Somehow, this final download has managed to ignore everything that made the game it is based on great.
Things start off interestingly enough. You trace a strange alien signal to a crashed spaceship that was previously the location of the most powerful gun in the game, the alien blaster. As you approach the ship, a blue beam surrounds you and beams you aboard an alien ship. After a montage of your capture, you awake in a holding cell. Here you meet the first of the handful of human prisoners that will follow you along your escape. After falling for one of the stupidest and unoriginal escape plans I've seen in a while, you kill your guards and make your way into the ship. After the first few fights, you find the new weapons in the DLC; all variations of the alien blaster, but none as powerful. The rest of the escape takes you through the ship led by a little girl that somehow knows exactly where you need to go in order to escape, yet for some reason hasn't done so herself.
The reason I explained the beginning in such detail is to make the point that you have just read everything that this download contains. There is no plot to speak of, other than 'get off the ship'. The environment doesn't change. Everything is inside the small corridors of the spaceship. You will face exactly two different enemies: the aliens and their robot workers. There are three new guns that you find in the first twenty minutes of the mission, but nothing else new is found through the rest of the four hour adventure. Even using these new weapons, your enemies tend to rush you and take too many hit in order to be able to rely on the V.A.T.S. to kill them off. This forces you to play the game like a close quarters FPS, which was never Fallout 3's strong suit to begin with. The few other people that you free aren't particularly interesting either. One of them, a Japanese Samurai (it makes sense in the game), doesn't even speak a word of English and their speech isn't translated. There are no bottle caps to be found, so even though you can have your equipment repaired, you won't have the money to do it unless you were rich going into the spaceship. While all the other DLC had rewards that could carry over to the main game, the weapons here are the only new thing and the spaceship is the only place to get ammo for them and that won't last you very long. To add insult to injury, one of the achievements is to locate all of the hidden recordings and you are locked out of most of the ship after completion. If you don't find them all on your first play through, you have to start a new game in order to get them.
Everything that you will see is new to the game, unlike past downloads that rehashed certain thing (some more than others). The aliens look good, although strangely resemble Krypto from Destroy All Humans. Their robots are intimidating to look at as well. Unfortunately, there is no other variety between the enemies and I quickly grew tired of clearing one room of aliens, then the next of robots. The ship itself looks impressive at first, but this too looks mostly the same throughout the mission. There are only two areas; the industrial assembly areas and the shiny common areas. There isn't really any difference between the rooms containing prisoners' cells and aliens' quarters.
It is incredibly disappointing that after such great previous DLC that the developer is going to close out their Fallout 3 add-ons with such a mediocre mission. Operation Anchorage was fast paced action. The Pitt was a fairly decent mystery with some great rewards for explorers. Broken Steel extended the main story and increased the level cap. Point Lookout added an interesting new area to explore. Mothership Zeta was just boring and adds nothing useful to the game. It wasn't until this download that I felt Bethesda was starting to milk this game dry.