Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta

The same applies to how you feel about the new enemies. You'll want to believe that Bethesda will do something interesting with this race of alien invaders, but it does nothing more than stick to the most obvious archetypes possible. They cannot communicate with humans, so react with ill-advised and unsophisticated aggression. Disappointingly, almost all of these little fiends are felled by a single shot, and any hope of tense firefights with intelligent foes soon fades. On occasion, the game throws up resilient variants, armed with shields and cloaking devices, but even these prove to be incapable of doing anything other than charging headlong into your line of fire. Often flanked by robot drones, and assisted by turrets, things can get hectic once they start to throw everything at you, but the outcome is never seriously in doubt.

If you decide to extend the experience beyond the basic four or so hours by exploring the otherwise unimportant areas of the ship, then you really are asking to be bored witless. Akin to endlessly trawling a narrower version of the wasteland's subterranean rail network, the feeling persists that we're merely being served up cut-and-paste Fallout at this stage. After some excellent Fallout 3 campaigns recently, to bow out with something so limp is hugely disappointing.

It doesn't help, either, that the new loot in the game isn't particularly inspiring. The Alien Disintegrator energy weapon certain packs a punch, but as a result it renders the Alien Atomizer and Alien Pulverizer rather redundant with its vast clip size and superior damage. As with a lot of loot in the DLC packs to date, you're generally so ridiculously powerful by this point that few weapons can better what you have. To be fair to Bethesda, there's not a great deal it can do but offer slightly intriguing variations on what's already on offer - but minor, often pointless variations after 120 or so hours of gameplay doesn't really cut it.

Where Mothership Zeta really falls down is the complete lack of inspiration in the mission design. Generally you can rely on Bethesda to intelligently weave complex scenarios around practically anything, with the key characters each having their own specific agenda. Once you've taken in the situation, it's entirely down to your own moral leanings as to which direction you decide to take any given mission. Never quite knowing who is really the good guy, or the least bad guy has made for some thrilling missions in past Bethesda games (and past DLC), but none of that applies here. At best, you can rope in some characters to help kick arse, but for the most part you're reduced to the most soulless of gameplay tasks - breaking machines by pressing buttons.