Fallout 3

Point Lookout is the fourth add-on for Fallout 3 and includes the additon of a an expansive new location for the player to explore. This downloadable content takes us to the far away island of Point Lookout, a most wretched hive of scum and villainy and also a treasure hunter’s paradise; only accessible by a journey that not only costs a lot of caps but is also on a boat that you wouldn’t exactly call safe.

Once the player has arrived at the swamp land that is Point Lookout, they are greeted by a desolate pier front which looks quite impressive. However, an issue I found with how the game looks is that there isn’t a lot of variety on the island and you’ll think that places on one side of the island look extremely familiar to the other. That being said, some locations around map, including the mansion where the main quest of the content starts, look especially eerie and help create a tense, lonely atmosphere.

The main quest starts when you meet a British Ghoul called Desmod who asks you to defend his land from home invasion. From what seems as just helping a friend out unveils an intense rivalry between two of the island’s big players. Along the way to settling their differences, you will lose a bit of your brain and end up being under the influence of some hallucinagenic drugs. The main quest lasts about 3-4 hours but it packs a lot into a short space of time, and due to the size of the island there wasn’t a lot of travelling to be done between main quest points.

That’s what may put some players off however, is the size of Point Lookout as it equates to roughly a sixth of the Capital Wasteland so the chance for a vast amount of exploration is scarce. There are a few locations which aren’t part of the main quest which the players can get some good loot from and there are still a couple of side quests that can be done as a break.

Point Lookout is a nice piece of downloadable content for Fallout 3 and perfectly incorporates itself into the fiction of ‘post-apocolyptica’. People may find it too short and that there isn’t enough to do to justify the money spent downloading, however, I found that for the strength of the main quest line and the dark atmosphere it creates, makes Point Lookout a worthy piece of content.