It’s been released today on Steam and, being the Fallout tragic that I am, I’ve purchased it, downloaded it, and started playing it.
Absolutely loving it so far- I don’t want to get into spoiler territory so soon after release, but the whole thing so far is basically a homage to 1950s “B” Science Fiction Movies crossed with some of the themes, ideas, and stuff parodied in Futurama and The Venture Brothers*
I’ve been laughing hilariously at the set-up and initial quest/background stuff; it’s so ridiculously tongue-in-cheek and over the top that it’s hard not to. I’m looking forward to playing the whole thing in more depth over the next few days, but couldn’t see a thread for it so I thought I’d start one… for SCIENCE!
*Oh, alright, one fun suprise: One of the Scientists in the Think Tank is voiced by James Urbaniak, AKA Rusty Venture from The Venture Bros..To make it even better, the character basically IS Rusty Venture, if the character was a real entity in the Fallout universe. Seriously; the Awesome-o-meter just got cranked up to 11.
You’re at a big Government Research Lab, Big Mountain (abbreviated Big Mt, or “Big Empty”) which I believe is supposed to be in Colorado somewhere although it hasn’t been expanded upon yet.
So far I’ve acquired two interesting new toys: A Sonic Wave gun that can do various things depending which frequency it’s set for (including disabling force-fields and robots), and a .357 Magnum machine-gun with an interesting targeting system that I won’t spoil just yet. Suffice it to say there’s an extremely strong Mad Scientist and The Wonders of Science! theme running through this DLC, and it’s important to bear that in mind as you’re playing. Basically, it’s not taking itself too seriously and you probably shouldn’t either.
Only about 2 hours in (with a lot of that just exploration), and enjoying so far. One thing I noticed is that they seem to have cranked up the enemy health. As a level 38 I can pretty much one-or-two-shot anything in Wasteland, but in the Big Mt I’ve had serious confrontations and taken real damage.
Don’t let your armour get too knocked about, either… I haven’t encountered much at all that can be used for repairing it, even with the Jury Rigging perk.
Picked it up on release day and am loving it. There’s much more to do here than the other DLC, too
Spoilers for play tips and preparing yourself for the DLC:
[ul]
[li]Bring the Pulse Gun if you have it.[/li][li]Stock up on .357/.44 Magnum and energy weapon ammo.[/li][li]The stealth suit is very useful. There are a lot of random encounters with powerful enemies, and trying to blast through them all will be very taxing on the limited ammunition, stimpacks, and repair parts available.[/li][li]Keep an eye out for weapon repair kit components.[/li][/ul]
Other thoughts:
[ul]
[li]The drained energy packs you get after robosex with Doctor Dala are much more hilarious than useful.[/li][li]How do you refresh plants you already grew with the biological research station?[/li][li]Some of the enemy spawn points are cheap and/or poorly hidden. I sniped the master override harness in X-12 from the top floor with my Gauss rifle, only to get 3 or 4 lesser override harnesses instantly spawning in my face.[/li][/ul]
Am liking it as well, though at first the game crashed every time I tried to get into the new area. I went back to an earlier saved game (before I did the Ultralux Casino quest series) and that seems to have worked…guess that means I’ll have to do that stuff again when I finish.
I love the Canine 9000 gun…it’s fun just to watch, though it eats through ammo really fast. I didn’t bring enough ammo with me so I’m hard pressed in the game so far, as the sonic emitter gun seems really weak and the Canine gun has burned through most of my .357 ammo.
I found a laser (well, pulse) rifle called the “LAER” that’s not too bad. As someone said earlier, stock up on the Weapon Repair Kits and the components to make them. When I do my “Complete Exploration” playthrough a bit later, I’m going to bring a heap of armour from the Mojave so I can repair my Desert Ranger Combat Armour which is getting torn to shreds by Giant Robot Laser scorpions, Lobotomites with Proton Axes, and Cyberdogs (amongst other things).
This DLC is definitely more challenging from a combat perspective than the others; and it’s good they’ve implemented a way to do something slightly useful with some of the generally useless Random Stuff (like scorched books, coffee mugs, pencils etc) that you find all over the Wasteland, too.
Just finished the initial playthrough, and without going into spoilers or details, I’ll say the endings are (depending on the choices you’ve mad, of course) generally considerably more upbeat than the other two DLCs.
I’m having a lot of crashes in this one. It might be because my character is so high level and I have so much stuff, but I’ve had the game crash a bunch of times when I leave or enter an area.
I’m also finding a lot of times where I’ve gone through one of the facilities only to discover I need a key or something that I can’t find. I haven’t read any of the walk through web sites, but I suspect you have to do once facility to get an item to actually get through another one.
So far it’s been fun, though as indicated it’s combat challenging, especially since I foolishly didn’t come loaded for bear, ammo wise, and am out of just about everything (and my character isn’t very good at melee…and I haven’t found the stealth suit yet, and didn’t think to bring mine with me this trip).
I had a lot of crashes as well, but not enough to wreck the experience for me. Ammunition hasn’t been an issue as I switched over to Energy Weapons fairly early in the DLC, but there’s plenty of .357 and .44 Magnum about (because one of the DLC weapons uses it), as well as .45/70 ammo (and Brush Guns/Hunting Revolvers) in the hands of Lobotomite enemies.
In the latter case, I think the enemy’s weapons may be level-based; I was about Level 39 when I started the DLC so it’s possible that there’s different weapons floating about depending what level you are at the time.
