A few months ago, when I was playing the rest of Fallout 4, I got to Nuka-World, found out that the premise of it is helping some raider gangs to build a bigger/better slave empire and I just kind of checked out of it. The game offers a quest to kill all the raiders instead of helping them, I did it, and my reward was the previously-enslaved NPCs glitching out and taking all their clothes off and then nothing else meaningful happened. I moved on with life. But now I felt a draw to go back. Maybe I missed out on something. Maybe within the rancid outer layer is a core that has something special. Maybe there is something here to point to that makes this awful DLC 'worth it.'

Dear reader, I am sad to say there is no such thing.

The Nuka-World DLC was made in response to fans at launch saying that they wanted more content with raiders and so Bethesda planned this out as a way to spend time with them and to add more depth to raider factions than what there was in the base game. And, see, that is a pitch I can get behind. Because in every Fallout game, from the isometric beginnings to the first-person present, the raiders are pretty much just murder junkies (and occasionally cannibals). They exist to fill a gap in the enemy progression and nothing more. Bethesda needed an enemy tougher than the random mutated bugs and critters but not as strong as the Super Mutants. And the raiders fill that gap. Fleshy bags of XP and loot that are pure evil that come from nowhere for you to freely murder the shit out of them without as much as a second thought as to who they are or why you're murdering them. The raiders are humans of pure function. So, the idea that you might actually get to sit down and talk to them and find out what's up with the raiders and why they are the way they are... yeah, sure, I'd like to see someone take a crack at that because no one really has so far.

Unfortunately, this DLC is a full product and not just a pitch. In practice, Nuka-World is a big map for you to go to with plenty of locations to explore and some very bare bones narrative to send you from one point of interest to the next. You arrive, are appointed leader of all the raiders and then you are almost immediately sent out to clear out the rest of the theme park of the various non-raider monsters and robots that have somehow completely confounded three rather large gangs. Each gang has a leader that you get one meaningful conversation with but even these are pretty disappointing. Instead of making raiders with depth, they just made different flavors of raider with fun coats of paint. Instead of generic murder junkies, you now have the Disciples (Original Flavor™ Murder Junkies), The Operators (Money-hungry Murder Junkies), and The Pack (Furry Murder Junkies). But that's kinda it. It's not like you get much background about who any of them are or where they come from or why they decided to be murder junkies. And after those initial conversations? They have nothing meaningful to say and will only send you on some classic Bethesda Radiant Quests to go murder people or enslave them. Cool.

Okay so it's a total whiff on the narrative end. But a theme park! Surely this is some cool locations with fun aesthetics! It's not just bombed out buildings or military bases or what! It's rollercoasters and fun houses and a zoo for some reason! And this all just... largely didn't do anything for me. The little bit of interest I had in it the aesthetic wore off fast, though, because this DLC has a lot of stuff in it and it makes you go to almost all of it. I recommend turning the volume slider for dialogue all the way down because the constantly looping theme park PA system messages about buying overpriced maps or how such-and-such a ride is out of order get old the third time they loop and get very old the eighteenth time they loop.

The one nice thing I can say about this is that they brought the Hubologists back and I think that's fun. I don't know how the religion from the West Coast games ended up in the Commonwealth but I'm not asking questions. They dose you with radiation and will give you way more lore than all three raider gangs combined before their heads all explode in a the best quest of the entire DLC.

Total ass DLC that is a huge missed opportunity because they just wanted to give you more. More locations to look at, more garbage to loot, more functional mechanical horseshit to wade through. As if the base game somehow didn't have enough. What the hell.