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Jamie At Home took on a darker look in its final series...
Jamie At Home took on a darker look in its final series...Jamie At Home took on a darker look in its final series...

Side missions range from a wearingly familiar fetch-quests to a neat little detective mission that has you following the trail of a Chinese secret agent. If you can find it, there’s also an arena-like challenge to take up. Whether you’re on an assignment or just poking your nose around, you’ll find that there’s rather a lot of combat in Point Lookout. Your enemies are pretty hard-boiled, too: there’s the Swamplurk, an acid-spitting variation of the Mirelurk King, and Broken Steel’s Ghoul Reaver also makes a cameo appearance. However, most of the time you’ll be fighting humans - or at least things that are almost human - and it’s here that the DLC makes a minor slip-up.

As you’re probably aware, your major opponents in Point Lookout are mutated, Deliverance-style rednecks. They wear dungarees, they have big lumpy faces and they speak with a yelp-y Southern drawl. They shout and gibber at you as they attack, and they’re altogether pretty creepy. Although one could argue that the design for these nasties is a little OTT for the Fallout universe, perhaps a bit too caricatured, they ultimately work because they’re deeply unpleasant. Unfortunately, they’re also extremely tough - and while this works from a game-design perspective, it’s also a tad unrealistic. I played through Point Lookout with a level 17 character; many people who play this will be at level 20 and above, thanks to Broken Steel. If you’re at this stage then you’re bound to be an armour-clad walking tank… and yet somehow your nuclear arsenal is nothing against the might of a half-naked gimp in piss-stained trousers.

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I’m quite happy to admit that this resilience makes for a more enjoyable game. If plasma weapons cut through these guys like a hot knife through inbred butter, there wouldn’t be much of a challenge. And yet I find it hard to shake off the stupidity of a situation. My alien blaster will kill a heavily-armoured Enclave Commander in one shot, but Cletus McBanjo will often eat one and still come running after me. Indeed, he and his cousins (who are also his brothers, uncles and lovers) are able to take up to six shotgun blasts to the head before they finally take a dirt-nap - and I’m talking about the new double-barrelled shotgun, which supposedly does a truckload of damage with each hit.

It’s a minor flaw, but I still think Bethesda could have found a way around it. While I’m complaining, I’m not sure if the new weapons will be used much when players take them back to the main wasteland (you can go back any time you like, incidentally). The new shotgun and the lever-action rifle are a good fit for the atmosphere of Point Lookout, but they’re otherwise a bit dull in comparison with Fallout’s existing arsenal. More interesting is The Dismemberer - a special axe you can find that causes people to burst into little giblets. It’s a bit silly, but it’s also a lot of fun to use.

On the whole, there’s very little to complain about with Point Lookout. The new game world looks great, and the omnipresent vegetation is a real change from the barren rock and destroyed highways that we’re used to. At times the frame rate seemed to take a bit of a hit, but this issue never became serious enough to affect gameplay - the action was just a bit less smooth than usual. There’s a good five hours of gameplay on offer here, more if you take the time to see everything, and the quality of the main quests is beyond dispute. If you’re a Fallout fan with 800 points to spare, there’s really no reason not to pick this up. Rockstar may lead the industry when it comes to expansive DLC, but Bethesda is surely close behind.

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