Mothership Zeta Fallout 3 Expansion #5

Downloadable Content from Bethesda - Alien Invasion / Abduction

Oct 15, 2009 Fernando Ynigo

Allegedly the final bit of downloadable content from Bethesda, the Fallout 3 saga drops curtain at the final frontier. Reminiscent of Anchorage / Pitt gameplay.

Mothership Zeta places the Fallout player in one of the three classic dangers of shooter setting. One is evil Nazis, another is demons and monsters, and the third is aliens. A cautious gamer can safely expect a phoned-in venture into the strip-mined genre of alien invasion, and most often get exactly that.

The genre has its champions: The Half-Life series, Prey, and the Halo series as market overlord. However, these success stories are few, and disappointment is often the only reward for the hopeful.

Reprieve from the Wasteland Desert

It became apparent, soon enough, that Bethesda does not slouch. They have an eye for detail refined by years of world-building, a skill that places the audience in a room where people (or in this case, aliens) live and work. As one makes his or her way through the ship, one notices set tables and meals and workstations cluttered with tools and disassembled projects. Close to the end, the alien-sized stasis cots, all empty, remind the player that he has probably killed the things that used to sleep there.

Add that to a varied cast of humans, ghouls, scorpions, and cows, 25 audio recordings of other human abductees, and one gets a fleshed-out population saturated in fear and cruelty, both deliberate and confused. The environment is affected by player actions, and the environment adapts to deal not only with the him, but the things he breaks or sets loose. This illusion is critical to this kind of storytelling, and often it will mean the difference between player acclaim or contempt.

Too Tried and True - The FPS Formula

So sight and sound are covered, they are beautiful, they are compelling, and they are diverse in a setting plagued by metallic sterility and the same raygun sound effects used since 1930. The gameplay is not so impeccable, unfortunately, and suffers from the same railway shooter effect as Operation: Anchorage. The first expansion for Fallout 3, Anchorage was a simulation of the military campaign between China and the USSA (America) that took place two hundred years before the Fallout 3 setting. It eventually resulted in the nuclear holocaust that destroyed the planet, so it is an important event in the story.

The Mothership Zeta and Operation: Anchorage expansions are set up in hallways, where the player starts at one end and kills everything until reaching the other end. Standard first-person shooter arrangement, very simple, very boring. Varying the color palette and keeping the scenery objects diverse as one moves from section to section helps to maintain some sense of realism, but the audience is by no means compelled to revisit these places and is moved by the action ahead. In effect, the player is placed on rails and given a push forward, traveling a preset path until an obstacle stops him.

Fallout Mothership Zeta Verdict

The ride is fun, it lasts about six and a half hours, and it is certainly not the worst ten US dollars ever spent on entertainment. However, the better bet would be on Broken Steel or Point Lookout before Mothership Zeta, unless patience is a virtue and the inevitable expansion bundle is not too far away.

The copyright of the article Mothership Zeta Fallout 3 Expansion #5 in Video & Online Games is owned by Fernando Ynigo. Permission to republish Mothership Zeta Fallout 3 Expansion #5 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.