Mothership Zeta's story spins off from the crashed spacecraft and other alien artifacts players can already find in the game without the DLC. Players are beamed onto the mothership while approaching the downed spacecraft, so it's in the player's best interest to take the alien blaster from the pilot's corpse before installing the DLC content. Soon after players are beamed aboard, they're stripped of their belongings and medically probed before getting tossed into a containment cell. From there, players meet a group of fellow prisoners who can help with the escape.

For the most part, the Mothership Zeta is one of the most straightforward content expansions to date. The pleasure in playing is found in exploring the ship, fighting aliens (which have never been seen alive before in Fallout 3) and using the new powerful alien weapons like the disruptors, all in a retro-scifi style. Other aspects fans expect from Fallout 3 like moral choices and a variety of branching side quests aren't covered quite as well. Trigger happy players will lose karma for shooting the red suited alien workers, since they don't fight back, but it comes off as an extremely arbitrary means of discerning goodness. After all, even the docile aliens are complicit in keeping you captive. Otherwise, there isn't much else for indulging one's dark side.

During the course of playing, we were unable to find any kind of translating device, so the alien motives and experiments are largely a mystery. Clues are provided in the recorded logs of other abductees, which help to fill in some of the gaps but not fully. The group of characters that are stuck on the ship alongside the player are made up of an interesting and diverse group, plucked from different time periods in Earth's history and cryogenically frozen. Characters include a kid who can make her way through the ships air ducts to hack doors open and a gun-toting man from the Wild West era. However the Japanese Samurai doesn't contribute very much except at the very end due to an inability to communicate.

Side quests are also handled a little differently compared to the usual Fallout 3 content. Technically, there aren't many side quests to speak of. All attention is focused on escaping from the ship, and that entails going to different sections and completing goals. However, inviting a group member to come along while you explore changes how the quest plays out. Some will offer their unique skills to help things go smoothly. Another companion presents the player with the moral choice of reviving, killing or leaving still frozen abductees after they've been experimented on. Then there's Paulson (the man from the Wild West era), who doesn't offer much besides his guns to shoot things alongside you. Players will find this either unique or completely bothersome, since bringing a companion along pretty much means having to babysit them throughout the quest. They'll often run blindly into combat, where they can potentially get lost and die. Bringing a companion along is completely optional, but playing through without them leaves most quests pretty straightforward.

The aliens themselves are pretty challenging, especially since they pack high-powered atomizers. A big part of us wished we could grab their personal shield technology for ourselves, but we made due with what was available. The alien guns do fantastic damage and have a chance to turn enemies into piles of ash. Alien tools like the biogel offers tremendous hit point recovery when it's adapted for human use, and the alien epoxy will repair any equipped weapon to perfect condition. Once players finish the mini-campaign, they'll have what's left of a spaceship, equipped with a death ray, to call their own. Players can also return to the ship to pick up more alien gear.

Mothership Zeta provides very a nice change of pace when compared to wandering through the irradiated lands of Earth. Although the spaceship primarily consists of narrow hallways, there's enough variety in rooms and areas to keep things interesting. The main issue is that there isn't a whole lot of "off book" exploring, where players can take a short break from the main story to check out different parts of the ship. Once the campaign is completed, players might find that there isn't much that they missed. The content doesn't do a whole lot to change the world of Fallout 3, other than give you command of a spaceship, but it ends up being just another place to hang out. Furthermore, the alien stasis pods can't be used by players to rest in, so there isn't much reason to stay. The main incentive in purchasing the DLC is in getting the shiny disintegrators to vaporize enemies with. That's great, but we would have loved a spaceship theme for our Fallout 3 apartment...

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