Fallout 3: Operation Anchorage

I have this problem with beating games. Mostly I'm like always playing six things at a time and often things will get put to the sidelines never to be picked up again. Anyway, here's my review of Operation Anchorage:

Something I really like about games like Fallout 3 is that they are incredibly open ended. Unlike Japanese RPGs there's rarely a time in them when you get stuck looking for the exact one thing that you need to do in order to get to the next thing. Here, you can almost always just think of something else. Sneaking not work? How about trying a more action oriented approach. That not working? Try hacking the computer nearby and reprogram that annoying turret to kill its own guys. Not good at hacking? How about we say screw this mission and kill everyone involved and never look back.

What I don't like about Operation Anchorage is that it doesn't have this formula. Not even a little bit, you can't just back out of it. You go to help these group of ex-Brotherhood of Steal refugees calling themselves the Outcasts. All they want to do is open a safe filled with a cache of weapons, but in order to do that they have to go into a virtual reality training program and only someone with a PipBoy can do it.

The problem is, once you decide to do this mission and start it, there's no backing out. You get into the training program and you just have to keep plowing through it until you beat it.

It's completely linear, and just as completely combat oriented. I was only level 8 when I entered and I was playing someone who was more geared towards stealth than combat. It really annoyed me, after the first part which is stealthy, you get a silenced pistol (awesome), but after that your "commanding officer" takes away you stuff and lets you pick a small group of weapons. My explosives skill wasn't bad, the highest of my combat skills, so I took a rocket launcher and 10mm submachine gun. They didn't have any stealth weapons, and everything after that was basically running along a clear-cut path to the eventual end. Unlike the Pitt, which I'll probably review later on, which was another little world to explore and find interesting people, places and things, this felt more like a Call of Duty game where you're just running along a linear path, following orders from someone you have no emotional attachment to (though, since I'm playing through with an evil cannibal, I don't make any emotional attachments), to complete a mission you couldn't care less about.

Oh, I forgot about the snipers. Fuck those fucking snipers. They're invisible, incredibly hard to hit, always far away from you cause their fucking snipers. To the right here is a picture of them. I couldn't find any gameplay pictures, probably because their almost always invisible. Oh, and you don't take any of your items with you into the game, so if you get injured the only way to heal is by going to little health machines to heal you.

Overall: D, sorry. I feel bad for giving it this grade. Partly because I'm such a fan of the series. But that's also the very reason I gave it that grade. It feels like something out of an alternate dimension or something. Like it's very makeup doesn't belong in the Fallout Universe and kind of just leaked into it from some other game universe. Doom, maybe?