Mothership Zeta Review

There are a number of alien weapons to loot, including the Alien Atomizer.

Soon you begin to unravel what the aliens, which seem inspired by the aliens from 1996 movie Mars Attacks!, are up to. There's no dialogue involved in this discovery – just exploration. Again, no spoilers. All we'll say is they like abducting people and they like experimenting on them. And not everyone you meet will be from the same space and time you are, although you've probably worked that out from the above paragraph if you've got two braincells to rub together.

For many, though, the new weapons will be of more interest than the plot. All the new weapons are alien, as you'd expect. You first get the Shock Baton, a melee weapon that does okay-ish damage up close. Next it's the Alien Atomiser, a small gun that rapidly spits out energy beams that do good damage. After that you get your hands on the Alien Disintegrator. As a two-handed rifle it's more powerful than the Atomiser, but you can only get a couple of shots off in VATs. This is a problem, because the aliens, particularly the ones that seem to be able to move in and out of phase, are double hard bastards that are incredibly good shots and fast moving to boot.

The alien weapons are a bit of a let down, only because they're not particularly inventive (more powerful variants of the above become available towards the end, but they're basically the same with more impressive stats). About halfway through you get the grenade launcher-like Drone Cannon, which seems to do hardly any damage to the aliens but does play fun havoc with the game's physics (it also reduced the framerate to pitiful levels). The hardcore will be disappointed to discover there are no Alien Blasters to be found, but you can use Alien Epoxy to repair any weapon by 25 per cent, including the Gauss Rifle (yeah!) so it's no bad thing. What is bad is that there are only a few Alien Power Cells to find on the ship. Boo. There's a weapon, not too dissimilar to the Alien Blaster, that you get right at the end that seems designed to make up for this fact, so it's not too bad. More interesting than all of the new weapons, however, is the Samurai Armour. The mere existence of such a thing has already set the Fallout hardcore off. Whatever your take on the issue, it's hard to resist murdering the owner for it.

The main quest is really the only quest. Unlike the superb The Pitt and Point Lookout add-ons, there are no side quests to embark on (that we found anyway). There's an Achievement for finding all of a certain item, but that's your only real distraction. All there is to do is march inexorably towards the top of the craft, killing countless aliens along the way. You're on an absolutely enormous ship, and yet the entire experience feels claustrophobic. Perhaps because there's nothing to do but follow your Pip-Boy way point marker to wherever you need to go next, Mothership Zeta feels remarkably linear and combat heavy, and rekindles memories of Bethesda's first Fallout 3 add-on, Operation Anchorage.

Mothership Zeta has its moments, but they're few and far between.

What's most disappointing of all though, is that there are no big decisions to make, no morally grey head scratchers. There are no real karma affecting choices. You can kill alien workers if you want – innocent bystanders who run away from you, and you can kill your friendly NPCs, but that's not the game asking you to make a decision, is it? As I neared the end I was sure I was going to be asked whether I wanted to avail of what I thought was an obvious game-changing opportunity. I wasn't.

There are some stand-out moments, however. There are a number of holotapes to collect, each with a recording of an abductee being forced by aliens to talk. Some of them are quite funny, especially the one of a sweary Raider. Stop and listen to your gang chat to each other and you'll hear some surprisingly engaging dialogue, particularly when Somah explains the current post-apocalyptic desolation of the world to those who had no idea, including Sally and the soldier. There's a set piece that's like nothing in the game so far – from a raised platform you need to trigger pulsing pylons as drones and aliens run past them - the pylons send the aliens hilariously flying through the air. At one point you embark on a space walk, which is as strange an experience as it is liberating. And the climax to the whole thing is sufficiently different and epic feeling to last long in the memory.

All told though, Mothership Zeta is a let down. It's nowhere near as good as Point Lookout or The Pitt. It's slightly better than Operation Anchorage, but only slightly. It's a linear, repetitive slog through an alien space ship and nothing else. Is it a fitting finale? No. Is it worth 800MS Points? Just. If only for the Samurai Armour. Sniff.