Your blood-soaked adventure was all for nothing - but you're not supposed to mind because it means you get to spend another hour and a bit slaughtering more monsters. Nothing more clearly demonstrates how cavalier gaming's attitude to story can be than this willingness to throw away everything players spent 15 hours working towards. It's bad enough that Awakened is a sort of megamix retread of bits from the main game, but the way it utterly undermines its own narrative is perhaps its most depressing aspect. There are Necromorphs all over the place. They're not clean, of course, because - guess what? That big finale to the game where you were told you'd eradicated the Necromorphs once and for all? That didn't actually work. It's a common problem with DLC, where the budget rarely allows for the creation of new assets, but there's still a weary sense of deja vu as you plod through familiar frozen corridors before nipping back to the Terra Nova to revisit even more places you've already stomped clean. Off into a truncated sequence of locations you've already visited and gameplay mechanics you've already exhausted. "Alien machine make magic thing happen," explains Isaac (I'm paraphrasing) and with that, you're off.
There's a brief bit of dialogue as our two heroes ponder just what happened, but this add-on isn't in the business of tying up such loose ends. Not only alive, it transpires, but suddenly transported back to the surface of Tau Volantis with nary a scratch.
Both have apparently sacrificed themselves, unless you stuck around for the post-credits sting that shows - surprise! - Isaac is still alive. Isaac and Carver have destroyed the sentient alien moon that was apparently the source of the Necromorph threat. It picks up immediately after the conclusion of the game's campaign, so spoiler-wary players who have yet to finish the story should steer clear - both of the DLC and the rest of this review.
Awakened is a 90-minute epilogue that barely bothers to mask its origins as an exercise in asset recycling. Even the word "expansion" feels too grand for what you get here. Short and insulting, the first narrative expansion for Dead Space 3 typifies what can go wrong when downloadable content is poorly planned and implemented.
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