Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta DLC Review



£34.99

So the last DLC for Fallout 3 has just landed, be prepared to be abducted by aliens - not of the friendly E.T. type - and to shoot a lot of the little sods, along with the usual movie references and visceral carnage.  Anal probe anyone?

Anyone who has spent any time exploring the Capitol Wasteland will have stumbled upon the downed alien spacecraft emitting a distress signal. This is where your adventure begins. After loading the DLC and waiting around for a bit, the obligatory radio signal cuts in and a map marker pops up on your pip boy, pointing you in the direction of the downed alien ship. Once arrived you are swiftly sucked up into Mothership Zeta, where you are greeted with a short cut-scene showing a group of aliens carrying out what appears to be a futuristic rear-end endoscopy on your character. And so your mission begins to exact revenge on your captors and ultimately make your way to the ship's bridge and escape back to earth.  And unfortunately this is where my issues with Mothership Zeta begin.

The greatest element of Fallout 3 is the exploration and the freedom to come and go as you please when and where you want to. Mothership Zeta, however, plays out like Operation Anchorage and is all very linear. At one point in the game you can choose in which order to play a handful of the missions, but there really is no feeling of true exploration as you're herded down one corridor after another blasting aliens. Sure there are a number of areas in the ship to visit from the cargo room (amusingly decked out with mementos from Earth which the aliens have been collecting) to the machinery-heavy engine room, but it all starts to get too familiar too quickly. Whilst, as ever, the visuals are impressive, once you get past the initial awe and excitement of being beamed aboard an alien ship it all starts to wear a little thin.  There are a couple of standout moments, the finale being one and another about half way through when you get to don a space suit and carry out a space walk (Dead Space anyone?), but they are frustratingly few and far between.  Operation Anchorage was combat heavy and Mothership Zeta is no different. Bethesda has attempted to give you the option of taking a stealthy approach, as at the start of the game you team up with a child abductee, who scouts ahead (having climbed into the ships walls, Newt from Aliens anyone?), advising you of the locations of the aliens. However, this does not really work, as inevitably you will have to blast some of them at some point in order to progress. At this point, the others in the vicinity always come running.

Amusingly, you soon discover that the aliens have been visiting our world for some time, as you have to defrost some NPCs from their cryogenically frozen status.  They include an astronaut (who sadly does not survive the process, but you get his suit), a wild west sheriff, a field medic from the American Chinese war (who has some rather funny views on why the aliens are here) and best of all a samurai warrior, decked out in some truly cool armour. These guys help you t achieve your missions in various parts of the ship, or without a karma penalty you can go ahead and kill them and loot them for their goodies. Seriously who wouldn't want to be running around in the Wasteland dressed as a samurai, yep you guessed it, he didn't last long. On the subject of karma, you oddly lose karma on killing the alien workers - unarmed they may be but these boys have still being doing the unspeakable to your fellow humans and this just didn't seem to make sense. Along with the workers, there is a small selection of other aliens all of whom look alike and are of the typical big head and eyes, little green man variety. But really the only difference between them is whether they are wearing a helmet or have a force field which offers them a little protection from your onslaught, as the ones without are generally a one shot kill. Again the alien killing gets repetitive; there are some new weapons to play around with like the alien Atomizer and Disintegrator, but nothing that really stands out.

Without a doubt I am a massive fan of Fallout 3 and have enjoyed all of the DLC to date, but this is clearly the wekest instalment yet. I can handle the combat heavy gameplay - Operation Anchorage was fun - and the lack of exploration (see Broken Steel and Point Lookout for that), but what really killed this for me werethe many, many bugs. In fact it's more buggy than an unemployed single mother's convention. I had to reload more than a dozen times, always for the most banal reasons; trying to open a container should not result in my character being hopelessly stuck to the side of said container with no hope of escape. As always in Fallout 3 save, save, save.

This is not the best episode of Fallout 3 DLC by a long shot, but it does offer some fun for Fallout fans. Albeit short (easily completed in a couple of hours), very buggy and repetitive, it's still Fallout 3 and you are killing little green men, thus redeeming points in my book.