dealing with the tribe who attacked your caravan, the White Legs.

The entire story is within the Valley of Zion and once you are done you CAN go back from Mojave to Zion (unlike Dead Money). Just like Dead Money or the main game, how you fulfill your quests will affect the ending you get once you are done.

Gameplay
When I wrote my review on Dead Money, I spent most of my review speaking about the gameplay since Dead Money had plenty of unique features that created a very different game from the Mojave. For Honest Hearts, this isn't so. In fact, gameplay in Honest Hearts boiled down to it, is little more than what you can expect from a Massive Multiplayer Online RPG. You spend most of the time fetching X of that, or killing Y of this. The entire Zion is actually a quite empty place with little unique loot and few unique discoveries to be made. There are some interesting quests such as a "spiritual journey" on drugs, and finding the whole story about the Survivor, but in terms of pure content, Honest Hearts have alot less filling than Dead Money.

In Dead Money each companion had a specific role in dealing with the challenges you had to face in DLC1. Honest Hearts have a couple of companions as well, but this time they do not really do much improvement on gameplay. In fact, I found two of the companions to be completely meaningless and the third just helps you to find all places on the map (which usually means generic caves and vista-points).

There are a couple of new items, but nothing I found to be important. Mostly you can use plants in Zion to do what regular aid-stuff can do in Mojave such as curing hitpoints and recover limbs (in hardcore).

There are a couple of new weapons, but I believe that Honest Hearts actually do a mistake when it let you keep your inventory (even if you have to reduce your weight to 75 when entering). The modded-out Holorifle from Dead Money do short work with pretty much everything that Zion had to offer and it doesn't decay.

If anything positive can be said about the gameplay it's the feel and atmosphere. Zion is a beautiful place and very relaxing compared to Dead Money. Climbing all the way up to the vistas and having a pair of binoculars in your inventory is nice. Honest Hearts will allow you to get plenty of use of a sniper rifle (or the Holorifle) if you bring them with you. The nightly missions might also be nice, if you brought some cateye with you that is which you are definitely going to need in some quests.

Final Verdict
I am sad to say it, but Honest Hearts is a rather weak DLC. Honest Hearts actually make me like Dead Money even more because when you compare them Dead Money stand out. It offers some brief hours of gameplay but nothing you really remember once you are done. Fans can probably grab it anyway for the +5 levelcap and finding out the story about the Burned Man and some more background info on the 4th DLC. It does offer a change in pace as well for those who wish to relax a bit. But that's it.