Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta Review

Matthew Scullion

Let me paint you a picture- a Fallout 3 fanboy, having purchased and completed every other item of DLC available for the masterpiece of an RPG, found out that the day the  final DLC dropped that he would not be anywhere near his 360. So the fanboy stayed up until 4:00 AM waiting for the DLC to be uploaded, but gave up once the voices started. He rushed to his games console first thing when he woke up in hopes of downloading the space-adventure for later consumption, yet he was disappointed yet again. Half a week later he returned home and rushed to his rig, queued up the download and finally started playing Mothership Zeta. Roughly 4 hours later, he ejected the disk, bitter and disappointed.

Bethesda’s quality level regarding Fallout DLC can be described best as “sporadic”- anyone who has been aware of the release of any of the monthly add-ons knows how buggy both Operation: Anchorage and The Pitt were upon initial release, with the latter being so game-breakingly filled with errors that Microsoft removed it from the Marketplace entirely until a fix was developed. What’s worse was that neither of the first two expansions were particularly great- Anchorage was panned for being combat heavy and linear, whereas The Pitt, while interesting, was nothing to write home about. Broken Steel went against this trend, being both relatively bug-free (it’s a Bethesda game after all, you can’t expect it to be perfect) and good quality, followed by Point Lookout’s hick-ridden swamp raising yet another step on the quality scale. Using simple pattern recognition skills, Mothership Zeta should have been the best of the lot, completing the progression of quality as everything Bethesda learned from their previous four releases culminating in a big ol’ pile of awesome. Yet that’s not quite so.

Mothership Zeta isn’t terrible by any means, but in much the same way that Operation Anchorage wasn’t awful. It adds a new location to the Capital Wasteland and sets you loose within it- except it doesn’t really give you as much freedom as the majority of the game. Everything is based around combat and exploration of the titular spacecraft following the Lone Wanderer’s abduction by extraterrestrials. The first thing that happens when you are taken aboard is that your intergalactic hosts see fit to strip you of all those nice little items you’ve spent however many hours accruing- this is Mothership Zeta’s first failing- the entire reason Broken Steel and Point Lookout trumped the first two offerings was the fact that they allowed you to use all your hard-earned toys in a new environment while at the same time allowing you to pick up some new shiny things for use in maiming, mangling and mutilating the various raiders, supermutants and hapless innocents of post-apocalypse DC. Mothership Zeta does make up for this about halfway through however, as the game leads you to an almost unguarded container giving you all your goodies back while at the same time crippling your ability to harvest the alien resources available to you. This is hampered further by the way the game locks you out of areas once you’ve been there once, meaning anything you leave behind until a certain event is gone forever- I don’t know about other people, but the joy I found in FO3 has never been in the inventory management.

The add-on takes you through a series of grey and chrome corridors, introducing you to a couple of other abductees from various points in the universe’s history, including a Cowboy, a Samurai , a medical officer from the battle of Anchorage and a dead astronaut. While that may sound exciting, it really isn’t-the characters are underdeveloped and kinda just thrown in there just for the sake of giving you some moderately competent support characters- each of the abductees have their story told via a data tape, but really the only information we get is their name, where they came from before being frozen and that they all like to kill the aliens just as much as you. There really aren’t many plot points available here, it seems at times like a bad Sci-Fi movie fused with an old style alien shooter…..so basically, DOOM with V.A.T.S.- you walk from section of the ship to section, blowing stuff up and splattering the blood of everything that moves and doesn’t speak English (with the exception of the Samurai, of course), until you come upon the alien leader and promptly ice him, leading to one of the strangest and easiest boss fights ever. The system used to defeat the opposing space ship is basically; press A to divert energy to full shields, wait for other ship to fire, press A to divert energy to maximum death laser , press A to fire laser, press A to divert energy back to shields, then rinse and repeat. While it all looks very pretty, it doesn’t take long, it’s not very challenging and it leaves you feeling incredibly unsatisfied.

As I previously mentioned Mothership Zeta is rather pretty, with almost no assets used from the main game and some wonderful looking set pieces such as the observation deck which lets gaze upon the brown and ruined earth from high, high above. I also liked the terrifying apparatus in the various science labs devoted to cutting humans up for the benefit of the glorious alien race, but looks without content to back them up aren’t much. Really this didn’t feel much like Fallout 3 to me, the only real reminders were the various cryogenically frozen creatures from the surface released to distract the laser wielding green men and the karma loss incurred upon you if you accidentally kill one of the “friendly” spacemen that seem only to be “good” by qualification of working on the ship, not being trained to defend it. This seemed kinda forced in, as if the developers were simply ticking a list of features from the game that were universally praised and came upon the alignment system just before publishing the game, hastily throwing it in at the last minute to pick up bonus points.

The aliens have been a mainstay of the fallout franchise, with their downed craft and weaponry featuring in almost every instalment, so their appearance should have been a big moment, but honestly if you want a combat-heavy expansion to the adventure deeply ingrained with the universe’s mythology, go for anchorage: its just as linear, you shoot as many enemies and you get a chance at a nice shiny set of power armour at the end. If you have an unhealthy obsession with Pipboy and can’t stand to pass up a couple more hours with your beloved Vault 101 exile, or just really want some fairly decent energy weapons, pick this up. Otherwise go for one of the two diamonds in the crown- both Point Lookout and Broken Steel are well worth the fee, whereas Fallout 3’s interstellar exploration is average at best.

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