Sorry my choice of pics wasn't exactly great...
Bethesda have FINALLY finished their quintet of Fallout 3 expansions - confirmed to be no more made - with a hugely unexpected turn. While the others focused on post-apocalyptic life, and the way I see it, things which were at least believable, this one breaks all boundaries and goes to space, into a stereotypical alien spaceship, classic green aliens and all. Did the risk of it being laughably stupid pay off?
In a way, yes. Mothership Zeta isn't a disaster. The game doesn't stop being Fallout 3, and everything stays in the usual format despite being somewhere completely ridiculous with ridiculous enemies. You keep your weapons and armour so it's effectively just exploring a new area with quests in it, though these quests seriously lack substance and the general storyline is incredibly weak; it's literally 'Damn. We've been abducted. We need to get back to Earth. Let's find a way back to earth.' You meet a few characters along the way, eg a cowboy and a samurai which the aliens had been keeping whilst studying humanity's history, but they don't reveal much about their back story and hardly add to the expansion as a whole. The environments aren't great either and get repetitive very quickly, and unless you're a real sci-fi fan you'll be begging for the Wasteland by the end.
Enemies hardly vary either, they're all aliens: some with helmets, some with energy shields and some normal, or robots. In this way, Zeta suffers in the same way The Pitt did. It's basically one big dungeon crawl, fighting a bunch of enemies, hitting a switch then repeating the process. New weaponry spices it up a little, but because of no hidden things to find (other than the Captive Recordings to collect making the MOST FRUSTRATING FALLOUT ACHIEVEMENT EVER) which all RPGs should have there isn't a great deal of excitement to be had along the way. So this also has the problem which Operation Anchorage had: too much focus on it being an FPS.
So Fallout didn't exactly make a joke of itself with Zeta, and the 'spaceship vibe' was successful, but it wasn't a great deal of fun. I guess this is a disappointment, as it's the last expansion of the five, and none of them managed to be outstanding, with Broken Steel being the best of the lot. I give Zeta 5/10 for another FPS-like experience which did bring some variety with the whole extra-terrestrial thing, even if it was pretty underwhelming.
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