WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS CERTAIN SPOILERS THAT MAY RUIN THE MAIN FALLOUT 3 CONTENT FOR YOU. DO NOT SAY YOU HAVE NOT BEEN WARNED IN LARGE, BOLD TEXT.

So, this is the end, is it? This is the culmination of the Fallout 3 story arc, which began at the end of last year in Vault 101 and seemingly ended in a rather silly, nonsensical manner some forty hours later. Not only does Broken Steel represent a startlingly honest admission from Bethesda that they completely missed the mark with the original game’s ending, but it also comes loaded with a higher level cap, new perks and a pretty enjoyable quest line to follow through. It’s not perfect by any means, but if it is truly the last new escapades that we are to be given then it’s a pretty appropriate send off.

That’s reason enough to be thankful, given how bloody silly Fallout 3’s original last few moments were. There you were, presented with the situation where turning on the purifying system would kill either you or your squad buddy due to the insane amounts of radioactivity in the chamber, when a thought popped into your head. ‘I know,’ you all exclaimed, ‘I’ll send in my newly acquired Super Mutant mate as he is completely resistant to it’. Umm, actually, no – he says it is your destiny and that you must perform the task. Utter cack. Anything would have been better. ANYTHING. For instance, the door to the purifying machine could have been too small for him to fit through, or he could have suddenly developed painful cramping in his hands.

Anyhow, yeah, Broken Steel kicks off a couple of weeks after this supposed ending, although I shall leave the explanation of which with you to discover for yourselves. The main meat of the pack offers you three quests to work through, although in all honesty the first couple of these are rather typical hunt-and-fetch type affairs that, whilst generally alright and challenging enough (particularly the second, in which you have to travel through Deathclaw-infested Old Olney), they never really register a major blip on the fun radar.

Thankfully, this is all quickly swept away once you embark on the final quest of the three, in which you basically play the part of a one-person army as you infiltrate and then set out to destroy a military base controlled by the Enclave forces. Not only does the mission and the way it is set out take a good while to work through, but it’s pretty damned challenging along the way and sees you not only facing some arse-hard new Ghoul Reaver enemies but also getting hold of a new weapon which is insanely powerful and generally pretty awesome.

This would be the Tesla Cannon, which fires bolts of electricity at your enemies and then slowly fries them as time ticks down. This proves pretty impressive against the Enclaves ‘copters too, as it can wipe them out in one single well-aimed shot, so chances are that once you get your hands on it you will use it for the majority of the time.

This is all well and good, but beyond the quests and such there are a selection of new perks and a new level cap to play about with. If you’re like me and have gone through pretty much the last ten hours of the main game and the two expansion packs to boot you are probably going to feel slightly miffed as you realise how difficult it’s going to be to get to level 30; doing Broken Steel in the slowest, most painstaking way possible just-and-just got me to level 25, leaving a whole 5 levels of progress to have to be attained by grinding through monsters in the Wasteland.

Another thing that isn’t quite so pleasing is that instead of aiming the perks and level points toward people specialising in one way of play, you quickly find that there are so many points available that you will end up being pretty bloody good at everything. One of the later perks instantly raises all your S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats to maximum too, and generally overall the whole way level 20 – 30 progresses ends up with you simply being able to make your character massively good at everything, rather than particularly brilliant in one area.

The new perks are a bit of a mixed bunch too, with three of them giving you the rather useless option of instantly resetting your karmic alignment immediately (although you’d suppose this would be good for a bit of quicksave/quickload achievement gathering once you hit level 30), and another causing you to expel some kind of nuclear blast if your health drops low enough that doesn’t kill you but will pretty much wipe out anything in the surrounding area. It’s fun for a few times round, but then you realise that you’re so high a level compared to anything else that it’ll only take some kind of complete ineptitude for this situation to arise in the first place.

Taken as a whole though, the new expansion does finally bring character expansion options to the table, and if you manage to get through the first couple of missions you are then presented with one of the game’s finest moments as you sneak through numerous different locations as you go commando and try to set a missile launch system to destroy itself. Added in with this is that, once you are there and with your virtual finger on the button, you get presented with a choice that will have pretty serious consequences on various parts of the game map should you choose to go down those particular routes.

Hence, the 800 points is pretty well spent. You can’t help but think that it would have been slightly more prudent to release Broken Steel before either Operation Anchorage or The Pitt saw the light of day so players could develop their characters over the whole lot rather than just the last of the three, but all the same it’s nice to finally be able to hear the ‘kerching!’ of gained experience and have a reason to explore and get the most out of the world again. They might not have always hit the mark with the DLC for the game, but on reflection having seen the dust settle at the end of this last instalment, the game has finally been given the bookend it deserves.