In a world where people are willing to spend a few quid a pop on ringtones and £60 for a Microsoft-branded wireless dongle, it’s hardly surprising that games companies have cottoned on to the fact that the majority of folks are likely to spend a pretty large chunk of money on something that probably isn’t actually worth it. Weighing in at 800 MS Points (about £7), Fallout 3’s first downloadable pack Operation Anchorage sadly slips into the same category.

Let’s say this right now so it is nice and clear: there isn’t actually anything broken or utterly terrible about the first of Bethesda’s planned trio of downloadable extensions to the Fallout 3 universe. It offers a new quest chain that’s pretty cleverly slotted into the world so you can complete it at any point of your main game playthrough, with you joining the Brotherhood of Steel to initially battle back to their base before you are then asked to step inside a virtual reality pod to complete a military simulation of the defeat of the Chinese army in Alaska so they can open up an armoury of old military tech, and whilst it lasts it gives you a selection of quests and eventually a selection of new equipment to nab and run off with, some of which is very cool indeed.

What isn’t quite so cool is that the missions you are thrown don’t really play to Fallout 3’s strengths – i.e. the explorative nature and the scavenging of bits and bobs – and instead end up being rather linear, simple A to B run-and-guns through occasional lines of Chinese defences. In a strange way you start to feel like it’s somewhat more Call of Duty than Fallout with you leading your character through numerous gun battles before reaching your objective, which you are then usually charged with blowing up. Perhaps in a way Bethesda were aiming for this with their military simulation idea and as such they’ve succeeded in making it a somewhat different experience to the main game, but as far as this gaming monkey is concerned it’s not really a change for the better.

There’s also an issue about the difficulty of the content, or rather the lack of it. Apart from the first virtual reality section you are always accompanied by at least one AI counterpart, with the main one being invincible and hence a little cheap when it comes to the old run-away-and-let-the-AI-deal-with-it tactic. Another negative point is that due to the simulation your enemies dissolve into blue pixels rather than remaining downed so you can nab tasty bits of equipments there and then, with the levels instead placing health and ammo machines at various points, most of which are too close together so you are never particularly far from a full health bar and maximum ammo.

As said at the start, there’s nothing particularly wrong with Operation Anchorage in some ways; it’s new content set in a new kind of environment, you get new equipment and it’s still fun enough for the three or so hours it’ll occupy, but you can’t help but feel for the price it’s still a little on the expensive side and that it’s rather too linear and easy for its own good. It sure as heck beats paying a couple of hundred points for a Horse Armour Pack and for those who have exhausted the main game then it’s a welcome injection, but the overriding feeling is that Operation Anchorage misses the point a little in the way it is set out. Here’s hoping the next couple of packs bring us a little closer to that particular kind of Fallout gameplay we all grew to love last year.