Fallout 3: Broken Steel Review

Premise:

Broken Steel is the latest downloadable content for Bethesda’s award winning RPG, Fallout 3. One of Fallout 3’s major gripes was that unlike Bethesda’s previous RPG’s, you could not carry on playing after you had completed the main quest. Also, the level cap was set absurdly low at level 20. This unusual break with tradition in what has been a company who manufacture the most open RPG’s currently on the market makes me wonder if this expansion pack was planned from the very begginig.

Either way, Broken steel lets you play past the ending of fallout 3, and also adds a series of new quests and weapons, as well as raising the level cap to 30. You wake up two weeks after the events of the final game to find that all has gone well, and the only remaining snag is that the enclave have not fallen over as quickly as the brotherhood of steel had hoped. They’re still putting up a fight, but with the brotherhood’s new weapon (a giant combat droid called liberty prime), they hope to defeat the enclave once and for and all.

Impressions:

Downloadable content for me has always been a mixed bag. Broken steel is no exception. While the add-on weighs in at roughly £6, I’m just not sure it’s worth it. In the end you get maybe 4, maybe 5 hours of game play if you head through the main quests (Which I did). And these quests just feel lazy.

For example, one mission takes you into the city of old Olney where you have to fight legion after legion of deathclaws. It’s pretty cool, but I can’t help but escape the feeling the programmers where being lazy. Couldn’t we have some new enemies? Maybe enclave special combat robots, or a cool boss fight with a vertibird, or maybe an Enclave response to Liberty Prime (that wasn’t just a set piece)? I suppose Broken steel delivers a satisfactory amount of content, but the quality of that content is somewhat lacking.

The new perks and the raise of the level cap to 30 are pretty cool though. The new quests give you enough XP to make sure that when you finish them you are about level 23, but contrary to what every other review on the internet seems to be saying I had very little difficulty breezing through broken steel’s main quest (I wasn’t even level 20 when I completed the main game)! My main cause of death was taking the wrong route when supporting liberty prime and so getting blown up in it’s little death set piece, and running out of stimpaks towards the end game (which lead to the amusing scene of me drinking out of a toilet for three minutes while enclave soldiers ran around looking for me).

Broken Steel’s new weapons are… well. I didn’t bother with the heavy incinerator as my big guns skill was about as high as the stock market, and the tesla cannon while being an almost guaranteed one hit Kill on everything bar hellfire troopers was only fun for the first five minutes or blowing up the first 3 vertibirds. Also using it at close quarters is a dearth sentence as it has a slight, but slightly too large AOE. Personally I stuck to the plasma rifle and the alien blaster for the most part.

In closing:

I hate it when a review is this short; it makes me feel like I’m not saying enough about a game to actually be helpful to anyone. But in the case of Broken steel (and downloadable content in general), there’s not much you can say as elements such as game play and setting are told in reviews of the main game. If this was a videgame I would say wait for it to come down in price, but broken steel is downloadable content and so will never come down in price. If you want to kill a few hours, or just check out the new perks (which are interesting if not all that useful or accessible), then it may be worth your money. If you’re looking for something that will actually revamp the way you play fallout 3, then good luck finding it here.

Now, I just need to finish the lost and the damned…