Bethesda has been really generous in giving fans new adventures to undertake in Fallout 3, releasing about one a month on average.  With expansions that have expanded the story, added new abilities and even enhanced the level cap, there really is not much more that could have been done, and that unfortunately is where Mothership Zeta falls.  While Mothership Zeta puts players in an interesting scenario, being confined to only one location feels highly repetitive which leaves Fallout 3’s last downloadable expansion seem like a hard pill to swallow after months of steady additions.

Mothership Zeta begins with your character receiving a mysterious radio message that is in a weird language that no one can understand, so naturally the best course of action is to go and investigate.  Once you arrive to the location you soon uncover a UFO that has crash landed in which case you are mysteriously transported aboard the ship and awaken inside one of the holding cells.  Once aboard the ship it is only a matter of time before you escape and try to fight your way off of the ship and back to the Wasteland.  The way in which is escape from your holding cell is clever albeit a bit cliché, but it was fun to perform and watch the events unfold.

Once free from your cell you soon meet a young girl named Sally who has agreed to help you around the ship in exchange to help her find her family members who have been abducted as well.  Sally will be with you for the majority of your time aboard Mothership Zeta and while her tone might get a little condescending and annoying at times, she does offer knowledgeable guidance and has access to open locked doors by crawling through vents.  In any case, her appearance only hides the fact that the action in Mothership Zeta is completely repetitive and you will find yourself constantly splattering alien brains throughout the entire campaign.

You have your standard objectives, such as blowing up generators in various rooms aboard the ship and performing space walks, but these events don’t help hide the fact that much of Mothership Zeta is focused on shooting.  To make matters worse many of the areas are located in incredibly confined corridors, so trying to battle groups of aliens at one time can get incredibly frustrating due in part to the targeting system.  The story doesn’t really develop after you reach the ship either, but thankfully there are Alien Captive Recordings that help shed some light onto the people you meet and the history of the aliens.  These recordings are actually quite pleasurable to hear and many of them range from family members wondering what happened to their loved ones or people being astonished by aliens being real and trying to figure out where they are.

One part of the story requires you to unfreeze four characters that have been put in cryo sleep, and once awakened, you are soon met by a cowboy (straight from the 1800’s), an astronaut, a medic from the war that took place in the Operation Anchorage simulation and a Samurai Warrior.  It is amusing to see these weird characters from different periods of time aboard the ship with you and since obviously space crafts and aliens are foreign to all of them, they are even more freaked out by the whole situation than you are.  You can also get a reference to these character’s lives by listening in to some of the Alien Captive Recordings too, which offers a much better take to how the aliens have mastered time travel and captured dozens of people from across different time periods.

However despite the addition of some interesting characters, it really is a shame that Fallout 3’s steady addition of downloadable content had to end on this sour note because there was plenty of room for interesting ideas.  The characters you interact with are hardly around at all once your initial meeting and the combat seems to have been overly done to the point of shoving it in your face at every given moment.  While the locations still look great and there are plenty of neat alien weapons and gizmos to use, Mothership Zeta falls under the category of misused potential, and fans of Fallout 3 might want to wait to pick this addition up until it drops in price.

Final Score: 7 | Recommendation: Buy It (When It Drops In Price)

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About This Author: Josh Schwartzman

Been into gaming for as long as I can remember and have enjoyed every minute of it. I enjoy playing with everyone and anyone online and I am an avid PS3 and Xbox 360 player.

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