Don't forget to tip your gardener, seriously

The second expansion pack for Fallout 3 has you taking a holiday to Pittsburgh. Taking in the sites, buying a hot dog, enjoying a ball game… nah just kidding, you’re captured as a slave and put to work in an horrific forced labour camp with the occasional break to take part in vicious blood sports. Pittsburgh is ruled over by the raiders you’ve killed so many of in the Capital Wasteland with an enigmatic figure in battered power armour named Asher at their lead.

The slaves in The Pitt are dying of a mysterious radiation related illness that first causes violent insanity before mutating people into Troggs, kinda like nimble Feral Ghouls that run on all fours and can jump the same distance as a Deathclaw. The quest starts as the previous one, Operation Anchorage, did with a mysterious radio broadcast. A man named Wernher is under attack by a group of slavers and after saving him he asks for your help. He wants you to help him free the slaves from The Pitt and steal the cure for the Trogg virus from Asher who is apparently withholding it.

You have to go into the Pitt undercover as a slave, allowing yourself to be captured and stripped of all your gear. It’s not too long before you’re given the worst job in the place, gathering steel bars from the Steelyard while fending of Troggs. Thankfully the slaves who have been sent out before you have managed to salvage weapons which you can loot of their corpses. The Steelyard represents one of the four major areas that make up the Pitt, the others being Downtown, the steel mill and Uptown. The Steelyard is by far the biggest, but rather than having a large surface area it’s a vertically orientated area with the furnace in the centre taking quite a long time to climb. It’s one of the tallest structures in the whole game.

The Pitt itself looks spectacular. If Fallout 3 took its visual cues from the likes of Mad Max, Steel Dawn and Salute to the Jugger then The Pitt pays homage to Escape from New York with nods to Doomsday and even the Wickerman. It’s a bombed out poisoned city strung together with gantries and rusted walk ways and the whole thing looks like it could burst into flames at any moment.

The plot of the Pitt has, at its centre, a moral choice. But rather than one of these very obvious black and white ones, like the choice given to players in completing the famous quest in Megaton, the decision here is a lot more ambiguous. No spoilers but it’s a real damned if you do, damned if you don’t option and no matter the decision you make, you’ll want to wash your hands afterwards.

As with Operation Anchorage the best thing about the new Fallout DLC is the goodies. The Pitt has a host of new raider and mercenary armour types, many of which wouldn’t be out of place at the Sydney Mardi Gras. The new weapons available include a few versions of the infamous auto axe; kind of a weed whacker for people instead of weeds and incidentally is one of your best weapons against the Troggs. There’s also a new fully automatic rifle that comes with a sniper scope and dedicated players may even be able to uncover the silenced version of this gun. It’ll quickly replace whatever your favourite assault rifle currently is. A few new perks can be gained by completing quests in the game, one specific to improving your attacks with the auto axe and two that improve your rad and damage resistance.

The Pitt offers around four to five hours of play for the main quests and expands the universe of Fallout 3 offering a change of pace for those who are used to blitzing through missions with their Power Armour and mini gun. For 800 MS points the Pitt is good value, on top of the quests and new areas to explore you now have a whole new kit you can take back to the Capital Wasteland and wreck havoc with. Personally I’m quite looking forward to testing out the auto axe against a Deathclaw.