REVIEW- FALLOUT 3: OPERATION ANCHORAGE
Reviewed on Xbox 360. DLC also available on PC. Fallout 3 game required. Fallout 3 also on PS3, but without DLC.
Developed and published by Bethesda.
Our first DLC review on c1 and its Fallout 3′s first piece of DLC, Operation Anchorage. F3:OA is a side mission for the game based around the Outcasts you may have seen around the map. You agree to use your Pip Boy to interface with an old Virtual Reality pod and voila, you’re transported virtually back to the campaign to oust Chinese Army occupation of Alaska before the Balloon went up.
The DLC is a lot more linear than the rest of the game and more action oriented. Its more Mass Effect than Fallout. You take nothing in and take nothing out, so you can’t loot corpses since your vanquished foes vanish along with any weapons and ammo. You have ammo dispensers and health dispenses dotted around the map, not always where you need one and since you can’t carry meds, it does change how you play fairly significantly. You can’t go into a fight, shoot, heal, shoot heal. You have to heal when you see the dispenser and hope you can make it through the few throttled areas with enemies aplenty without dieing.
There’s a boss encounter at the end but if your speech stats are high enough, you may able to avoid altogether in a rather bizarre way. At the end of the simulation, you unlock some booty that you can return to at any point (though i’m not sure if items respawn- i’d doubt it). There’s nothing in the booty that you can’t get elsewhere but its nice to have it all in once place.
The other thing the DLC does is remove the level cap, so its definitely worth doing if you plan to do everything in the game. The actual F3:OA mission is not all that great and made me stop playing F3 once I was done. I would say its essential only if you are planning on doing EVERYTHING. There two more F3 DLC packs scheduled in the next few months but I think I’m done with this game. The levels here should take around 3-4 hours which is not bad for the price but you just need to know that it doesn’t play like the rest of the game.
Controller1.com rating 2/3
