Undead Nightmare

Undead Nightmare is one of those games that, when played in a busy office, can act as a Weapon of Mass Disruption. For starters, there's the odd spectacle of zombies swarming all over Rockstar San Diego's carefully constructed Western wilderness, disrupting the cut-scenes and generally making a mess of things. Then there's the utter racket made by the undead hoards - the wails and howls boxers-browning shrieks that attract people from the adjacent room. The occasional frustrated yell adds to the disturbance, but that's nothing compared to the excitement that greets the arrival of a rare mythical creature. "WHAT THE ***K IS THAT?! Is it... wait... no! Can I ride it? I can ride it! And it's on fire!"

Thankfully for the rest of the staff here, I've now finished my battle against the plague-ridden denizens of New Austin. The fight took a surprisingly long time to finish, however - far longer than what you might expect from an 800 MS point / £7.99 piece of DLC. Undead Nightmare gives you an awful lot for your money: a new single player campaign that will take five to six hours to wrap up, a quartet of fresh weapons, and a long list side quests and challenges to complete. After you're done with all this, there's new multiplayer material to get to grips with: the territory-snatching Land Grab match-type, and a co-op mode called Undead Overrun - essentially a zombie-based variant of Gears of War 2's Horde, pitching four human survivors against 10 waves of re-animated nasties.

Aside from the volume of additions, the impressive thing about Undead Nightmare is its sheer thoroughness. Rather than going for the easy money, and perhaps just lobbing a few new enemies into the existing framework, Rockstar has opted to completely overhaul the Red Dead experience in fine detail. So alongside the new quests, foes and weapons - the kind of thing you expect from a typical expansion pack - the developers have changed the whole appearance of their world, redressing the land in gloomy hues. There's a revamped soundtrack too, including a few licensed psychobilly tunes and even new cheeky comments for Marston himself as he loots the bodies of his rotten opposition.