Fallout 3

To date, I've purchased all of the downloadable content for Fallout 3. As you can tell, I kinda love that game. But  that love didnt always exist. I put it down for a good 3 months after my original playthrough. Mostly because all I wanted to do is finish the main story and just keep playing. But instead, all I got to do when I beat the game was watch that lame 2 minute ending. It left a bad taste in my mouth and was why I left it alone for a while. But caught word of this new pack,  that eliminates the old ending, adds a bunch of sweet items, AND increases the level cap...I found myself running to Best Buy to get a points card. Honestly, it is the best 800 points I ever spent.

The DLC officially starts after you finish the original main quest. Your character wakes up two weeks later in the Citiadel, and you can immediately start the new quest line or do whatever. The new quests are pretty decent,  It revolves around your character working with the brotherhood to wipe out the rest of the Enclave. It has you working with Liberty Prime again (which is awesome), hunting for a Tesla coil to make a cannon that shoot lightning (again..awesome), and finally infiltrating the new Enclave headquarters and finishing them once and for all (or not). Mostly these quests are the run of the mill get from point A to B and kill guys in the process. But are varied enough that they can be finished depending on your preferred playstyle. The new side quests however, are quite interesting and are much more open-ended then the main quests. They mostly revolve around the purified water pouring out of project purity. With this new water comes new problems, like raiders attacking caravans and cults radiating it and giving it to unsuspecting people.

The big draw to this pack for me was the increased level cap. I got to the level cap way to quickly in my original game and it made it feel like there was nothing left to do. Now that it's 30 instead of 20, it makes it seem like there is much more to be seen and makes exploring the wastes that much more rewarding as you're always working towards getting to the next level. And getting to 30 isn't an easy thing to do. It takes quite a bit of questing and killing to make it all the way to the max. And to entice you to get there, new perks have been added as well. Such as ones that allow you to respawn dogmeat or to make you explode like an atom bomb whenver your health gets below 20. Most of them are throwaways however, and you will find yourself just picking some of the old ones because they're just not that useful.

The icing on the cake is  the new items that were added. Which include a flamethrowing-mortar type thing, the Tesla cannon mentioned before, and a new kind of Power Armor. These new weapons made me want to start a new character just to specialize in using them, they're all fun to use and definitely help to add replay value.

So if you weren't feeling Fallout 3's style of gameplay the first time, this pack won't fix that. However, if you were picking up what Fallout was putting down, and found yourself wanting more reason to spend time in the capital wasteland, this is the DLC to get.