RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

With virtual Alaska, Pittsburgh, Point Lookout, and a better endgame behind it, Fallout 3 has set its sights a bit higher – literally – with its latest DLC. Putting a big twist on a previously unmarked encounter, Mothership Zeta is essentially a lengthy, linear shoot-em-up quest in the vein of Operation: Anchorage. While the setting is novel and it contains some memorable setpieces, it’s crippled by balance issues, overlong segments, and, of all things, plot holes. For all its atmosphere, Zeta can’t shake the feeling of wasted potential.

As with the other stand-alone questlines, Mothership Zeta will not be scored independent of Fallout 3.

In vanilla Fallout 3, the player can find a crashed alien scout ship, complete with a dead pilot, an apparent SOS radio beacon, and the powerful alien blaster. Now the beacon can be heard all across the wasteland, and players who approach the craft will be ensnared in a tractor beam and pulled into the sky. After a short and disturbing cutscene, you wake up in the brig of the titular mothership, stripped of your belongings. A wasteland scavenger named Somah is your cellmate, and it quickly becomes obvious that the aliens are experimenting on abducted humans. For what purpose is not known, but it’s obviously in your mutual interest to escape. The aliens don’t speak your language, so diplomacy isn’t an option: just break out, grab a weapon, and bash some little green heads.

Perhaps more than any DLC to date, Zeta varies wildly in challenge due to the enemies it throws at you. The alien prison guards, for instance, are (intentionally) frail and can be brought down bare-handed by well underskilled players. Their shock wands are damaging at first, but only because of your lack of armor. Standard grunts are more formidable, and sometimes employ special shields that shrug off a staggering amount of damage. Fortunately, their blasters and rifles are nowhere near as damaging as the one originally found in the Wasteland. New turrets fill fairly obvious roles, while alien robots – and the bouncing, grenade-like projectiles they fire – prove less conventional foes. Some bots are weak melee opponents, while others hide with surprising effectiveness behind their own massive weapons.

Uh-oh. What’s going on here? Am I starting a new character again? ’cause that doesn’t look like the face-making machine.

Your arsenal has expanded to counter these threats, including mostly energy weapons. Unique variants of alien pistols and rifles exist, while drones will drop their cannons for you to use. Your human friendlies come with weapons and armor of their own; more on them in a moment. Alien foodstuffs, medical supplies, and other treasures are in abundance, some of which can be modified on the ship. One of the more welcome additions is an epoxy that can repair any equipped weapon, even those with no base weapon for normal repairs; good news for anyone fond of the gauss rifle from Anchorage.

Initially you’ll only have Somah and a precocious youngster named Sally to interact with, but later on you’ll come across cryogenically frozen friendlies who can be thawed out and recruited. This cast is colorful and lively, ranging wildly from a pre-war field medic to a 19th century cowboy to a Japanese samurai (who doesn’t speak a word of English, in contrast to the English-translated Chinese throughout Fallout 3). Each will accompany you in clearing out certain sections, building to a climactic showdown on the bridge. The cast, with one noteworthy exception, is interesting, respectably acted, and prove genuinely useful as you traverse the ship. The past characters act with a distinct sense of fatalism as they realize that everything they ever cared for is long gone, and it gels with the half-serious, half-silly feel Zeta has going for it.

Speaking of which, there’s very little plot to speak of in Zeta, with ‘get out alive’ being the long and short of it. There is, however, plenty of rich, gooey atmosphere, and it contains almost equal doses of silly and serious. Audio recordings of previous abductees abound, all apparently made just prior to being experimented upon. Some are little more than whimpers or screams, but the wordier recordings range from macabre to comical – in a good, campy way – as various people from various times struggle to comprehend what’s about to happen to them. Your allies all have their backstories, some more subtle than others, and there’s a particularly grim scene where the medic comes upon what’s left of his army detachment.

Greetings from Earf’!

The atmosphere combines with solid level design and clever scripting to set up some memorable encounters. An early battle pits you and gunslinger Paulson against non-stop waves of aliens, and you have to activate a series of Tesla coil lookalikes to zap them as he covers you against any you miss. A tense spacewalk section puts you in hard vacuum as you try to find a way to the bridge, and sound is used extremely well here. A trip through cryogenics may net you unexpected allies – or enemies – as you come across frozen ghouls, raiders, and super mutants; possibly overlords if you have Broken Steel active. Through it all, the architecture is at once alien and distinct, and you generally won’t mistake one area for another.

And yet, Zeta does not come to the table prepared. Some of its most obvious problems are technical, with scripting issues predictably piling up the more characters are on screen. There have been reports of crashes involving the audio logs, though they were not encountered in the course of this playthrough. And in deep space, it only stands out even more that the player’s left hand is always uncovered no matter what they’re wearing. Balance issues aren’t hard to spot, either. Alien gems are a license to print money, being weightless and in extremely large supply. The sole new perk – Xenotech Expert, earned by finding every audio log – augments the ludicrous damage alien weapons already do. And some sections simply overstay their welcome, to the point where it can be hard to tell if you’re making any progress.

Worse, the plot, what little there is, just flat-out doesn’t make sense at times. Late in the mission you’re tasked with sabotaging an alien superweapon. It’s entirely possible to miss other characters even acknowledging its existence, meaning the quest might just show up with no explanation when you get there. The problem is you’re required to use said superweapon near the end, begging the question of just how effective your sabotage was and why you even bothered. Sally, the little girl, knows so much about the ship you will half expect her to be one of the aliens, and most of the time she’s basically just a channel for the developers to lead you by the nose to your objectives. Red-suited alien workers are marked as ‘good’ for some reason, and will cost a karma hit if killed, despite that they show up as hostile. They’re also extremely frail and easy to kill by accident.

Ah-ha! Now the probee has become the prober!

Perhaps most damning is that Zeta doesn’t really add anything to the Wasteland. Afterwards you get weapons and tools, and can return to the ship to scavenge, by proxy, for more goodies. But there are no new perks apart from Xenotech Expert, and – in spite of a golden opportunity to add the abducted ensemble as possible recruits – Zeta does nothing with the characters afterwards; most of the survivors just vanish, never to be seen again. Even Anchorage at least gave an interesting glimpse into a mad general’s imaginings of the ground war in Alaska, a key episode in Fallout‘s backstory, and it also further detailed the underutilized Brotherhood Outcast faction. Comparable words, however, cannot be said about Zeta.

With the wealth of interesting places left to explore, even within Fallout 3 alone, the decision to take on an alien spaceship remains a puzzling one. All said, Mothership Zeta does provide a decent playground to blast some aliens, and a few novel sections (and an epic finale) spice the action up considerably. But it is perhaps ironic that the previously unfettered alien blaster, now only accessible once you’ve finished the quest, is still more useful than anything you’ll find up there. Though Zeta has its appeal, those who skipped Operation: Anchorage will probably be no more enamored with this latest and likely last DLC offering.