As far as downloadable content goes, Bethesda’s second instalment in their trio of Fallout 3 packs had a mighty tricky start to life and required not one but two additional patches in order to actually work. Fresh from the rather disappointing Operation Anchorage effort that saw people undertaking some sort of bizarre virtual reality mission and that also pretty much focused on areas which Fallout 3 didn’t necessarily excel in, it was not the kind of thing people needed if they were still excited about what new stuff Bethesda had to offer us.

Thankfully the problems were eventually ironed out, at which point pretty much everyone who started playing immediately found The Pitt to be a lot better than its predecessor DLC. Starting off with you locating a radio distress signal and progressing, via a short ‘trip’ to a local raider camp, to the broken, burning city of Pittsburgh as you try to go in to rescue a whole lot of slaves who are starting to turn rather mutant. Whether you end up doing so or not is, of course, up to you.

Before you get to such decisions you must of course work your way through the quest line on offer, and this time it’s pretty enjoyable. The rather more open nature of The Pitt makes it much more fun to explore and run around than Operation Anchorage’s rather more linear effort, with numerous buildings and different walkways and levels to wander around in order to collect various goodies.

Talking of goodies, something rather clever that The Pitt does right at the beginning is to take away all of your equipment and effectively reduce you to how you were at the start of the main game: ill equipped and having to scrap for your life. It also does a good job of making you feel vulnerable amongst the crowd of slave-driving Raiders whom currently run the camp, so any hopes you had of walking straight into the place and obliterating everyone with your vast array of massive guns is out of the window. For those who cherish their collection of random Wasteland rubbish, don’t worry – you get your stuff back a bit later on.

Having worked your way through the initial stages (via a quest that will either take ten minutes or a few hours depending on how you feel on collection type missions) you eventually gain a kind of freedom and head toward where the main ‘bad guy’ of sorts is ensconced, only to be presented with quite the moral dilemma. I won’t spoil it for you folks, but you do find yourself in a situation where there is no really obvious good solution, and hence have to make your own judgement on what is right. It’s all the better for it, too.

You also get a fair whack of new equipment to use throughout your adventuring, with my pick of the bunch being a bloody great circular saw that can cut through things like they were made of butter. This is a particular boon around the steel works that form the middle part of the game as they are riddled with all sorts of strange ghoulish nasties that have a habit of sneaking up on you if you so much as turn around the light a quick ciggy.

All added up, The Pitt certainly represents a step up from Operation Anchorage (although having played Broken Steel now I highly recommend picking that up before any of the other packs), and justifies the 800 Microsoft Points it costs. Thankfully, this time around Bethesda have lumped in what Fallout 3 did best as well as a dose of combat, hence it’s more in tune with what everyone loved in the first place, so if you’re new to this DLC bag or simply have slightly burnt your fingers with the original pack, rest assured that this time around things are a lot sweeter. Three cheers for that, eh?