Round two of the Fallout 3 DLC finally hits the PlayStation 3! While all the extra content has been available for the 360 and PC for a while now, Bethesda held back the PS3 release to iron out all the bugs that porting code to the notoriously fickle console usually causes to crop up. PS3 owners grumbled, but with the long wait now a thing of the past, they can finally step up and bask in the glow of all those cool little side missions you can buy to extend the life of your game, content in the knowledge that while they had to wait a bit longer, at least it meant that the DLC packs wouldn't be a horrid unplayable mess.
Right?
Er. Hm.
To be fair, I previously reviewed Broken Steel, the first PS3 DLC pack, and while it wasn't without its issues, they weren't so bad that they detracted seriously from the experience. A crash here, a weird AI bug there, maybe some iffy framerates tossed in, but nothing game-destroyingly awful. Fallout 3 is certainly not going to go down in history as the most bug-free game of 2009; this has been a Bethesda hallmark all the way back to their 1996 game Daggerfall, itself infamous for hard-locking your computer if you so much as sneezed violently at the screen. Their games have gotten better since then, but not by a huge amount.
Okay, remember that little factoid because we're going to come back to it in a sec.
First, let's cover what the DLC actually entails. Once it's installed, load up your save game of choice and after about five minutes you'll get a little popup window telling you that a new radio signal can be heard across the wastes. Tune in (or don't, you get the quest marker anyway) and you're directed to an Outcast base being set up in the southern end of the DC ruins that's under attack by Super Mutants. Show up, help out – expect some heavy resistance, coincidentally, since it's something of a Super Mutant family reunion going on down there when you arrive – and eventually get directed into the base itself where you're informed that there is a) a large vault containing all kinds of rare and pristine pre-war goodies to be looted, and b) a big immovable door between you and said goodies vault which can only be unlocked by completing the base's training simulation.
That simulation as it turns out is a virtual re-creation of the American liberation of Anchorage, Alaska from the Communist Chinese during the war. This is part of the game lore from before the nukes started raining down, so it offers a unique and honestly quite clever way to experience some of the fictional history first-hand without resorting to something as goofy as time travel.
It also pulls the neat trick of bumping you back down from the likely Demigod status you've achieved by this point in the game. High-level Fallout 3 characters tend to be wearing some pretty expensive name-brand military gear, are usually super-humanly accurate with every weapon known to man, can carry around a couple hundred pounds worth of random junk as well as enough weaponry to arm a small nation, and can nonetheless still run everywhere at a full sprint all day without ever having to so much as stop for a pee. And on top of that they're probably flanked by a dog with the healing power of Wolverine and another NPC fighting alongside them wielding all the slightly-less-powerful versions of the guns that have been picked up along the way. As such, things have usually devolved into casually obliterating everything in your path without even a token attempt at any kind of tactics because why bother? No need to conserve ammo or even sidestep that incoming RPG round when you've got enough bullets and stimpacks to kill everything in the entire wastes three times over and bring yourself back to life at will.
Of course, you can't bring your guns with you into a virtual simulation, and this is something that gets taken advantage of. Expect to find yourself re-learning the meaning of ammo conservation and using stealth to avoid enemy fire like it's level 4 all over again. Your weapons and armor are both provided for you, and now there's a limit on how much ammo you can carry, often a fairly paltry one for some of the more powerful weapons – the sniper rifle is capped at an alarmingly-meager twenty five rounds max, meaning every shot has to count or you're going to find yourself fighting off five or six very pissed-off Chinese soldiers with a silenced pistol.
Enemy bodies can also no longer be looted for ammo or weapons, they simply fritz out of existence when killed and bring their weapons and extra ammo with them. The only items that can be picked up are the items the simulation will let you, drastically reducing the resources available and making for a much more tense experience than your average endgame-level player is probably used to.
This has what I'd assume would be the intended effect; Operation Anchorage feels very unlike the vanilla stages of Fallout 3, and more like a transplanted level from Call of Duty 4 (there's even “Enemy Intelligence” briefcases to gather in an obvious nod to that game). Your mission takes you through a Chinese stronghold, fighting or sneaking your way to an American base camp. From there, you're tasked with blowing up two enemy waypoints and then making your way to a large refinery where the Chinese general has holed up to stage your final assault.
The action-game feel is the best thing this DLC has going for it, and it's complemented nicely by the visuals. Nothing outside of the enemy death animations indicates that this is supposed to be a computer simulation, and the icy cliffs, huge snowfields, and long oil pipelines you battle on and around are at a start contrast to the visual style from the rest of the game. This is the world before it got nuked, and it's quite pretty in a stark and majestic way. You're prevented from exploring too far, though: “Invisible Walls” (which are actually visible as a shimmering blue surface) keep you funneled along the same basic area, although it's hard to complain here because this is one of the few situations in a game where having invisible walls actually makes perfect sense.
As pretty and innovative as it is, though, it's also over disappointingly quickly. Unlike the Broken Steel DLC, once you start Operation Anchorage you have to go all the way through, no leaving the simulation until you've completed it. It's easily finished in a single sitting (in theory, anyway: See below) and took me about three, three and a half hours of playtime to sneak and snipe my way to victory. Those who go in at a full sprint with guns blazing and don't worry much about exploration could probably have it wrapped up in around an hour, so your mileage may vary. The ending is also a tad anticlimactic, although once you get out of the simulation there's a nice coda to the plot that makes up for it a bit.
So, all's well and good then, right? Well, no. Remember when I mentioned that Bethesda was notorious for previous games like Daggerfall that couldn't stay running for more than an hour without gloriously swan-diving into a system-locking crash?
Right. So. Take it to heart when I say that Operation Anchorage makes Daggerfall look like a rock-solid bastion of coding efficiency by comparison. This isn't just a step backwards for Bethesda, it's more like a cross-country flight. Nevermind sneezing on your PS3, this game will do everything in its power to suicide itself the moment it realizes you're trying to play it. It takes crashing to an art form. It will turn itself on just so it can crash whether you want to play it or not. If Crashing 101 was offered at Harvard, it would be the tenured Nobel Laureate on staff to teach it. If it was an Olympic Sport, it would be the contender equivalent of six Michael Phelpses fused into a single being. With gills. And submarine turbines instead of legs. And while it had to swim through water, everyone else had to swim through wet concrete.
Okay, so I'm exaggerating slightly, but still: I counted eleven crashes in my single run through of the game. It got to the point where I had a pad of paper and a pen next to me just so I could keep tally. That's about ten more than is even remotely acceptable considering the entire DLC pack only takes about three hours to complete, and that's if your slow. Also bear in mind we're not talking wimpy crashes that just kick you back to the main menu or even the XMB, oh no. We're talking lock-your-console-down, reach-in-back-and-toggle-the-kill-switch-because-the-system-is-completely-unresponsive crashes. One right after another right after another.
Worse, crashes of that nature take about ten minutes to recover from, from rebooting the console to restarting the game to waiting through the titlecards to reloading your save to waiting through those titlecards to re-watching any cutscenes you're now forced to re-watch. So if we tally up all those crashes, we're looking at nearly two hours of downtime. That's almost longer than the game itself. And God help you if you forgot to save more than fifteen minutes ago.
Something clearly went wrong here; what makes this even more bizarre is that the game was delayed for months specifically so that this wouldn't occur. What the hell happened?
And it's not even like the crashes were the only bugs. Here's some of the more major ones I ran into:
Upon first entering the Outcast stronghold, I got a popup message saying that my follower Star Paladin Cross had died(!?) and that Dogmeat had returned to his waiting spot outside Vault 101. Upon reloading and trying again, both of them got “unstuck” from me and remained stationary, refusing to enter into the stronghold and further refusing to follow me anymore if I left. The only fix was to either fire them and then go pick them back up from their default locations, or (more amusingly) shoot them a couple times to unstick them. Eventually I fired them both for the duration of the DLC and picked them up afterward as that seemed the safest route to take. Note that all these shenanigans were well before I'd even started playing the new content itself – it took three tries to get all this hammered out. Not a great sign.
And it just keeps getting better from there.
Once you enter the stronghold for the first time, note that the door won't open for you if you leave and try to get back in. You have to go back in partway, toggle a switch to raise the elevator back up, go back out into the wastelands, go back in, and toggle the elevator switch again. Repeat this every time you leave the stronghold, so four 10-15 second loading screens each way. Also there's a chance your game will crash because of this.
Once you actually get inside the simulation and get past the first infiltration portion, save and reload before you walk outside the tent of the Americas home base or your framerate will drop down to about one frame per two seconds, tops. Attempting to go into V.A.T.S. or initiate conversation while it's chugging like that will crash it. This happens again once you complete the mining facility section of the DLC, and in one instance for me even a save and reload didn't fix it, I had to power down the console completely and reboot from scratch just to clear that portion of the game.
Transitions to new areas seem to be the worst. The game also seems unable to handle the player backtracking when they're not supposed to, and this can cause problems galore. Reach the end of Operation Anchorage, and your character is locked in place while an NPC acts out a small cutscene, then runs up to you. The game auto-saves before this happens; re-load that auto save and the NPC will no longer realize you're there, and stand around as your character is paralyzed forever. Solution? Exit all the way out of the game, load it back up, and then re-load your save to get him to remember what he's supposed to do.
And then there's a ton of minor stuff. At one point I knocked a tank into the air with a grenade; it stayed there, and drove around on thin air forty feet above my head raining down lasers and cannon fire. The Mysterious Stranger perk kicked in and somehow locked my character in V.A.T.S. Mode, forcing another reboot. The list really just goes goes on and on. I've got another two pages of notes sitting here that I don't even have the heart to put in the review. It's just a mess.
I'd love to say this was just a fluke on my end, but signs are pointing uncomfortably towards that not being the case. I obtained a second PS3 to test the game on by talking a hapless friend into buying it, and sure enough, within 20 minutes her console was emitting the three rapid beeps of death, with her Wastelander frozen in a V.A.T.S. and the game completely locked up. We didn't sit there and play through the entire DLC a second time on a different console, but the fact that we got a crash right off the bat on a totally different console with a totally different save game confirms some worrisome fears.
What makes this all the more confusing is that this doesn't seem to be nearly as prevalent with the other DLC packs, although reviews on most of those are currently pending so we'll see.
Overall: 3.5/10
Considering this is not only a product you are presumably supposed to pay money for, but the fact that it was delayed for months ostensibly for QA to have their way with it, you've got to wonder just what was actually going on this entire time. This game crashes far more than any other console game I've ever seen, period. How this slipped through the cracks I really can't even begin to speculate, but it completely ruins what would have otherwise been an enjoyable end product.
With all that said, Operation Anchorage sans bugs would be a fun little addition to the Fallout 3 universe. It has some neat ideas, mixes things up from the usual formula elsewhere in the game, and could've been worth the money easily if only it worked like it (presumably) does on the other systems, which makes this even more of a shame. Pass on it unless you're both a completist and/or something of a masochist, and know what you're getting into; if you've yet to get around to Fallout 3, wait for the Game of the Year edition and pray that this content has better implementation there, or better yet just avoid getting the PS3 version entirely as it looks like Bethesda isn't really giving it the time of day. Better safe than sorry.
Worth noting: If all the technological issues were somehow resolved (read: Bethesda, patch this for the love of God) then I'd probably double the score, because underneath all the bugs there's a fun game here. If you think you can stomach the bugs and absolutely must have your Fallout 3 and PS3 is your only option, you can still have fun with this content. As it stands, I'm giving it what I'm giving it because the constant crashes and endless other bugs are a game-killing problem and I have serious reservations about recommending anyone actually pay money for this.
(This review is based on a copy provided by the publisher.)
