For the fourth time, cunning businessmen from Bethesda rush to extremes. The first (Operation Anchorage) was a bold experiment with shooting, blackjack and whores. The second – The Pitt – turned out to be more thoughtful, rich in plot, but poor in freedom. Strict frameworks and blind fences for the free spirit Fallout somehow we didn’t go. The third experiment is already in a different steppe. The Broken Steel expansion added 10 more levels, a bunch of new abilities, monsters and a piece of the storyline. It turned out to be such an organic response to amateur mods that allow you to play even after the ending – here the story doesn’t seem to end, it continues, and we can continue to complete it, even though the main quest has ended.

Point Lookout – new extreme. This is a small town south of Washington where no bombs fell. It was simply forgotten even before the war, but two hundred years after the nuclear disaster, adventurers, robbers and scoundrels of all stripes flocked here. So we are offered to take a short cruise down the Potomac River to look with our own eyes at the surviving witness of that former life, which the Wasteland is beginning to forget about, because more than one generation has passed..

So we’ll see. The ship is said to be leaving at the southern border. That’s where we’re going.

What do we need here?

Point Lookout is somewhat similar https://gamblingsitesnotongamstop.co.uk/review/spins-heaven/ to The Pitt expansion. This is a separate location, a separate world, where everything happens as part of local quests. It’s like a game within a game, essentially not affecting the main plot in any way. In TV series they call it Spin-off, but here it’s kind of like a full-fledged addition.

Point Lookout notable for the fact that it has no sane storyline. Well, or almost not. In Operation Anchorage, we followed a Forsworn alarm. The Pitt helped the refugee, even Broken Steel clearly said what we should do and why. We go to the swamps of the former state of Maryland out of interest, and already at the very ship a woman is waiting for us. Her daughter has disappeared, she needs to be found – this is the simple beginning (this has already happened, in Fallout 2, for example).

We sail to a dull, foggy town and… all the mystery and intrigue is spoiled by the green marker (if you don’t have the mod installed, of course). This looks really stupid. The developers showed all their cards right from the start, literally took the tasks by the hand to the first Waypoint, destroyed all the mystery and secrecy. Without any investigation, we go to the mansion, where we help the undead fight off the attack of savages, and only then find out what happened here. It turned out somehow unreasonably, unreasonably and stupidly.

In addition to the main task, there are several additional ones. There are even a couple of interesting ones among them. For example, you can follow the path of a Chinese spy and find out how he was recalled back to his homeland. The rest of the side quests are dead boring. The developers have not come up with anything better than a simple mail scheme: “find this and that, bring it here”. A promising and promising quest with the half-sunken ship Ozymandias turned out to be completely ruined. You don’t expect to find a task inside a ship that has been sinking for two hundred years to collect access codes in different parts of the map. And I don’t want to get useless, cheap garbage as a reward. It’s the same story with making homemade whiskey, only instead of codes you need to look for components: fruit, yeast, batteries (so that it’s crazy, otherwise).

Inconsistencies

Much in Point Lookout doesn’t fit with the message. If bombs didn’t fall here, why are there charred corpses lying around everywhere?? All the settlers went crazy at once and started burning each other? It seems not, because everything else is more or less intact. One can understand the blackened skeletons in the center of Washington, where the atomic “gifts” actually fell, but this is where?

The developers failed to create a credible world, but it is the detailed, detailed elaboration of the environment that largely keeps Fallout 3 afloat. These minor inconsistencies kill the atmosphere, they pull the player out of the immersion, because it is obvious that a world that survived the war, even though a thousand times mysterious, should look different.

The strongest allusions to Resident Evil 4 are no less jarring. A mysterious cult, an incomprehensible village, fog, again. Everything here is not so sinister, and the locals are not at all mysterious, but the swampy terrain, abandoned mansions and unfriendly natives over and over again destroy the “magic” of the game. All you have to do is believe it a little, and then “bang” – yes, this is Resident Evil. The only thing missing is a third-person camera, and even that can be fixed.

Point Lookout for all its pretentiousness it turned out to be at least a dummy. Much was expected from him, because this is not just another addition, but a completely new idea. Remember, in the first Fallout, wherever we walked, there was desert everywhere, but here something alive. That’s right, but the addition itself turned out to be a boring corridor with two doors at the end. Along the way, of course, you come across interesting finds, but it’s easy to get bored among the plain wallpaper and regular sconce lamps. Behind the visible space, the developers simply hid a very wide corridor with a clear entrance and no less clear exits.

Pros: new post-war area, swamps – this is not a wasteland.
Cons: many things do not fit with the concept and history of the city.