Today marks the first of a series of downloadable content for Fallout 3. Operation: Anchorage landed today and for 800 Microsoft points you can help the United States liberate Anchorage, Alaska from the Chinese communists. Instead of opening up an entire area to explore and scavenge, Operation: Anchorage is a small quest line that leads the player to the Outcast Outpost. Inside the outpost you find out that its residents need to access an armory, and to do so, they need someone that can access an old simulation. You happen to be that person. The download relies on faster paced combat/stealth, pushing Fallout’s focus of exploration on the backburner. It brings fresh content to Fallout 3 with new weapons, achievements, and a new area to explore in an awkwardly different package.
Initiating the simulation pits your character in the heart of the Alaskan mountains. You retain all of your abilities (skills, level, stats) but your gear is stripped and replaced with new duds, a pistol, and the new trench knife. Another soldier gives you your task and you set out to defeat the communist threat. Right from the start, the focus on combat or stealth (your choice) is made apparent. There are plenty of enemies to shoot at and health/ammo dispensers are liberally strewn about. These are unlimited vending machines that refill your health and ammo completely. They make completing the quest easy, but keep in mind, there are no stimpacks and the only ammo available on the ground consists of fusion cells and explosives. After completing the first series of quests, you are sent to a camp that is focusing on the Chinese base of operations. This portion of the quest lets you choose a weapons package and a strike team to aid you in your endeavors. The strike team ranges from simple infantrymen to a sentry bot, and your control over them is limited. After completing various tasks, you assault the main Chinese base. Battling through trenches and artillery fire, your company blows through their defenses and the simulation ends after an anticlimactic boss battle.
Liberating Anchorage isn’t your only reward for downloading Operation: Anchorage. Remember that armory I mentioned earlier? After completing the quest you are given access to its contents: A Gauss rifle, T-51b power armor suit, the trench knife, a Chinese stealth suit, a rare sword, and a variety of well known goodies. The Gauss rifle is the energy weapon equivalent of the sniper rifle. It only holds one round but it packs a stronger punch. The T-51b power armor is a non-rusty weaker version of the set found in Fort Constantine. The Chinese stealth suit is a ninja-like armor that gives you a bonus to sneaking and a stealth field bonus while sneaking. The rare sword feels like it’s ripped straight from oblivion; however, it’s nice to get a usable melee weapon since the trench knife only looks cool. There is also a new perk, Covert Ops, available if you collect all of the intel scattered throughout the mission. It increases your science, small guns, and lockpicking skills by 3 points. After collecting your new found goodies from the armory the DLC is over.
After completing the DLC quest and collecting my items I had mixed feelings about the download. The environment looks like a copy paste of the capital wasteland with snow and the enemy AI is still so-so. For 800 points, you get two hours of linear combat, new items, achievements, and a couple of holotapes that detail a soldier’s experience. I appreciate Bethesda giving me a glimpse into Fallout’s lore (future), but the immersion that makes the game so tantalizing is absent during the entire quest. Operation: Anchorage forces the game to play out more like a full fledged shooter and takes the game out of its comfort zone. The weapons and armors are nice additions to anyone’s arsenal but the quest serves its purpose as a mediocre distraction until the next download is made available. Fans of the Fallout 3 series should purchase this with no second-thoughts, it will do a good job at pumping them up for the next two DLC episodes; others may just want to wait.
Final Score – 8.3 - Buy
