The highly anticipated Point Lookout is finally out, and it does not disappoint. With this being the fourth DLC available for Fallout 3, you’d think Bethesda has started to run out of steam, but it seems they’ve just gotten started. The DLC starts out with a boat docking near the Jefferson Memorial and talking to a strange Tobar, who tells you all about Point Lookout, Maryland, and all its great treasures and adventures. Sure, it sounds great for the heroine of the Wasteland, but just how dangerous is it? Well, extremely, and especially if you are under level 25 and without the Broken Steel DLC, because the bog hillbillies are extremely tough to kill even with the Tesla Cannon (you get this in the Broken Steel DLC). Hell, even the Rocket Launcher won’t kill them with one shot (it must be all that moonshine they drink).
While not giving too much of the story away, you meet one AHOLE of a ghoul. Try to find a woman named Nadine, a deceptive brain, a strange cult, and a woman who has you help her with her family recipe of moonshine. The DLC is nothing short of amazing when it comes to the atmosphere since it’s just as lonely and creepy as the stuff on the disc (and The Pitt), with lots of fog, bogs, creepy hillbillies, strange buildings in the distance, and rads. Yes, since most of the DLC has water in it, you’ll be getting irradiated quite a bit, and this means you will need to bring some RadAway and Rad-X with you.
One mission even requires you to swim away from the island and locate a sunken submarine underwater. You have one store in the game in the carnival; there’s a motel you need to explore, a mysterious mansion, and a few other buildings, but there’s a lot to explore on this HUGE island, so you’re in for about 4-6 hours of great gameplay and story. Bethesda seemed to have concentrated more on exploring this time around than weapons or anything like that. There are a few new parks, the double-barreled shotgun, ando the lever-action rifle, but there are a ton of supplies to loot and grab. So much, in fact, you’ll have to head back to The Capital Wasteland just to sell it all. I believe this is a great DLC and is well worth the $10 (hell, I’ve paid $140 into Fallout 3 already), so don’t be afraid and come down to Point Lookout and explore!
When we called the Ghostbusters back into our games in the early 90s, they didn’t do a very good job. You remember the Genesis version, MSX, NES, GameBoy, Atari 2600, and C64. The richness of the Ghostbusters universe needed more than 8 or 16-bit graphics and midi sounds to make it come to life. Technology has improved considerably since then, finally being able to do justice to our Ghostbuster friends. With the help of the Unreal 3 engine, the developers were able to create an atmosphere and story that are truly amazing.
Players start out in the Ghostbusters’ headquarters, which has been properly equipped with a true-to-life fire pole for you to slide down on. Ray takes you through the basics of wrangling ghosts, trapping them, and using your gear down in the basement. One of the first things you will notice is that the controls feel very familiar, resembling those of games such as Resident Evil 4/5 and Gears of War. Still comparing it to a shooter, your proton pack takes the place of your “gun,” and your “ammo” consists of different types of particle streams. You can unlock four streams throughout the game, starting with your basic proton stream. The Stasis Stream, Meson Collider, and Slime Gun follow suit quickly. The most useful is the Proton Stream, which weakens ghosts and stuns them so you can wrangle, toss, and then hopefully trap them. Ghosts come in many shapes and forms, and it is rare to see so many different enemy types and level bosses in a game. These include many of the ghosts from the movies. You will be battling the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, heading through the Sedgewick Hotel and the Haunted Library.
Each ghost has a weakness for a specific weapon type. To find out which type is effective, you must scan them with your goggles. Doing so will also reveal all sorts of other interesting and sometimes ludicrous information. Some ghosts are dispersible, which means that they die after a few hits with a certain weapon, but others must be trapped instead. The objective is to weaken them until their health bar turns red, after which you can trap the suckers. Walking around with your energy detector is good for finding artifacts—treasures that you get money for—and enemies.
Upgrading your weapons will improve them in various ways. You can increase a weapon’s rate of fire, make it overheat less often, or let you trap your enemies faster. All of these upgrades can be purchased in one play-through. Ghostbusting is a high-revenue business, and you will earn ample money to purchase any upgrade that catches your fancy. You are also tallied by how much damage you cause the city throughout your play. Doing too much damage may affect achievements.
The gameplay may sound simple, and it is, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it is extremely fun. There is always something new to be experienced, and only towards the end of the game did I feel some repetition setting in. Ghostbusters kind of felt like a mix of Gears of War, BioShock, and Silent Hill. It can be downright creepy at times, but it also has wonderfully witty humor and some great lighting effects that help create a fantastic ambiance. Walking through dark hallways, your senses are always stimulated in various ways. Things may jump out at you, or you will hear strange cries and screams. Besides being scary, it is also immersive; I left the game after about a four-hour sit-down, and I really felt like I was a Ghostbuster (don’t call the men with the long-sleeved jacket until you have played for four hours straight yourself!). This is in large part due to the fact that the original actors are voicing the game, and I think that’s what truly made the difference.
The game is actually based on the script written by Harold Ramis and Dan Akroyd that was never made into a third movie. There are a lot of tidbits in the dialog that relate back to the original 1984 classic. This game can be played by both fans and nonfans, but it is truly geared toward fans of the movie. You can safely say this game is one of the best movie-licensed translations ever made.
Ghostbusters is just one of those amazing and immersive games that make you all giddy inside. The game truly has an amazing effect on its players. It may not have a lot of depth, but it easily makes up for that in the fun department. It is worth noting that Ghostbusters is a little on the short side, giving you about 6 to 8 hours of gameplay. Fortunately, the replay value is fairly high, making this a recommended buy. I really hope there is a sequel. Playing Ghostbusters has been one hell of a ride.
OK, Far Cry was a great technical feat, and that’s pretty much it. Far Cry had a lot of AI problems with enemies being able to see you miles away; you needed a monster computer to run it; it had almost no story; and it was pretty repetitive. Unfortunately, Far Cry 2 follows all these trends again, but with better graphics, a setting in Africa, an even more confusing story, a super confusing level editor, and the same bland, boring, huge open world. Now, I’m not saying Far Cry 2 is bad; I’m just saying it needs more filling because there is way too much crust on this one.
The game starts out great with you in the back of a car driving to the guerrilla’s headquarters. Once you get through the tutorial, you’re thrown into the beautiful yet empty world, trying to find “The Jackal,” who is feeding both rival gangs guns and fuel (APR and UFLL). You can work on either side since you need either to get to The Jackal. For starters, the game has lots and lots of guns, and you can upgrade them by using diamonds (finding diamond cases and/or completing missions). You can buy the weapons for infinite ammo in your safe rooms, and you can buy manuals that increase accuracy, reliability, etc. You can also buy equipment that will let you hold more ammo, more health, more stim-paks, etc. There are lots here, and everything is fairly priced, but you earn diamonds so slowly that it takes forever to get enough.
When you’re actually shooting the guns, it feels great, but another problem carried over from the first one is that these guys never die. You’ll pump a whole clip into these guys, and sometimes they’ll still be standing. Sometimes your gun will jam and you have to mash X to get it unstuck, and if you’re really unlucky, the whole gun will break, and then you’re SOL. Getting the reliability upgrades fixes this, and swapping out weapons from fallen foes helps this a lot. Far Cry 2 also has a “buddy system,” which is acquired by completing missions, and these so-called buddies can save you in battle (if you run out of health; think of it as an extra life). They can help make missions easier by offering alternatives. This is a great system and is probably the only great gameplay idea in Far Cry 2 that isn’t boring or doesn’t piss you off. When you do get low on health, you can pry bullets out of yourself, wrap yourself in bandages, and even poke yourself with magic needles. You can refill these at health boxes in random areas or in one of your safe houses. You unlock new safe houses by killing all guards in the area, and bam, there you go.
The next gameplay element that is from the first game and was bizarrely stripped down is the vehicles you drive. There are only maybe five in the whole game, and those are a Jeep, a car, an assault truck, and a couple of boats. When your vehicle gets banged up and starts smoking, you can hop out and repair it, which is great, but even if the car starts smoking a little bit, it runs very slowly. Now to get to the most annoying part of the game—the constant backtracking. I understand this is an open-world game (I love sandbox games, don’t get me wrong), but Far Cry 2 fails at this. First, the map they give you is horrible since it’s a little piece of paper you hold (next to your GPS), and all the dots look like blobs, so the legend is useless. You’ll travel to missions on one side of the map, finish them, and then have to navigate all the way back to town. You can’t really go off the trails since there are so many mountains, rocks, and trees blocking your path unless you run on foot.
Then this is where the meat of the annoyance comes in; there’s nothing in between all of this driving around! Maybe here and there you’ll see an animal, but all you get are the same thugs coming after you in their vehicles from the guard posts plastered all along the trails. That is really all there is to driving from mission to mission. The missions are exactly the same; maybe you’ll have to save a friend (or shoot him/her), but essentially it’s all the same.
The malaria effect was useless and made things even more annoying. Every so often, you’ll have to take a malaria pill, and if you run out, you have to go to the ends of the earth (ok, Africa!) to get more, or you die. Essentially, this makes the game boring, and I get headaches every time I play it. Now if you like sandbox games where there is hardly a story and you just drive around killing random thugs, then go ahead and have at it. Now, this brings me to the level editor, which is deep, but there’s no tutorial, and it is not user-friendly. Lastly, the only exciting thing is multiplayer. The best part of Far Cry 2 is the graphics; the game is gorgeous with free-flowing grass, everything burns, trees break when under fire, and the lighting is beautiful. It just all looks so good, but the gameplay is just not there. Sorry, Ubisoft, maybe Far Cry 3 will fix all of these issues.
Silent Hill 4 is a continuation of the long-running Silent Hill series that started on the PlayStation way back in 1998. As a kid, I remember how incredibly horrifying SH was and how ridiculously hard the puzzles were, thus sending the rental back due to complaints of nightmares to my mother. Fast forward to 2004, and we get SH4, which is a mediocre approach to the amazing survival horror series. For some reason, Konami changed everything for this game, thus making it less fun and a major chore to play. You play Henry Townshend, who wakes up in his apartment one day with the front door chained up. You walk into your bathroom, and there is a hole in it that is a wormhole to these creepy SH worlds. You are following the murders of a man named Walter Sullivan and must release his soul and find out why he’s killing all of these people. The story is very interesting, yet there are few cut scenes and very little dialog, so most of the story is told through diary pages and memos that you pick up, which is actually kind of bland and boring (and lazy on Konami’s part).
SH4 is very strange in the sense that the game uses an initial gateway between levels, and you travel back and forth to heal, save, and unlock the rest of the world. After you finish the world, you get warped back to your apartment room 302, and you are free to roam around. This is in a strange first-person view, and you can save (this is the only save spot) and dump stuff into your trunk for later storage. You only get about 10 slots in your inventory, so going back to your apartment via red holes is essential. While this isn’t so bad, there’s so much backtracking and repeating of levels that it will make you sick. While you’re on a level, you wander around in the same SH fashion, picking up strange objects and using them in puzzles. The only problem is that the memos that give you the puzzles are so unbelievably vague that you will have almost no idea what to do unless you wander around aimlessly, just trying everything out. In most SH games, you do this, but it’s pretty obvious where to go. If you use a little bit of brainpower, you will get it. In SH4, things are so obvious that you will completely miss them.
This is all tied together because SH4 has the worst level design ever, and those are just paths that lead nowhere. You will wander around hallways and go up and down ladders that lead to dead-end rooms or send you back to places you don’t recognize. Not only this, but if you miss certain items (like the Swords of Obedience), the “boss” later on cannot be fought, and there’s no way to go back. Thanks to the whole gateway system, if you miss an item, you cannot go back, unlike in past SH games. There are four worlds that you must complete by finding a placard at the end of each level. In SH fashion, you must complete weird puzzles by putting the right pieces in the right places, and this is figured out by the memos you pick up. As I explained above, they are so vague that you can’t really figure out what to do except look through a walkthrough.
After you complete the world, you go back to your apartment, look through the peephole in your door, and read all these pages to advance the story. After you complete the fourth world, everything changes, and your room becomes haunted. You must use holy candles that you find throughout the world and place them down in front of these demons on your walls to rid them before they kill you. I found this extremely annoying and pointless gameplay element, which just makes this SH game very weird and a bad departure from the series. After completing these four worlds, you open up another whole of your washroom (yeah, what?!). With the four placards, you go back through these worlds again, trying to find God knows what, but the levels are continuous, and you don’t get warped back to your apartment (thus not getting healed). I found this really annoying and very boring since I just spent hell in these worlds and I have to go back?!
Now the boss fights are really stupid since they aren’t traditional SH bosses; they just look like regular enemies, and you must hack away at them till they fall, then stab them with that sword of obedience I mentioned. This is both boring and stupid since if you miss a word, you just have to run away from this boss until you finish the level. Now, if I should mention improvements, the combat is actually really great since you just lock on and whack away. You can charge attacks, but that’s about it. If you play on a harder difficulty, you’re going to be SOL because the game can be extremely tough since they throw dozens of enemies at you at times. The only weapons in the game are melee weapons, a pistol, and a revolver. Yeah, lame. Where’s the shotgun? Halfway through the game, you have your neighbor, Eileen, following you everywhere, and this is extremely annoying since you can’t leave her behind, and she hobbles on one leg, so she’s very slow. She has to be near you before you go through doors, or you leave her behind. This was a huge gameplay mistake, and it’s probably just as bad as the level design.
Now the only thing I haven’t mentioned is the scary factor. Is it as scary as past SH games? The answer is no. The enemy designs are a little creepy, but not out of this world terrifying like the past SH games. Are the levels creepy? Not really. Sometimes you’ll see something weird in the background, but you won’t really notice it. The atmosphere is a little spooky, but nothing that’ll make you crap your pants. The past SH games scared the living hell out of me, but SH4 didn’t really do much for the scary factor. I feel SH4 is really toned down, and Konami tried to do something new but failed at it. The siren doesn’t even go off in SH4!! C’mon… If you played the hell out of the other SH games, then go ahead and pick this up at bargain bin prices, but don’t expect a whole lot.
Beneath the Ashes was very mediocre, hardly strayed away from what was offered on the disc, and was not worth $10. Lara’s Shadow is a completely different animal, thanks to the new gameplay elements added. Lara’s shadow can use superspeed and hand-to-hand combat against the undead creatures of the underworld. Natla is trying to restore herself using the machine she used to create Lara’s shadow, and then the tables turn…
Lara can now run up walls using her superspeed. This makes gameplay very fast, extremely quick, and also a lot more fun. She can shimmy walls super fast and can even slow down time to avoid fast-moving obstacles. You also have a kick and punch button, along with a few super attacks. You have a superkick and punch, and you can fire your guns super fast as well, and all of these are very effective.
The fighting is responsive and works very well; it’s just not very deep at all. For $10, this is all you can expect, but I expect Eidos to expand on this with more expansions. What I mainly loved in Lara’s Shadow is the fact that navigating levels isn’t as difficult as it is on the disc. Since you move so fast, you have to navigate quickly, and you don’t need a walkthrough this time around to find out where to go.
I did find some obstacles too hard to avoid since you have to have perfect timing, and this can be very frustrating. I also found that if you fight too close to an edge, Lara will just fall off thanks to the spotty collision detection in the game, and you will die lots of times due to this. Everything else is pretty much the same; while I love Shadow Lara, I just wish there was more. 3–5 hours of gameplay is not that much for $10. If you really love Underworld, I promise you this will be an excellent buy.
Call of Duty is probably the best WWII FPS series ever made, and there are many reasons why. If you rewind back about six years, when Call of Duty was released on the PC and console, gamers envied this exclusivity. CoD offered cinematic gameplay, great characters, and amazing visuals. At the time, the Medal of Honor reigned supreme, but not for very long. With Medal of Honor, Brothers in Arms, and Wolfenstein being the top competitive WWII FPS games, CoD always remained on top. With each new sequel, CoD added better graphics, a more realistic cinematic experience, and overall great multiplayer. Throughout CoD’s six-year life cycle, Activision has used many developers to keep the series going strong, and it was also the first WWII series to stray away from WWII and lean towards modern warfare (no pun intended, really!). Now that CoD is back on the WWII front line, it finally hit the nail on the head, and this is what CoD should have been years ago: World at War.
I thank the WWII gods who listened because we finally, for the first freaking time, got to go through the trials and campaigns of Japan and not just the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The game starts out in the jungles of Japan with banzais rushing after you with bayonets, strange rifles never seen before in a WWII game, amazing visuals (a slightly updated Modern Warfare engine to be exact), great enemy AI, and just absolute mayhem. The first thing I noticed were the new weapons. Yes, you have the Kar98, MP40, Thompson, BAR, MG42, Springfield, Enfield, etc. What I picked up was an Arisaka, a variation of the Kar98, a flamethrower?!, a bayonet?!, the ability to toss motorheads like grenades, molotovs?…insane. I couldn’t believe this. Someone actually added something new. Not only are the graphics amazing and extremely cinematic, but the level design is also awesome. There are cool sniping missions (think of the one in MW), tank missions (they drive great for once, by the way), and missions where you run through Japanese mortar pits and just torch the hell out of everyone. How fun is that? Well, let’s just say it’s so fun you won’t want to use another weapon during those levels.
You don’t just fight in Japan; you also fight on the European front as the Russians overtake the Reichstag all the way to planting the flag yourself. If this isn’t enough to sell you, try out the air mission, where you’re shooting down Japanese boats and pulling in survivors of the Pearl Harbor bombing on your way back home from Japan. If that’s not exciting enough, oh boy, I don’t know what is.
What makes the return to WWII so great isn’t just the new content or the cinematic gameplay. It’s the detail put into the level design, the characters, the ambiance, the dialog, and the voice acting; it’s all top-notch, and not even the first CoD had this much detail put into it. After playing WaW, you will want more WWII games, and this is the revival we’ve all been dying for (sorry, MoH Airborne was terrible). If single-player isn’t enough to sell you, how about multiplayer?
While I didn’t get to try it, I was involved in the beta multiplayer, and it was pretty amazing. It’s just like Modern Warfare but set in WWII instead. There’s plenty of incentive to go back and play the game again, thanks to its fair difficulty and amazing visual experience. World at War has so much detail put into it that I wouldn’t be surprised to see another MoH, BiA, or Wolfenstein copy any of it. Thank you, Treyarch and Activision, for reviving this great series. Now everyone shuts up.
I remember when the first BloodRayne came out. I stared at the ad and drooled. I never knew vampires could be so sexy, and right there, she became one of my top 5 favorite female video game heroines ever made. Of course, being younger, I wasn’t allowed to play such games, so in the end, I never got the chance to play the first BloodRayne. When BloodRayne 2 came out, I had to play it, so I rented it for my PS2, and it was great—not amazing, but pretty solid—but now, well, time ages things.
BloodRayne 2 has you playing as the half-human, half-vampire Dhampir Rayne, who is trying to kill her father Kagan (who survived the first game) and kill all his children and demon spawns. Through this escapade, Rayne runs into his new minions, Kestrel, Ferril, and Ephemera (who hate each other). While they are almost as sexy as Rayne, their attitudes make up for it. BloodRayne 2 has pretty decent voice acting, and Rayne’s attitude is just something you have to love.
BR2 is very gruesome, with lots of dismemberment and gory death traps. There are two types of enemies in the game: unarmed weapons (that you can freely feed off of to get health) and armed enemies with melee weapons that will push you down if you try to feed. You just knock their weapons out of their hands before doing this. Yes, I realize there are only two enemy types, but this is why the game could have been better. The designs for them are neat, and they look cool, but seriously? You will run into sub-bosses an awful lot, and most of these are just elite henchmen or giant minotaurs. This is where one of my biggest gripes comes in, and that’s the fact that boss fights are all luck and no skill. It doesn’t help that the game is a button masher and there’s no skill involved whatsoever. You just hit X for blade attacks and B for kicks, and that’s it. The blocking never seems effective, and you are constantly relying on your powers.
Powers range from astral feeding, temporary invincibility, time freeze, and aura vision. These take up a lot of power, so you have to constantly kill them to keep your meter up. You can level up to extend this, but it never seems enough. You also have your Dragon Pistols, but you can’t level them up, and you only get very little ammo, which feeds off your health. You have to kill to keep your ammo up, but this thing never seems effective until you get different ammo types.
You also have a harpoon that you use to throw enemies into deadly death traps to unlock different parts of levels, but later on, enemies in Twisted Park can block this, and you have to use your time freeze or super speed to get behind them, but sometimes THAT doesn’t work. See what I mean? The game is so frustrating later on—so much, in fact, I had to use God Mode through the last 25% because they threw way too many larger enemies at you and not enough people to feed on. There are some acrobatics involved, such as sliding down rails, swinging, and climbing poles, but this is troublesome since the mechanics are so finicky and everything has to be aligned perfectly.
Don’t get me wrong, BR2 is worth a bargain bin purchase; you just have to look past its many flaws. When it comes to graphics, the game is decent at best. The characters look good, and so do the environments, but the pre-rendered scenes look cheap and crappy. There is also a lot of slowdown throughout the game when too much is going on on-screen. With button mashing, no skill involved in fighting, unbalanced everything throughout, and weak acrobatics, there is just something about this game that makes you want to keep playing, and it’s probably Rayne herself.
Now that the third (but most certainly not final) DLC is out, we get the best of the bunch. Broken Steel adds an extremely hard quest, a level 30 cap raise, new powerful foes, and one mean Tesla Cannon. I also highly recommend, if you haven’t bought any DLC yet, buying BS first because it picks up two weeks after the “Project Purity” quest when the game initially ended.
This quest, of course, is for the Brotherhood of Steel, and you must help cut off the rest of the Enclave forces by blowing up a radio control tower that they are using at the Air Force Base, which is a whole new location. Before you do this, however, you must steal a Tesla Coil for the Scribes (they are scavenging Enclave tech after all), and you get a brand new awesome Tesla Cannon that is probably the most powerful weapon in the game now. This thing will kill almost anything in one to a few hits, and after impact, the electricity keeps eating away at health. This thing will also take out vertibirds in one fell swoop. Yes!!! Thankfully, it uses EC cells and not special ammo, so there’s plenty of it.
Walking around these two new locations is actually extremely tough, so just make sure you’re at least level 25–30 before even attempting it because you have Hellfire Enclave and new Ghouls that take forever to kill. Make sure you take a good 30–50 stimpaks with you because you’re going to get hammered in probably the most enemy-populated area in the game. When Bethesda said harder quests and enemies, they meant it. Now, this doesn’t mean the DLC is impossible to beat; it’s just extremely challenging.
There is also one other side quest they go through in there called “Aqua Pura,” and this is located at the Ghoul hideout in the Museum of History for those of you who want to know. Now there’s no interesting, unique atmosphere like The Pitt, so it’s just like what’s on the disc, except with new locations. I highly recommend players pick up Broken Steel, especially for the level cap raise and the new perks. The only problem is that this DLC is still too short, with about 4-6 hours of play, but the level cap raise makes up for it.
Well, here is part 2 of the Fallout 3 DLC, and boy, is it a huge improvement over the last one. I’m not going to explain much about Operation Anchorage, but it was linear, stripped away most features, and was kind of boring (check out reviews elsewhere). The Pitt actually adds a whole new city, which is post-apocalyptic Pennsylvania. You are to free slaves there and find a cure to the rad poisoning that’s getting to everyone and turning them into “trogs.”. Yes, trogs are a new creature you’ll discover and are even creepier than those ghouls.
The Pitt is fairly large, and you start out on a bridge that was once a freeway that led into Pennsylvania, so you’re right on the border. Once you cross the bridge, you lose all your equipment (don’t worry, you’ll get it back!). and talk to these poor people and fight in a gladiator arena to win an audience with a man named Ashur. I won’t go any further since this will spoil stuff, but The Pitt has an awesome new weapon and, mainly, a great story and new setting.
The Pitt is very industrial, with a huge steel mill and a steelyard that goes hundreds of feet above the ground. To get an idea of how big The Pitt is, you need to take the Citadel, Rivet City, and the whole area around the Capital Building (you know, with the Washington Monument and that huge lake), and you have The Pitt. While most of it is indoors and in the steelyard, you’ll spend a good four hours exploring this amazing place.
Thankfully, there are reasons to go back here (which I won’t reveal due to spoilers), so this setting isn’t a one-shot deal like Operation Anchorage. The Pitt is just very gritty, more dark and mature than the Capital Wasteland, and much more dangerous. The whole place feels scarier than the Wasteland (which just felt really lonely), and this place feels haunted. There are raiders everywhere, and there’s no way you can fight them all off like you can at the Falls. The new weapon added is the Auto Axe, and boy, is it sweet!!! This thing spins a deadly blade and will do almost a one-hit kill in V.A.T.S. I highly recommend buying this, but also buy Broken Steel for the level 30 cap!
Fallout 3 is just one amazing experience, one of the best games I’ve ever played, and one of my top ten for this generation. I’m not going to write a review for Fallout 3. This review is really for Fallout 3 fans who paid $10 for this addon and for those who are thinking about it.
Operation Anchorage is the liberation of Anchorage, Alaska, from the communist Chinese. You’ll be helping out the Brotherhood Outcasts and will have to travel a great distance from the downtown metro area to get there. Once you help some outcasts fight off some super mutants and help escort them to their bases, you enter a computer simulation of this liberation. This is where Fallout 3 goes weird and doesn’t really feel like Fallout anymore. Everything is covered in snow, first off, and second, it turns Fallout 3 into a linear FPS. You still have everything, like your Pip-Boy and your RPG bits, in tact, but there’s no looting or anything like that. You have health and ammo dispensers spread throughout, and you’re only allowed the weapons the simulation wants you to have.
You have to help these people infiltrate the Chinese base in the mountains and disable three AA guns. After this, you have to take out a listening post, a tank depot, and then a pulse field to finally get into the headquarters. The DLC feels very derivative, with only two new enemies and one or two new weapons. The only new weapons I saw were the awesome Gauss Rifle, which uses microfusion cells (yeah, you actually use those now!) and is a one-shot super sniper rifle. The other was a Chinese officer’s sword, but I think that might be old. You can get troops that can help you battle things out, but this was a weird turn of events for Fallout 3.
On the plus side, though, you have realized this is a simulation, and it helps ease the pain for people wanting to wander the Capital Wasteland. The whole purpose of this DLC is to unlock some pretty sweet loot (I won’t spoil it!) in a vault that can’t be accessed unless the simulation is completed. You can complete this DLC in about 3–5 hours, depending on your play style, and it’s not worth the $10. I would honestly skip this one and go get The Pitt and Broken Steel. If you really want more Fallout, then pick up OA, but Bethesda’s first foray into DLC wasn’t a great one.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…