Andrew Bryant dons a slave outfit, picks up a piece of machinery and heads too work in The Pitt.
Game Title: Fallout 3 – The Pitt
Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: Bethesda Softworks
Format Reviewed: PC
Also Available on: Xbox 360
Price: 800 Microsoft Points
The release of The Pitt for the Xbox 360 was poor – it’s been well documented and fixed now, but it was a pretty shoddy case of affairs. The sad thing is, when looking at it from a PC gamers viewpoint, it’s business as usual – The difficulties getting Operation: Anchorage too work were dismissed as teething troubles, but when the sophomore DLC release comes with the same bugbears, it’s hard to forgive. In this time of environmental variables and roaming profiles, requiring the game to be installed on the C:\ drive (alongside the standalone GfW:L client) for the add-on files to be loaded without requiring user intervention and the moving of large files across disk drives beggars belief.
Still, when you do get The Pitt working, you won’t be getting near it without either a good chunk of experience (or luck) behind you. Bethesda don’t seem to want level one characters walking through their DLC and seem to be actively trying to prevent this by placing the entry points at extreme points of the map, conveniently with the majority of the wastelands hostile denizens located in your path. (Here’s a hint – if you haven’t already explored a chunk of the map and are making a bee-line straight for the map marker revealed by the radio message, make sure you avoid specific locations so that you don’t ‘lock’ their difficulty level.)
Once you reach the northern border of the Capital Wasteland and approach the location marker, gunfire attracts you towards the plight of one Wernher, an runaway who informs you of the plight of his fellow prisoners, put to work by an ex-Brotherhood member-come-warlord in the toxic ruins of Pittsburgh, which, on the surface, has been turned into a radioactive steel mill but disguises a more noble (or insidious) purpose under the crusty layer of radioactive waste. In order to infiltrate the industrial slave camp, you must disguise yourself as one of the many by pilfering the clothes of a deceased slave and surrender all your gear (although you retrieve it halfway through your stay).
Once in, prepare for a change of scenery as the greens and browns of the Capital Wasteland are thrown out for, well, orange and brown! Apart from the palette swap and one good use of vertical space (without load screens, it’s worth noting), The Pitt is no more visually different or interesting than some of the more boring areas of the main game, making the experience initially disappointing, something which is not helped by the further reliance on combat over brains.
Several unavoidable events throughout your stay in Pittsburgh will place you in direct opposition with hostiles that cannot be avoided (even with Stealth Boys), with Fallout 3’s poor combat mechanics being further hindered by the focus on melee combat due to the close-in areas such as the sewer system and the Arena, which bolstered by one of the packs main additions to the game, the Auto-Axe (think Painkiller).
This further complete failure to focus intently on what Fallout 3 did best is annoying when you consider that the plot that drives The Pitt along is interesting, if badly paced, with a moral dilemma or two that hide their distinct good/bad results under several shades of grey, leaving you questioning which the good choice to make is. Unfortunately, the decision is largely academic as there are no consequences to your action with regards too the overall picture – something which stands out too any fan of any Bioware RPG or CD Projekt’s The Witcher.
As touched upon earlier, the decision does unfortunately turn distinct, placing you in conflict with one of Pittsburgh’s two main factions, but you won’t care as no attempt is really made to make you hate the slavers or feel for the slaves, as the key characters are devoid of soul or emotion and the generic NPCs take the term to extremes, even persisting in foreshadowing events that have already happened.
If Anchorage did one thing well, it was throwing the balance of the main game wildly askew with its super-weaponry that was dished out liberally at the end of the pack, often to the detriment of the main game, as a significant quest was broken by the sudden appearance of Power Armour (amongst others problems). As a result, The Pitt handles this a bit more sensibly – the collectable elements (Steel Ingots) slowly unlock unique armour & weapons when traded in, meaning you have to explore two of the main areas of the game if you want the best equipment, although you aren’t forced to find them all in one go as the area can be returned too at any time.
Broken Steel is the final DLC pack on the horizon (due in a few weeks), which will finally open up the endgame, evolve the storyline and increase the difficulty as a further ten levels are opened up, making the unique weapons more useful against the imminent higher-level foes, but for now, The Pitt is just another diversion designed to drive you into the brick wall that is the level cap. It’s good, definitely better than Anchorage as a package (although much less visually interest) but hardly essential.
