At heart, much of Fallout 3 boils down to matters of economy. That’s what’s driving The Pitt, where rulers have resorted to slavery in order to power the city’s vital industrial machinery. The big cheeses are unable, and unwilling, to fund the necessary research to determine why Pittsburg’s residents are falling victim to a toxic, mutative and rather unpleasant disease. This condition results in transforming citizens into ghastly Trogs.
Which is why, after forking over 800 Microsoft Points, one escaped slave recruits you, the dashing, intrepid adventurer of D.C’s Capital Wasteland, to infiltrate The Pitt: so that he and his enslaved brethren can wreck a bit of havoc on Ashur, the despotic warlord running the show. The game justifies it in two ways, first as the chance to do the right thing for good character or just end up with a fat reward and some tasty loot if you’re playing someone more morally dubious. But, really, you’re just playing it to soak up a bit more Fallout. Which is no bad thing.
Bethesda’s immaculate designing of landscape is, once again, wholly apparent. The Pitt’s crimson red skies and billowing smoke stacks give the quest a unique, and fantastic, visual identity. Recycled assets are intermittently employed, but the tactful crafting of the factories and slums make it look stylistically distinctive. As you traverse the mine-encrusted bridge to enter the city, the stark iconography ensures that anticipation for disassembling the new content is immense.
It’s a bit of a shame, then, that the first thing you’re asked to do is run around and collect steel ingots. You only need ten to progress in the quest, but there’s a hundred scattered around. Returning them in multiples of ten nets you some tasty armour and weapon rewards, as well as a 20 point achievement for bagging them all. Tedium aside, it’s worth doing as you’re forced to surrender your entire inventory to get inside the tattered industrial complex to begin with.
By doing this, The Pitt marks a return of Fallout’s scavenging tactics that most high-level players won’t have encountered for months. It also ensures The Pitt has a very different feel to the tepid run-and-gun style of Operation: Anchorage.
The all-important ingots, then. Getting them all guarantees you’ll be in for a long, drawn-out procedure: I managed to find 94 in roughly three hours, and am convinced the final six lie behind a door that requires a lock pick skill of 50 to open. I ran through the whole expansion as a level 8 stealth character with few difficulties, but I’m now back to scouring The Wastes looking for a few more issues of Tumblers Today to get past the meddlesome final door.
When you’re finally done with item gathering, The Pitt quickly throws another staple Western RPG trope in your direction: the arena battle. It’s over briefly, and Bethesda adds a slight twist to the proceedings as you’re mucking it out with your enemies in an area littered with hugely radioactive barrels. If you’ve been getting a good amount of ingots, the arena is a doddle thanks to the powerful weapons given to you as a reward.
The loot is all pretty good. There are a few sets of nifty new power armour, but at this stage in the game there’s now more sets of unique power armour than there are days of the week. The Pitt throws you a functional new laser and assault rifles, but the star of the inventory show is the AutoAxe, which operates like a chainsaw made out of old car parts. Its visceral whir and rickety charm ensure it’s a lot of fun to use, sawing Trogs and humans alike, effortlessly into piecemeal whilst degrading rapidly. It’s odd, though, to see a weapon so bold and distinctive end up as one of the best options for performing sneak melee attacks.
With all that, the quest comes to its denouement, forcing you – as is always the way with Fallout – to make a morally dubious choice. The Pitt’s final twist is especially well handled, with the realizations coming to you slowly and awkwardly, instead of getting slapped down and reported as fact. It’s certainly a distinctive end to a unique quest, helping numb any potential frustrations towards the previous three or four hours of unspectacular genericity.
Bethesda haven’t quite managed to find the sweet spot for their DLC campaigns, although it’s worth pointing out that The Pitt is much more comparable to extraordinary quality of the main game than its predecessor, Operation: Anchorage, ever was. It’s the visual finery of decaying industrial city that emerges as the most compelling part of the DLC. The detail, the landscape and the introduction now stand as some of the most intricate spectacles in Fallout 3, but the gameplay still isn’t as entertaining as it needs to be to make The Pitt something spectacular.
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