Mothership Zeta Review

Mothership Zeta transports you out of the Wasteland and into an alien space ship

Mothership Zeta marks the end of Fallout 3's monstrous life. Really. Bethesda has said there will be no more add-ons to this quite stupendous, enduring game. It's sad, really. Sniff.

It seems appropriate to ask whether Mothership Zeta, the fifth and final Fallout 3 add-on, is a worthy finale. It seems appropriate to ask how Mothership Zeta compares to the add-ons that have proceeded it. It seems appropriate to ask whether I'm going to get any kick ass new armour and weapons I can use to lay waste to the, er, Wasteland. Unfortunately, the answers to these questions aren't going to please those hoping for a Point Lookout-quality addition.

Mothership Zeta, if you don't already know, is set on an alien space ship, the kind you'd expect to see in a sci-fi comic book from the fifties. That's fine – however outlandish the premise, or even the existence of aliens at all, Fallout's got form. One) there was a crashed UFO and an alien blaster in the original Fallout. Two) Fallout's universe is a retro-futuristic Americana vision of the future. It's what people from that era reckoned it'd be like in the 21st century. Flying cars, plasma weapons and ALIENS! Roswell and all that jazz – alien abductions, alien blasters, little green bastards with anal probes who were probably in league with the commies. If, as a die-hard Fallout purist, you're rubbed the wrong way by the very mention of aliens, then you'll probably hate this DLC, because it's fit to bursting with them.

It begins with a broadcast. The signal is a ruse – you're abducted, whisked off into outer space (sans Dogmeat, Fawkes or anyone else you might have accompanying you). You wake in a holding cell, stripped, predictably, of all your weapons and armour. There you meet a tough talking female wastelander called Somah. Before you've had a chance to check your crown jewels, you see a mechanical claw pluck a man from a nearby cell and carry him off kicking and screaming into some godforsaken pit of experimental doom. Clearly, these aliens aren't here for tea and scones.

The emphasis is on killing aliens. Lots of aliens.

And so it's escape time. We won't spoil it for you, but we will say it's not hard to get out of your holding cell. And from the moment you pick up your first alien weapon, Mothership Zeta quickly descends into the very experience we feared.

Fallout 3 is an awful shooter. It simply doesn't work played as a typical first (or third, but we can't imagine anyone plays the game in the poor third-person view) person shoot em up. But that's okay, because when combat is required, the brilliant VATs system does a great job of making the rampant destruction of your enemies fun and very, very bloody. And then, usually, there's some NPC interaction and beard-scratching decision-making for pacing. Mothership Zeta disappoints because it basically asks you to kill hundreds of aliens and other enemies we won't spoil in samey corridors and rooms for five hours without any role-playing to mix things up. There are so many aliens and guard drones to kill, usually at the same time, that it's impossible to use VATs and VATs alone to survive. You're forced, by sheer weight of numbers, to shoot stuff in first-person. This isn't a good thing.

Your main task is to get off the ship, but initially you're tasked with getting out of the holding cell area. Before you do that though, you meet a surprisingly chirpy little girl called Sally. She acts as your guide throughout, creeping through vents and opening doors as you head towards the bridge. Along the way you gather an eclectic mix of followers, all abductees like yourself. There's an American soldier, a revenge-obsessed cowboy and even a Samurai. Really.