The third entry to Dawn of War 2, Retribution, targets rabid fans that can’t get enough of the franchise while also appealing to those who haven’t tried it all. As a $30 stand-alone expansion it’s easy to recommend, because despite its comparatively less exciting narrative, it still has a great set of missions, a lot of tactical options, multiplayer, and the same fun Dawn of War mechanics the franchise was founded on.

The Dawn of War 2 series has long been a story about the Space Marines, but Retribution gives your a choice between Space Marines, Tyrannids, Chaos, Orks, Eldar, and the new Imperial Guard. After selecting an army, you play through 16 missions that are written just vaguely enough that they can work for any force. It’s a clever way of giving you a lot of choice, but it also results in a weaker narrative than the previous Dawn of War 2 games. None of the characters stand out like the previous entries in Space Marines, and Retribution lacks that same sense of attachment that built up during the many, many hours I spent with the campaigns of both the original Dawn of War and the first expansion, Chaos Rising. Read more »

Fallout: New Vegas doesn’t always feel like a desperate situation. There’s usually food and water nearby, plenty of ammo, guns and armor to loot off of bodies and once you’ve leveled up, you should have no problem taking on most of the creatures or psychos in the wasteland.

Things aren’t so relaxed in the first downloadable content for New Vegas, Dead Money. Now, it’s important to note that even if you don’t think you’ll get around to this particular mission anytime soon (there is so much to do in the Mojave after all), purchasing it raises your level cap by five.

Dead Money tells the tale of the Sierra Madre casino and the fabled wealth trapped inside. It begins like any other extra Fallout content – a message on your Pip Boy. Wander to the location on your map and enjoy the artistic watercolor-style cutscene.

Stripped of your high-powered weapons, equipment, and bottle caps, you essentially start from scratch in Dead Money, although it’s recommended that your character be at least level 20 before you start. Adding to the fun is that you’re immediately fitted with a slaver collar — meaning if you don’t do what the Man in the Sky (a.k.a. Father Elijah) says, he’ll blow your head off.

Not only that, but you need to work together with a small crew of misfit characters, all of which are interesting and enjoyable to get to know. But if one of them dies, you die, too. While it’s a neat angle, I was disappointed to learn that you can still only have one official companion at a time and they actually don’t have as large of a role as I thought they would. After all, it’s a scary world out there, and it’s nice to have some company. Plus, they have companion perks that are really useful, so it’s a shame you don’t get to utilize them more often.

Instead of bottle caps, Sierra Madre casino chips are the only form of currency and ammo, supplies and guns are incredibly limited. You can use nifty vending machines to purchase food with the chips, but in order to get more useful things like Stimpaks, you have to find special codes scattered throughout the city.

Ghost people inhabit the town, and they sure aren’t friendly or easy to take down. Much like Dead Space Necromorphs, unless you dismember or decapitate them, they’ll keep getting up and attacking you. If your character has a high unarmed skill, you should manage fine, but others will need to take it slow and try to minimize contact with enemies due to the short supply of healing items and weapons.

The unexplored land surrounding the Sierra Madre casino and village isn’t a cakewalk like the Mojave Desert. A red misty smoke simply called The Cloud, blankets the area. It just so happens to be toxic so you can’t rest anywhere that’s not fully enclosed, which is pretty much nowhere. Between the poisonous atmosphere, inconveniently placed bear traps and rigged shot guns, ghost people with the MO to kill and hidden speakers that will trigger your explosive collar, it’s quite the dangerous place. The music, sound effects and environmental hazards all work together to create a very hostile world that’s quite freaky.

The constant stress of looking for ammo, chips, supplies and so on along with trying to avoid enemies like the plague makes Dead Money feel much more like a survival horror version of Fallout, which is cool. If you were hoping for a run-and-gun style mission, you won’t find that here – you’ll need to proceed with caution while navigating the confusing Fallout maps.

Typical of Fallout games, there are performance issues and game-breaking bugs that seriously detract from the experience. There’s also a random difficulty spike halfway through that can be really frustrating. The game switches from a stealth focus to combat-heavy, but with such limited ammo and supplies, fighting off waves and waves of overly aggro ghosts isn’t much fun. Running away isn’t much a great option either, as you’ll frequently get snagged in traps or high-pitched frequencies that set off your collar.

Unlike a majority of the DLC for Fallout 3, Dead Money doesn’t really reward you with awesome armor or weapons. The tale is better than most of the previous add-on content, but the story does get overshadowed sometimes by tedious quests. If they had allowed fast-travel through the confusing streets of Sierra Madre, it would’ve made everything much less frustrating.

Is it surprising that Dead Money feels like it was released before it was actually ready? No, but it’s still disappointing. With some more development and care this could’ve been a shining example of what downloadable content can be.

Vegas, baby.

Instead, standard Fallout bugs like freezing and “features” like a stuttering frame rate and wonky textures plague the game. I also encountered one game-breaking bug. One of the characters suffers from a split-personality and I apparently chose to recruit the wrong one. Subsequently all quest lines broke, but I didn’t realize it until I had already completed everything and wasn’t given any new missions. I had to restart the whole game, which flat-out sucked.

I know Bethesda and Obsidian are infamous for making games with lots of bugs, but I was really shocked that this DLC is so easily broken. I didn’t make some crazy decision wearing a strange costume in an unforeseen area, it was something the game offered to me and yet it halted my progression. That’s unacceptable.

It’s good to see Mafia II’s Joe Barbaro again; it’s just too bad this add-on isn’t worthy of the character. Mafia II: Joe’s Adventures does have its shining moments, however. Multiple story-based missions are electrifying and recall some of the main game’s fantastic set-piece shoot-outs. It’s unfortunate that the side missions surrounding them range from plain old boring to downright awful. One of Mafia II’s most special qualities was how the excellent story and banter between characters gave context to your activities. Even the most mundane tasks were exciting because you felt invested in them. Joe’s Adventures, like the downloadable content for Mafia II that came before it, fails to provide adequate narrative to motivate you. As a result, driving from one mission across town to the next becomes laborious, especially when you discover that the mission you drove to is aggressively unenjoyable. There are incredible moments that Mafia II fans should experience–just ready yourself for some drudgery that misses the mark by a wide margin.

Even a blaze caused by a molotov cocktail can’t match Joe’s fiery personality.

At the very least, Joe’s Adventures gets off to a good start, putting you in the shoes of Vito Scaletta’s boisterous, puffy-haired sidekick and sending you to a wintertime shoot-out. The locale for this bloody battle is beautiful and atmospheric, and a car chase across a slippery frozen lake is an enjoyable finale to this introductory mission. There are a few other such story-driven missions, including a gunfight in a supermarket that ends with an explosive escape and an action-packed sequence that begins in a bordello. Like Mafia II’s best moments, these scenarios are made all the more exciting by the game’s excellent visuals and audio. Glass shards fly around you, police barricades explode as you drive through them, and your potty-mouthed foes call out that they need to hurry and put a bullet in your head because the wife has a delicious dinner planned. The brothel’s interior is ostentatiously decorated and richly colored, while the market’s shelves are stocked with fictional products that nevertheless strike the proper old-timey vibe. Good animations and great sound effects make it fun to shoot your foes, whether you’re wielding a Magnum or a tommy gun.

The majority of Joe’s Adventures, however, is structured like the Jimmy’s Vendetta add-on. You drive from one stand-alone mission to the next, earning points by filling your assigned enemies with lead or by maintaining high speeds in your vehicle of choice. Each mission comes with a time limit, and once you complete a mission, you can compare your performance with other players on the online leaderboards. This setup was, and still is, a poor fit for a character-driven game. The timer encourages you to rush, yet Mafia II’s mid-1900s vehicles aren’t built for precise handling at high speeds. Furthermore, the game’s oversensitive police and busy roads aren’t conducive to speeding about. Seven cars lined up at a stoplight might make for a frustrating barricade, and going over 40 miles per hour alerts any cop that notices you–and considering that a single city block might be patrolled by three or four policemen, there’s a good chance you’ll be noticed. This lack of cohesion between Mafia II’s mechanics and the new content’s structure is evident time and time again. For example, one frustrating mission has you driving as fast as you can through a series of checkpoints, but roads slippery from the rain, congested traffic, and a strict timer make this race against the clock anything but enjoyable. (It doesn’t help that in two different key turns during this mission, the game’s GPS can go haywire and send you off in the wrong direction.)

As beautiful as Empire City is, driving from one disconnected mission to the next gets old.

Some other missions are just as frustrating. In one teeth-clenching task, you must deliver gun shipments to several weapon shops, which entails driving a slow, and slow-to-accelerate, wagon. The moment you make your first shipment, a speedy sedan gives chase while three mobsters hanging from the window fire at you. Because the enemy spawn point is much too close, your vulnerable vehicle might get blown to smithereens before you can even turn the corner, and your foes will chase you all over town if you can’t shake them. You might take the time out to gun them down, but doing so wastes precious seconds. In an on-foot chase sequence, your target might go running off in a direction the game doesn’t intend, breaking the mission. And as in Mafia II and its previous downloadable content, you might fail a mission through no fault of your own should your target get hung up in traffic, or get arrested by a policeman. The fact that these side tasks have no mid-mission checkpoint makes these kinds of moments even more annoying.

Not every side mission is so vexing, though many of them suffer from a lack of inspiration. A short series of fistfights is too easy to be frustrating, but it’s not very exciting either. Ditto for stealing a vehicle and delivering it to a garage. If these tasks had been given proper story context, they might have been more exciting, but side missions are delivered with bits of expletive-filled text that leave too much to the imagination. The story missions take an extra step, setting up the ensuing action with a full-fledged cutscene, complete with more of the excellent voice acting that helped make Mafia II’s story so immersive. Joe is a great character, and his smirking line delivery is always a delight. Yet these cinematics are short and contain minimal dialogue, and the facial animations are stiffer than they were in the main game, which is distracting. The add-on closes with an eerily silent scene that feels more like a mild interlude than an actual conclusion, and then deposits you back into the beautiful Empire City, where you can return to any side mission you like.

Joe’s loose tie just screams ‘rebel.’

Mafia II: Joe’s Adventures delivers several moments of absolute brilliance that remind you of what makes the initial release so special. But these moments are too often overshadowed by aggravating missions that focus your attention on the game’s flaws while minimizing its strengths. Six or seven additional hours of content that returns you to one of 2010′s finest fictional cities seems like a steal at $9.99. But that’s not such a good value when so much of the content is obvious padding that fails to capitalize on the main game’s best qualities. That’s too bad, because this add-on’s best missions are awesome and hint at the great DLC that could have been.