Push the commies out of Alaska!

I haven't touched Fallout 3 in a while due to new Burnout Paradise stuff and various Left 4 Dead bouts and SFIIHDRemix. But Operation: Anchorage just dropped for Fallout 3, and I certainly wasn't missing this.

Fallout 3 takes place in a post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. after a atomic war with rival countries, most communist, being that the timeline has frozen 50s ideals yet technology flourished into a futuristic fashion.

Operation: Anchorage finds an excuse to explore new design concepts by introducing the new quests in a manner that will let them break away from the post-apocalyptic settings. You'll set foot into a virtual machine which will throw you into the historical battle in Alaska to push the Red Chinese Army back into Russia. Completing the VR mission will unseal a weapons cache of new weapons for you to use, but like the Matrix, if you die in the game, you die in real life.

First thing I noticed when trying the DLC is that the combat is much more fast paced. Since you're in VR, you don't take all the items you've acquired along the way, and instead are given set gear as a member of the U.S. Army. In order to simulate VR and help you survive though, mysterious items along the way will flash red for you, signalling that you can use them to activate virtual features such as health and ammo replenishment. Sort of like simply learning kung fu by uploading it directly to your head.

The new mission is great fun, pitting me in much more constant firefights and giving me a support team of misc team mates to even the odds when the Chinese really get the drop on me. I'll most likely start a new game soon though, because you can't simply retry the mission if you've missed certain items that will give you access to special perks when the entire simulation is over.

Operation: Anchorage is 800 MS points and offers a minimum of 3 new hours of gameplay to the existing Fallout 3 game.