Written by: Ian

 

 

 

'Fallout 3' is awesome. Aliens are awesome. Now they have been combined with the fifth and final DLC for my RPG of 2008- surely this is a winning combo that will round off all of this fantastic DLC with a bang!? I was certainly very excited to start playing once my download had finished.

 

 

The story starts in a very similar way to the other DLCs- you get a radio message, and go off to see what your investigations pick up.

 

Here, you find a crashed UFO in the wasteland, but as you approach, you end up being beamed into a mothership far above the earth’s surface. Imprisoned with a small child, you have to plan your escape, take over the ship, and get yourself back to earth in one piece. It’s certainly an all-action adventure, and the story also has some really humorous parts where you encounter some figures from the past that have been captured for several centuries.

 

 

It’s a decent story, but not quite up there with the length and depth of "Point Lookout".

 

 

Gameplay-wise, Zeta doesn’t play to Fallout’s strengths. Whilst it starts interestingly, with you being beamed aboard, losing your weapons and equipment, and having to escape by conducting a bare-knuckle fight, it soon gets really rather more boring. Within ten minutes or so of your escape, you get all your original weaponry back, as well as a host of pimped-out alien weapons.

 

At this point the game becomes a straight-up, linear shooter until pretty much the final scene of the content. At certain points, you get to play in squads, but this merely reinforces that the friendly AI in Bethseda’s games have never really been up to scratch. Everything from animation to actions just look a little bit off, and they certainly aren’t much help in a firefight either.

 

So, after a promising first 15 minutes, you then get 2 hours of dross, fighting against the very few types of drone and alien, with some of the most basic fetch quests and puzzle solving seen across the game yet. If you can stand all of this, the game then has a rousing finale where you take out another large spaceship in a strategic battle across space. It’s pretty good, but it’s a struggle to get there.

 

 

At around 3 hours, it’s one of the shortest pieces of content yet offered by the developers, and without any of the moral choices or less linear paths, there’s no real reason for a second playthrough either. There are some collectables, but they’re not really worth the effort of finding them out to be honest.