Personally, I don't like any of New Vegas's DLCs because I feel that either the feel differs too much from the base game or else the hook that gets you into the DLC doesn't fit with the main story.
Honest Hearts fits in with the rest of the game best, but I don't see how anyone's suspension of disbelief can survive the idea that the Second Battle of Hoover Dam could happen any day now and you're just going to go AWOL from whichever faction you're backing so you can fuck off to Utah for a month with a trade caravan and will suffer no consequences for doing so. We all know that the main quest is event-timed instead of clock-timed, but exposing it so blatantly when the rest of the game does a pretty good job of hiding it rubs me the wrong way.
Lonesome Road sort of fits in with the base game, but its message is delivered with all the subtlety of a super sledge to the face, Ulysses and his endless monologues are insufferable. The way it places nuclear missile launch controls outside (completely unguarded, BTW) where you'd normally expect door controls, then forces you to activate them, just so Ulysses can scold you for doing so is unforgivable. And once again it involves you voluntarily leaving the Mojave with the big battle looming in the very near future.
The less said about Dead Money, the better. It does at least have a hook that involves you making a small detour to check out an abandoned bunker only to get shanghaied, so it avoids the question of why you're putting the main quest on hold while a rival faction potentially claims the Mojave for itself. I appreciate how the base game is designed so that a wide variety of character builds can beat it, so I don't appreciate how this DLC expects you to build around the Light Touch perk so you don't need to worry about all the hidden bear traps and the Rad Child perk so that you can regenerate health faster than the Cloud can strip it away from you. Even taking the partially collapsed buildings into consideration, the Sierra Madre was always designed as a maze instead of a resort, and Duke Nukem 3D had more believable maps than this a decade and a half earlier. Playing this game is neither fun like the base game, nor rewarding like Dark Souls (where having a boss beat your skeleton into aquarium gravel a few dozen times while you learn his movesets is not fun, but it at least feels really good when you finally see the magic smoke start pouring out of him), it's just tedium punctuated by sadism.
Old World Blues starts off with a decent hook, since you again make a small detour, this time to search a crashed satellite for loot, and get involuntarily teleported to Big MT but getting shanghaied twice in one game is so lazy that you'd think Emil wrote more for this game than just the manual. Unfortunately, it doesn't really fit the theme of the main game and outright contradicts part of its story. Mr. House tells you how he spent years having the route between his Sunnyvale factory and Vegas searched for the Platinum Chip and its essential Securitron upgrades, but someone decided that having a self-loathing miniature Securitron would be funny (spoiler: he's not) and changed the story to imply that the Securitrons were designed at Big MT instead. The only good thing I have to say about it is that I enjoy breaking the economy of the game, so being able to hoard half a ton of corn and empty bottles and then have the machines at the Sink increase their value by an order of magnitude by turning them into salient green and bottles of purified water almost makes up for the machines' primary outputs being cringe dialogue.
