Review: Fallout 3 - Mothership Zeta

Publisher: Bethsesda Softworks
Developer:Bethesda Softworks
Platforms: X360, PS3, PC

Mothership Zeta is quite different from other Fallout 3 adventures. From the minute you are abducted, you are taken from the dirty and destroyed wasteland and placed in a holding cell on one of the most cliched and sterile alien space ships I have ever seen. There are a few standout set pieces but it mostly stays pretty generic looking throughout. I'm not really sure if Bethesda intended it to feel like that on purpose to fit with the retro 1950s feel of the rest of the game but it is a weird design choice none the less.

After a pretty dramatic abduction scene,you awake in a holding cell not really realizing who has captured you or why they have done it. It's pretty disapointing that you never really find out why either. You just have to go along with the general "aliens like to do experiements on humans" thing that the expansion sets up pretty early on. There is however, good motivation to get the hell off the ship, as it becomes very clear that these aliens are doing some really bad things to the people they take.

Most of the time in Mothership Zeta is spent straight up killing aliens. You kill what feels like hundreds before the end of the 3 to 4 hour content and story really takes a back seat to the gory action. It's a good thing that MZ gives you some pretty fun to use alien weapons and they give you loads and loads of ammo to use with them. Even if you primarily use them to kill every single alien on the ship you will still have plenty of ammo to take with you back into the Capital Wasteland. One of the biggest problems is that the enemy types are very repititous. You are not only in a generic sci-fi enviornment you are also fighting very generic looking aliens. Again, this may be by design, but it does not make it any less disapointing. The same basic two or three types of aliens are repeated with only slightly different armor until pretty late in the content.

Even though combat is much more present than story, Mothership Zeta still has a pretty interesting cast of other human characters. The problem is the game does not do too much with them. I won't say very much about the characters you meet but a few of them are very different from the people you would expect to have a conversation with in other Fallout 3 experiences. Talking to them was probably my single favorite thing about the DLC and they come into play in a pretty cool way in the content's finale.

All in all Mothership Zeta is a perfectly ok piece of content for Fallout 3 fans who want the full experience. On it's own however, it doesn't quite hold up.