Monday, October 18, 2010

Point Lookout - Fallout 3 DLC review


Point Lookout was the fourth of five DLC releases for Fallout 3. Way back when I put together my Fallout 3 review I promised that I would come back with my thoughts on the various DLC packages once I'd had the opportunity to check them out. Now, with Fallout: New Vegas less than a week away I have finally played through one of them, namely Point Lookout. Better late than never, eh?

I enjoyed this for the most part because it gives you a new, fairly large area to roam around in at your leisure, with quite a few locations to explore (and an achievement if you visit them all). There's a decent amount of gameplay to be had, too, with a main quest line that will take several hours to complete, a couple more optional quests, and of course many incidental and optional areas to discover. Throughout your time on Point Lookout you will come up against creepy rednecks, a tribe that has set themselves up in the local church and are obsessed with the native Punga fruit, and plenty of ghouls and mirelurks. Because I had already played through most of the main campaign by the time I came here I was armed to the teeth with a mini gun, combat shotgun, an alien blaster and full Brotherhood of Steel armour, but should you decide to visit earlier with the limited weaponry available towards the start of the game you may struggle a bit.

One of the optional quests you can complete in Point Lookout involves finding an evil book, which you can then take back to the mainland and destroy in the extremely creepy and ghoul infested Dunwich building should you decide to do so. Many people had already noted the references to H P Lovecraft throughout this building but had failed to locate the book mentioned in the audio logs that you can find - well now this DLC will finally help to solve that mystery.

Visually Point Lookout is a bit of a dreary place, which I suppose is in keeping with the atmosphere of Fallout 3 but a little more variety in the colour palette would have been nice. I also don't think the new areas were quite creepy enough - there were no scares that matched being assaulted by ghouls in the pitch black underground areas of the main game, or coming face to face with a Super Mutant Behemoth, for example. All in all though Point Lookout is an enjoyable experience and it was great to revisit the Fallout 3 world after all this time. I'm going to try and crack on with at least some of the other DLC packs this week, before picking up Fallout: New Vegas on Friday.


Overall: 7 out of 10.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice review! Keep them coming!