Fallout: New Vegas - Dead Money

Your bomb collar also tweaks the gameplay in an interesting, though not always enjoyable, manner. Bodged together from pre-war components, it's vulnerable to signal interference. Anything from a domestic radio to the casino's own speaker system can set it off, causing an incessant beeping whenever you get in range and culminating in a rapid cranial eruption should you linger too long. Normal radios can be turned off or destroyed, unshielded speakers can be shot from afar, but there are also invulnerable speakers that can only be deactivated using a terminal, or cannot be switched off at all.

Also providing environmental menace is the toxic red cloud, which eats away at your health with ferocious speed should you venture into it. If you're playing in Hardcore Mode, even the seemingly clear atmosphere itself becomes hazardous, reducing your health slowly whenever you're outside.

The cloud also adds some fun new recipes to your crafting options. Find or collect some cloud residue and it'll brew up some seriously nasty poisons or a useful stat-buffing cocktail, depending on how you mix it.

And, finally, there are some interesting new enemies in the shape of the casino's holographic security system. These glowing drones are limited in reach by their emitter range, but are otherwise indestructible and come armed with deadly laser weapons. Navigating your way past them, either through cunning or by changing their programming, is one of the stiffest stealth challenges the game has to offer.

All these elements are used to herd you along, but they can become annoying – particularly when their use combines with the maze-like streets of the villa exterior. Having less than ten seconds to locate and destroy a radio before your head explodes is exciting the first few times, but by the end it's become a chore and one that reduces one of Fallout's greatest pleasures – exploration – to a frustrating save-and-reload routine. That Dead Money's finale finds you racing through a veritable gauntlet of broken walkways while being constantly stymied by holograms, radios and the poisonous red mist makes what should have been a thrilling climax more irritating than it needed to be.

Story-wise, it's a substantial affair. Each chunk of missions feels like a fairly epic undertaking in its own right, and the game pairs you up with each character in turn, giving you the illusion of a four-man team without breaking the game's one-partner rule.

There's a fairly enormous amount of back-story to be devoured, covering the history of your play pals as well as the murky past of the Sierra Madre itself. The broad strokes are covered in dialogue scenes, but there's a lot more to be unearthed through shrewd conversation choices and hacked terminals.

To begin with, the mystery is enticing, but unless you're incredibly thorough in your info-hunting and absorb every detail of the many text logs, there's a good chance the climax to the tale will only make a vague sort of sense. Certainly, I thought I'd been paying attention but there were still a few major plot points that I didn't quite understand by the time I was dropped back in the Mojave.

While Dead Money justifies its 800 Microsoft Point price tag in terms of quantity, the quality isn't quite there. The plot and gameplay both sag in the second act, as you perform some obvious filler quests to entice your comrades to do as they're told. Tromping around poisonous streets looking for switches to throw or lost fuse boxes is the worst kind of RPG busywork, and the structure makes little attempt to dress it up as anything more important.

Things pick up considerably once you're inside the Sierra Madre, where the script does a good job of dolloping out revelations and gameplay twists that fly in the face of your Ocean's Radioactive 11 expectations. But that final stretch with its infuriating collar-popping tricks and against-the-clock stealth knocks the wind from the story's sails right when it needs to be in full flow.