Broken Steel - Fallout DLC Review

Broken Steel signified the mid point in Bethesda's Fallout 3 DLC campaign, and it slots in rather awkwardly amidst the other four self contained mini campaigns, being a direct continuation of the main games plot. Though I would personally recommend buying and installing before you play any of the the other DLC packs in order to take advantage of the increased level cap and the new perks that go along with it, I personally decided to play it last (note: while I have played Operation Anchorage it was such as long time ago that I don't have a clear recollection of it, so I intend to replay it as my evil character this week and come back with my thoughts by the end of the week).

Broken Steel directly addresses a problem that many people had with Fallout 3, namely that once you completed the final mission of the main storyline the credits rolled and in order to continue playing you would have to reload an earlier save before you set certain events in to motion. This is a bit of a pain in a game that is ostensibly a free roaming experience, so Bethesda listened to their fans and now you have another option that allows you to play on and take part in several missions that show what befell the Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel after Project Purity.

The missions in Broken Steel are good fun and take place in a combination of existing locations and a major new one. The main plot lasts a little bit longer than that of the other DLC packs as well, around 5-6 hours. Then of course you have the 10 extra levels of experience. When I played through all the of DLC, I was still only level 26 at the end of it all, so from that point on I explored all of the places that I had yet to visit in the wasteland (which was quite a few as it turns out). Fallout 3 is an absolutely vast game, but a good deal of the content is entirely optional so have further impetus to get out explore is a good thing.

Also, the new perks featured in Broken Steel meant that I was finally able to complete the annoying Nuka Cola Challenge side quest and earn the achievement points. In the original game I hadn't realised that you were supposed to save the bottles of Nuka Cola Quantum that you find and hand them in to one of two particular NPCs, so I actually drank a lot of them as healing items. Thankfully Bethesda must have realised that people might do this, and they added a perk that converts every 10 normal bottles of Nuka Cola into a Quantum. There are also other perks that reset your karma to neutral status, allow you to walk over traps without triggering them, and give you increased resistance to radiation, so by the end of the game you can pretty much make your character an unstoppable killing machine. I have also noticed many of these perks make a return in New Vegas.

All in all, Broken Steel is the DLC that many Fallout 3 fans were waiting for all along - it fixes certain problems, enhances an already brilliant game and allows you to wander the capital wasteland for as long as you wish. It's well worth the Microsoft points!

Overall: 8 out of 10

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The Pitt - Fallout 3 DLC Review

The Pitt was the second of five pieces of DLC released for Fallout 3, and personally is the one I enjoyed the least. First, a bit of background. This time, after receiving an emergency radio signal, you will encounter an escaped slave looking for help to free his fellow captives from the ruins of what used to be Pittsburgh. The unfortunate masses are forced by those in power to labour away in the steel mills, and venture out into the hazardous, Trog invested city to salvage steel ingots that can be fashioned into ammunition. Trogs were once normal human beings, but a disease has swept the city, causing many of its occupants to de-evolve and turn into these feral creatures. You have been tasked with both helping to free the slaves and also to help deliver the cure to the people, which is currently in possession of the leader of the slavers.

It appears that The Pitt is aimed at the Fallout 3 hardcore player, something which I certainly am not, despite having now invested over 80 hours into the game. I prefer to play on Easy, enjoying the exploration, the thrill of combat and towards the end of the game the over powered weaponry. Not long after starting this side story, all of your equipment is taken away from you (you can get it back later, so don't worry too much) and for a while all you have to defend yourself with is a brand new weapon to Fallout 3, the auto axe. You will be able to pick up guns from defeated slavers, but ammo is pretty sparse and there are many Trogs that you will need to kill, so you may run out pretty quickly.

As you'd expect, The Pitt isn't too difficult when played on one of the lower difficulty settings - but what it is, is annoying. It's fairly linear, the graphics aren't very varied (and nowhere near as nice as in Zeta), and the lack of ammo/decent weapons is a pain. Don't get me wrong, it's not a boring waste of time like some of the DLC I've been unfortunate to waste my money on (Dragon Age, I'm looking at you), but for me at least, The Pitt is definitely the weakest of the bunch. Those who struggled through the main game on one of the harder settings and are looking for a challenge may well enjoy it though.

Overall: 5 out of 10

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Mothership Zeta - Fallout 3 DLC Review

Mothership Zeta was the fifth and final piece of DLC released for Fallout 3, and in my opinion it could well be the best of the bunch, or at least of equal standing to Point Lookout and Broken Steel. It all depends what you want to get out of it really. If for you the best part of Fallout 3 was exploring the wasteland at your leisure, discovering quests and places of interest at your own pace, then Point Lookout would probably be the best choice. On the other hand if you would like a more linear experience, packed with high powered weaponry and unique enemies, then Mothership Zeta really delivers.

Some of your may have already stumbled upon the downed UFO out in the wasteland and picked up the Alien Blaster, an extremely powerful energy weapon. Well, this vessel is the starting point of Mothership Zeta, and it sees you being beamed aboard a ship populated by ETs that strongly resemble the classic Roswell alien from the legends. You are taken captive and thrown into a cell with another prisoner, and decide to work together to get out of there before your alien abuctees have an opportunity to test out their anal probes, or whatever else it is they may have in store for you.

After knocking out one of the guards, you can arm yourself with a Stun Baton until you get an opportunity to pick up a gun with a cool sounding name like a Disintigrator or Atomizer, before running amok on the ship, blowing up reactors and sabotaging the aliens attempt at destroying the world. It will probably take you between 3 and 4 hours to complete the quests contained within Mothership Zeta, and you will have great fun doing it as the graphics featured here are some of the best to feature throughout Fallout 3 and the DLC packs, with a steampunk vibe going on, lots of lovely shiny metal and some nice smoke effects. Reducing aliens to their component molecules is always good for a laugh as well. So all in all I heartily recommend downloading Mothership Zeta, but would suggest that you also buy Broken Steel as well so that you can take advantage of the increased level cap, or if you don't own Fallout 3 at all you could get the Game of the Year Edition which includes the main game and all of the DLC - which is amazing value for money and will probably take you a long while to complete.

Overall: 8 out 10

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Point Lookout - Fallout 3 DLC review

Point Lookout was the fourth of five DLC releases for Fallout 3. Way back when I put together my Fallout 3 review I promised that I would come back with my thoughts on the various DLC packages once I'd had the opportunity to check them out. Now, with Fallout: New Vegas less than a week away I have finally played through one of them, namely Point Lookout. Better late than never, eh?

I enjoyed this for the most part because it gives you a new, fairly large area to roam around in at your leisure, with quite a few locations to explore (and an achievement if you visit them all). There's a decent amount of gameplay to be had, too, with a main quest line that will take several hours to complete, a couple more optional quests, and of course many incidental and optional areas to discover. Throughout your time on Point Lookout you will come up against creepy rednecks, a tribe that has set themselves up in the local church and are obsessed with the native Punga fruit, and plenty of ghouls and mirelurks. Because I had already played through most of the main campaign by the time I came here I was armed to the teeth with a mini gun, combat shotgun, an alien blaster and full Brotherhood of Steel armour, but should you decide to visit earlier with the limited weaponry available towards the start of the game you may struggle a bit.

One of the optional quests you can complete in Point Lookout involves finding an evil book, which you can then take back to the mainland and destroy in the extremely creepy and ghoul infested Dunwich building should you decide to do so. Many people had already noted the references to H P Lovecraft throughout this building but had failed to locate the book mentioned in the audio logs that you can find - well now this DLC will finally help to solve that mystery.

Visually Point Lookout is a bit of a dreary place, which I suppose is in keeping with the atmosphere of Fallout 3 but a little more variety in the colour palette would have been nice. I also don't think the new areas were quite creepy enough - there were no scares that matched being assaulted by ghouls in the pitch black underground areas of the main game, or coming face to face with a Super Mutant Behemoth, for example. All in all though Point Lookout is an enjoyable experience and it was great to revisit the Fallout 3 world after all this time. I'm going to try and crack on with at least some of the other DLC packs this week, before picking up Fallout: New Vegas on Friday.

Overall: 7 out of 10.

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Fallout 3 review

The RPG that saw me through the late winter months of 2008 and beyond into 2009 was Fallout 3, set in a post apocalyptic world in and around Washington. You begin your epic journey as a lowly vault dweller, but not long into the game you leave the confines of Vault 101 and go looking for your father. It's up to you how you go about finding him though - you could just follow the linear path that the game sets out for you, or you could forgo it altogether and explore the world, picking up the trail later on. What you do when you do finally catch up with your father is also in your own hands, as you can decide to be good, bad or neutral. Not sure if the game is right for you? I'll help you decide.

Format: Xbox 360 (also on PS3, PC)
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Genre: RPG
Region: PAL
Price: £30-£40

Graphics: 8 out of 10
All in all, the graphics in Fallout 3 are fantastic - but they aren't without their faults. The NPC's you speak to all have a glassy stare on their faces which a bit of naturalistic animation could have fixed. This is also a criticism that has been levelled against Oblivion, so it's somewhat annoying that Bethesda hasn't fixed it. There is also a fair amount of repetition across the various areas of the wasteland - you will continually find identical looking metal boxes, radios, sewer systems and other bits and bobs. I understand why the developers would choose to reuse resources wherever they can in a game of this scale, but I appreciate it when teams make a bit of extra effort to make different areas of their world look unique (Dragon Quest VIII remains a shining example of this in my opinion).

Nevertheless, there's still an awful lot to be admired about the visuals - when you're creeping around, unsure what's around the next corner, it can be extremely atmospheric, and when you are suddenly faced with a Feral Ghoul of a Super Mutant Master it can be shit-your-pants scary. The minor quibbles won't spoil your enjoyment of the game too much, but they are serious enough to lower the score to an 8.

Sound and Music: 9 out of 10
Most of the time while playing the game I was tuned into Galaxy News Radio, and I absolutely love the range of old timey music that plays on that station. The list of artists include Cole Porter, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. Great though this music is, there isn't quite a enough of it. By the end of the campaign, I must have heard the same tunes dozens of times. I didn't matter too much, but at the same time I would have appreciated some more. If Bethesda had offered a DLC pack which was nothing but another selection of 20 or so tunes for example, I would have bought it - but that is unlikely to happen.

Apart from the music, there are also a few famous voices amongst the cast. These include Liam Neeson as your father, Malcom McDowell as President John Henry Eden and Ron Perlman, reprising his role as the narrator from the first game in the series. All of them put in solid performances and help give the game more atmosphere. Some of the incidental characters have the same voice (most of the male ghouls sound the same for example) but this is nowhere near as great a concern as it was in Oblivion, where there was seemingly only a half dozen or so actors playing hundreds of people.

Finally, the sound effects. Gun shots and explosions all sound suitably beefy and realistic, monsters sound nicely disgusting and the sound effects of the VATS system, while borrowed from the first game in the series, are unique and very easy to identify.

You can gain several followers during the game including Dogmeat here. He died valiantly defending me from killer robots during my play through.

Game Mechanics: 8 out of 10
My opinion about the game mechanics is much the same as the Graphics - they work well enough but still have a few niggly flaws that prevent them from being great. Firstly, the battle system - you can play Fallout 3 in real time like a first person shooter, but it really doesn't function very well if you do decide to go that route. To get the most out of the game you should use make use of VATS whenever you can, and just use the real time combat as a fall back. Pressing the RB button freezes the action and puts an overlay over the enemy that allows you to target a specific body part and see how likely you are to hit it, and you have a certain amount of ability points to spend on shooting at the enemies. Different weapons will use up different amounts of AP.

The VATS system isn't perfect either, though. The theory is that you can cripple the legs of your enemy to slow them down, but it is almost always better to simply aim for the head and try and get an instant kill instead.

The freeform nature of the quests have also come under a fire a little bit, too. I just recently listened to an episode of the Listen Up podcast where host Garnett Lee was describing how he accidentally managed to skip over several major storyline quests when he decided to do some of the optional quests first. I did exactly the same thing, except I later found out that you can go back and do those quests anyway if you want to (Galaxy News Radio). I see his point but personally it doesn't really bother me that you can direct the path of the main story, because I was planning to play the game a second time as an evil character anyway.

Speaking of which, Fallout 3 is yet another RPG where you can decide to be good or bad, following in the footsteps of pretty much anything by Bioware, and the Fable games. I do like these games that give you moral choices and two ways to play the game, but it has been done to death at this point. Fallout 3 doesn't really add anything new to the idea but hopefully Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins will do something different. Each time you level up your character, you can also choose a perk, and your choice is also effected by your good/bad alignment, how may points you have assigned to a certain skill and how you rolled your stats at the beginning of the game. They include Strong Back, which allows you to carry extra loot, and everybodys favourite, Bloody Mess, which can cause enemies to explode in a shower of guts.

Innovation and Cleverness: 6 out of 10
Much of Fallout 3 is built upon the foundations of the original Fallout (the world, the dark humour) and Oblivion (the game engine, the overall design and structure), but that's not to say that it doesn't bring anything new to the table. The VATS system is a decent attempt to convert the battles of the original game into a real time, 3D world, and there are some very inventive optional quests for you to take on.

This is Megaton, likely to be the first town that you come across and home to some of the more interesting quests in the game. There's an unexploded nuclear bomb in the middle of town - will you defuse it or detonate it?

Value & Replayability: 9 out of 10
This is really the major strength of Fallout 3. There's an absolutely massive world out there, and completing the story and the optional quests will only show you a fraction of it. You could spend hours trawling through the the ruins of DC, taking down roaming bands of Super Mutants, or wandering the wasteland to see what you can find. Then of course you can do it all again as a character of the opposite alignment, and maybe focus on sneaking and thievery instead of just blowing everything to kingdom come. The choice is yours.

Overall: 9 out of 10
Despite all of the minor flaws, Fallout 3 is still a fantastic game and it was very nearly my favourite game of 2008. You don't really notice the niggly things while playing the game, you're too busy having fun. It's only after you've finished and think back on the experience that you realise that certain things could have been better.

I haven't covered any of the DLC packs in this review because so far I've only played through Operation Anchorage. I have bought and downloaded The Pitt and Broken Steel, and will play them soon, but I will wait until Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta are released and then write a round up of all of them at the same time.

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