As if wandering the Mojave Wasteland didn't already have enough content to keep you busy for the next few months, Fallout: New Vegas offers up the first batch of downloadable content for the enormous open-ended RPG dubbed Dead Money. So what do you get if you download the first of hopefully many add-ons? New perks, new characters, new locations, new weapons, new storylines, new enemies, new achievements, and five new levels. That's right, the level cap has been raised as well, from 30 to 35, with new perks to keep things interesting.

After discovering a weak radio signal in the Wasteland, the location of Dead Money is revealed on the map in an abandoned Brotherhood of Steel bunker. The bunker leads to the extravagant Sierra Madre Casino and Resort, a fabled paradise before the bombs fell. When you enter the bunker, you are immediately gassed and taken prisoner by the only man to see Sierra Madre and live; the long lost Brotherhood of Steel leader Father Elijah.

Elijah has kidnapped you and outfitted a bomb collar around your neck. He informs you that will have to do his bidding if you want to keep your head attached to the rest of your body and one day leave the Sierra Madre for good. Elijah plans to rob whatever is left of the Sierra Madre vault and he needs your skills as well as a few others he snatched up over time to complete his risky heist.

What Elijah reveals to you is that the resort and casino are very dangerous places. Residential districts rigged with booby traps, state of the art security systems inside the casino, and a poisonous fog that hangs over the entire area are the immediate threats. All of that was before the faulty bomb collar that can be activated by radio frequencies from broken speakers. Needless to say, this won't be an easy job. The first thing Father Elijah suggests to handle is recruiting your team if you want to survive the perils of the biggest heist of the century.

Dead Money includes three new characters for you to recruit and discover. Like everything else about Fallout: New Vegas, the writing and back story for each character is absolutely magnificent and manages to deliver some of the most interesting characters in the entire game, while still keeping the trademark black humor and morally sticky situations the series has perfected over the years.

You will have to tame the wild nature of a schizophrenic super mutant named Dog, befriend a show-stealing swinger named Dean Domino, and help a former Brotherhood scribe who has lost her ability to speak named Christine. Each of the three characters has their own questlines and dialogue trees that add incentive to keep them around all the way to the end.

During your treacherous stay in the Sierra Madre, you will come across a slew of new weapons including a new Holorifle with an excellent scope, the versatile kitchen companion known as the Cosmic Knife, and a punching glove affixed to a bear trap for maximum punishment. Scrounging for weapons and ammo can sometimes be a chore in Dead Money because you are stripped of all your personal belongings at the start including your caps! Don't worry, the casino has it's own form of currency in the gambling chips, so you can collect hundreds of chips and cash them in for better gear and more ammo.

Once you have recruited everyone in your team, it becomes very apparent what one fatal flaw Dead Money suffers from: repetition. Developer Obsidian seems to face the same criticism at every turn with the games they make, which is that they are better storytellers than game designers. The setting, characters, and dialogue in Dead Money are simply top-notch and go well with the rest that New Vegas offers. Unfortunately, the repetitive backtracking, artificial padding to add length, and inability to leave whenever you want (once you are done, you can never go back), really drag down the experience of Dead Money. As much as I loved the banter between Dog and his malicious alter-ego, I couldn't help but feel a sense of slogging during each of the quests as I backtracked my way the town multiple times.

While the overall experience is a positive one, the limiting scope of the environment and the poor mission structure hamper an otherwise colorful and memorable story. If you make a quick adjustment to your expectations, Dead Money is a good, solid add-on to one of the deepest games to release in 2010.