Fallout 3 The Pitt DLC Review
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The flow of the overall game works much better than in Operation Anchorage - I have highlighted some annoyingly nonsensical moments, but most people won't get hung up on those. You get your quest, you move from task to task until you get to a fork in the road, make your choice, then proceed to the conclusion. Everything wraps around your central mission, and the pacing is set nicely to keep you on the edge of action at all times. The game design seems centered around providing enjoyable combat throughout at the expense of well thought out level design, so you get areas that are great in terms of pinch-points and vantage-points but fall apart badly when you turn around and look at how it is all laid out.
Of course, the whole point of it is that you aren't supposed to turn around and think about things. You are supposed to speed forward and just keep going. You aren't supposed to wonder about your early conversations with your initial contact; you aren't supposed to wonder why all of your equipment gets separated and put into a nice little container for you to retrieve later; you aren't supposed to wonder about the apparent cognitive dissonance inherent in the few facets of the slave leader's personality that are revealed to you. You are just supposed to accept it all at face value, look on your choice as some great 'moral decision' and be heartily impressed. Sadly, it is those sorts of things that you might be able to forgive and forget once but that will make a replay all but impossible.
Another thing that is hard to ignore is the bugginess. I have been impressed with the robustness of the original Fallout 3 and the Operation Anchorage add-on, but even though I waited a couple of days for the initial round of problems to settle down, I still ran into more slowdowns, freezes and crashes to desktop in this small module than in my entire time with Fallout 3.
