4thofeleven | Review: Mothership Zeta (Fallout 3 DLC) (Reply)

And so Fallout DLC ends as they began – with a completely linear shoot-em up completely detached from the setting of the original game. I wasn’t expecting anything as good as Point Lookout, but Mothership Zeta is, if anything, worse even than Operation Anchorage!

The plot, such as it is: You pick up a distress call from a crashed alien spaceship. On reaching the crash site, you’re abducted by the aliens. Escaping from your cell, you team up with a few other human captives to disable the ship’s systems and gain access to the bridge. There, you fight a brief battle against another alien spaceship, before finally reactivating the transporters and returning to Earth.

There’s a couple of problems. Number one is that while, yes, in real life exploring an alien starship would be an incredible experience, in computer games aliens are dime-a-dozen. Second, the alien ship doesn’t feel too alien anyway. It’s mostly generic corridors, with no windows or viewscreens to emphasise you’re in space. I might as well be fighting through an underground Enclave base – and at least that would tie into the Fallout world.

Even for a generic alien shooter, Zeta has little of interest. Since you’re on an alien ship, obviously human weapons and ammo are rare, so you spend most of your time using alien weapons. There’s three – an alien piston which uses the energy weapon skill, an alien rifle which counts as a small gun, and an alien rocket launcher. Pick whichever one your character has the highest skill for, and then never switch to another for the duration of the mission. One of the great things Fallout 3 has is that you’re almost always short on one type of ammo, and frequently have to switch between weapons to survive. Here, every weapon uses the same alien power cells, and almost every enemy drops a few. You may as well have infinite ammo.

I was expecting some sort of twist, some sort of explanation for what the aliens were doing and why they were at Earth, that would tie them into the Fallout world. Certainly aliens have appeared before in Fallout games, but always as hidden easter eggs, not as key parts of the game. If you’re going to make an entire downloadable mission revolving around the aliens, you need to offer some explanation for how they fit into a post-apocalyptic setting. There’s some interesting bits early on – you can access recordings made by various alien abductees across history, and later on you fight a few alien ‘abominations’, which are implied to be alien-human hybrids. I was expecting a big twist when you finally made it to the bridge… but no, you just shoot the captain and then take out the rest of the crew, and end up leaving just as baffled as you were when you arrived.

A couple of possible alien motivations that would have left me feeling far more charitable about the whole thing:

- The Enclave uses alien technology. They’re here to reclaim the items stolen from them by the US before the war.

- The aliens use Enclave technology! They’re lazy, and prefer to steal from other species than develop things on their own. They’re observing Earth, waiting for it to rebuild enough that they can start stealing technology from us again.

- The aliens are here to keep Earth in the dark ages, abducting anyone who could properly rebuild shattered Earth. They think any species that wiped itself out in war is too dangerous and savage to be allowed to expand.

- The aliens are here to preserve humanity. They recognise that Earth is doomed in the long term; they’re abducting a cross section of humans to transport to a new world.

- The aliens are refugees. Their own world was also destroyed in nuclear war, and they’re the last survivors. Earth might be a radioactive ruin, but it’s an improvement over most planets they’ve found, and they intend to settle here.

- As above, but the aliens have degenerated into barbarism. The aliens you fight aren’t the crew – they’re the alien equivalent of raiders.

And that’s just off the top of my head. Aliens on their own aren’t interesting. Aliens as a part of a post-apocalyptic world, that could be done interestingly. Unfortunately, Bethseda apparently felt a linear dungeon crawl with personality-less alien orcs was good enough.

And why the hell can't your fellow alien captives acompany you back to the Wasteland? Having the cowboy or the samurai as an ally in the DC ruins would be awesome!

Anyway, not recommended.