I've finished Broken Steel, and I have to say that the story doesn't give me much to write about. You go to a series of locations, blow shit up, and then go to the next. It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a "mop up the Enclave remnants" storyline. Liberty Prime is destroyed, which kind of sucks. As much as he overshadowed me in the last story mission, I'm going to miss that bizarre, genocidal robot. In the end, I got revenge by destroying one of the Enclave's cool mechanical toys - a giant mobile base that somewhat resembles the Jawas' sand crawler. I wish I hadn't, though, because it would have been much more satisfying to take it over.
It's not like the Enclave had anything that could stop me. The last few battles of the DLC were some of my most intense yet, so much so that I had to dip into my massive stockpiles of mind-altering chemicals just to give me an edge. But once I was hopped-up on Jet and Psycho, I was pretty much an unstoppable killing machine.
Speaking of which, I'm kind of annoyed by a certain piece of loot I found in the Enclave mobile base. It was an alien pistol of such phenomenal power that once I got it, I barely needed the drugs anymore. So, to find it when I'm level 27, and my stockpile of alien power cells had been steadily spent from a high of about 1800 to less than 150, really gets my goat. I know I'm about to quit soon, and that with only 1 DLC left, I probably won't need too much more ammo, but when I think about all the times I used three shots to kill an enemy with the disintegrator, when the pistol would only have taken two, my parsimonious nature feels a kind of outrage. (Perhaps the Fallout games are not the healthiest thing in the world for me to play)
Aside from acting as the Brotherhood of Steel's attack dog, I also indulged in a bit of virtual tourism, taking a long detour from the final mission to visit the White House and the Capitol Building. That's my favorite part of the open-world genre, getting the opportunity to see real things rendered in 3-D, and then having action-adventure inside of them. I was a bit disappointed that the White House turned out to be a radioactive crater. It makes sense, given the basic premise of the game, but I would have liked to have a look around. Besides, I can't help noticing that Fallout 3's nuclear devastation is quite selective. The Washington Monument was hit hard enough to expose the girders inside it, but Georgetown was barely touched at all. The buildings there looked more abandoned than destroyed, and some of them clearly had their original paint.
I suppose I could call that a flaw in world-building, but I think that would involve an excessive cleaving to literalism. I think with this sort of project, it's probably better to give the impression of a ruined nuclear wasteland while actually crafting an environment that's fun to play in. It's the same reason distances are compressed and populations are reduced. If things looked like they actually looked in real life, you'd spend most of your time getting from place to place, and there wouldn't be a whole heck of a lot to see along the way (and I got to experience what that was like in Ship Simulator Extremes).
It's just kind of jarring when you notice (I felt the same way about Skyrim), but if you want to present a game with epic scope, it's pretty much what you have to do.
Plus, it gives you some pretty amazing moments. Fighting a bunch of super-mutants in the Capitol Rotunda was an unforgettable thrill, though it would probably have been better if the Super Mutant Behemoth had not gotten glitched inside a wall and thus preemptively neutralized.
Nonetheless, what with huge shootouts in front of famous national monuments and giant robots and implausibly large tanks getting blown up by orbital strikes, it is probably all down hill from here. I still have the Point Lookout DLC to do, but everything I've heard about it (basically "radioactive hillbillies") suggests it won't be able to compare.
I guess we'll see.
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