Moterhship Zeta

There were two places I absolutely had to visit in Fallout 3: Dogmeat and the crashed spacecraft. With the new downloadable content, Mothership Zeta, what was once a visit to a spooky alien craft turns into a full-fledged abduction scenario.

After being beamed up by into a saucer, the player is subjected to a disturbing sequence in which the aliens conduct experiments with painful probes. You wake up naked in a holding cell with another abductee, Somah, and have to fight your way to freedom.

Like The Pitt and Operation: Anchorage, this content is an entirely self-contained environment. You're in a spacecraft, after all. The green men, with their guardian drones, pack personal force fields and painful disintegrators that make the weapon you found on the dead alien in Fallout 3 look like a pop gun.

Leading the way through the labyrinthine architecture is Sally, a little girl who is small enough to traverse the ductwork. With a nod to Newt from the movie Aliens, she is at turns annoying (not all of her advice is sound) and helpful. You eventually are joined by other abductees awoken from cryo-sleep, including a samurai, a cowboy, and a medic abducted from Operation: Anchorage.

Like Operation: Anchorage, Mothership Zeta forces cocky players to change their tactics. The aliens are physically weaker but they make up for it with powerful weapons and armor. They come in groups of three or more and attack in enclosed spaces. Mothership Zeta is no cakewalk.

Along the way, the aliens plans are revealed. Creepy tapes of abductees being interviewed and experimented are littered throughout the ship. At one point, the player must conduct a spacewalk – although there's not much of a challenge in doing so. The finale is suitably climactic as you attempt to command the ship to fire on another UFO while fending off wave after wave of angry aliens. The win is hard-earned.

Mothership Zeta provides a few items that will be valuable back on Earth: biogel (heals hundreds of hit points), a disintegrator (inflicts massive amounts of damage in a single shot), and the energy ball-bouncing drone cannon (acts as a grenade but is very imprecise). When I returned to the regular Fallout 3 game, I used the drone cannon to devastating effect, especially because you can bounce the shots around corners.

Motership Zeta isn't for everyone. The foes are a bit repetitive, and listening to the alien chatter (they don't speak English, natch) gets old fast. More often than not I had to resort to bashing their big green heads in with a shock baton – ugly work, as the aliens squeal with every hit. But for fans of 50s science fiction, little green men, and Mars Attacks, this is a must buy.