Before you read my long, directionless thoughts about this first piece of DLC for the actually rather amazing Fallout 3, I need you to remember one thing: £8.50. Have that fixed in your mind the entire time you’re reading this. You could also try to remember “Five Reinstalls”, but anyone who cares about the overpowering awfulness of Games For Windows Live can probably imagine the hell I went through to slot three hundred megs of content into a highly moddable RPG anyway.

£8.50. Okay? Let’s go, then.

Operation: Anchorage, brilliantly referred to as Operation: Anchorage! in-game, is a great big lump of barely-downloadable content that is crowbarred somewhat brutally into the Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3: the Brotherhood Outcasts want to open a door; the only way to open the door is, for some reason, to participate in a training simulation of the Chinese invasion of Alaska; the only people that can interface with the simulation are those with a PipBoy clamped permanently onto their forearm; the only one of those not cowering underground behind several feet of steel is, well, you. Which is fine, really, because the second best thing about Operation: Anchorage is the fact that there’s a whole bunch of new textures and new stuff to look at that would have been very difficult to fit into Fallout 3’s ‘real world’. Wartime Alaska is a very different place from post-war DC; where the latter is mostly a brown, open plain studded with run-down shacks and ruins, Anchorage is full of jagged outcrops, sheer cliffs and monolithic fortresses, with bombers flying overhead and shells exploding in the distance. It’s a genuine departure from the rest of the game, and in this respect at least, Operation: Anchorage is more of a bonus extra than a deleted scene.

Of course a consequence of all those cliffs and canyons is that you never really get any choice of where to go. There are some open areas, but you’ve still only got one place to get to and, generally speaking, that is towards more enemies. If you put all your skill points in Barter, Speech and Lockpicking then you will not enjoy Operation: Anchorage: it’s shooting, perhaps mixed in with some punching and exploding, from beginning to end. I can think of one Speech check, a handful of locked doors (all with ‘Easy’ locks and achievement fodder ‘Intelligence’ briefcases behind them), and a couple of hackable terminals, although all you could do with those was deactivate some weak turrets. On the other hand, there are hundreds of Chinese soldiers, always shooting at you. Even the Sneak skill – and my character is a catlike ninja with a hundred Sneak skill points – proved mostly useless when fighting through Anchorage’s narrow, brightly lit trenches. Compared to the dizzying scope and scale of the base game, Operation: Anchorage just feels a bit limited and confined; and never more so than when my decidedly female Wasteland wanderer was referred to as ’sir’ and ‘him’.

Fortunately, the combat is pretty fun. The Chinese soldiers are fairly ordinary, and you will find yourself slaying them by the bunker-load, but the Crimson Dragoons – some kind of elite special forces unit clad in stealth armour – are completely unlike anything else in the game. They have a similar invisibility field to the Stealth Boy, and, where every other adversary in Fallout 3 essentially runs at you screaming, the Crimson Dragoons are predatory, silent killers, lurking quietly until you’ve passed them before opening fire with a sniper rifle or jamming a sword into your spine. Plodding through the corridors of the Chinese-occupied buildings, I found myself peering carefully into darkened corners or warily avoiding spotlit areas, even occasionally firing wildly into thin air in the hopes of uncovering them. They’re a disciplined, efficient fighting force, and they make a happy change from the merry chaos of the Capital Wasteland itself. As well as the Crimson Dragoons, there are a couple of boss fights, one passable and the other wretched, especially considering the limited arsenal afforded to you as a foot soldier in the US Army.

Operation: Anchorage does well at evoking the atmosphere of a larger war taking place, with grease-monkeys and medics wandering around the base camp and soldiers cowering behind cover out in the field, but it also does well at evoking the atmosphere of a simulated war taking place. Interactive objects flash red, dead soldiers fizzle out of existence after a few seconds, you occasionally teleport to your next objective, and attempts to shatter the fourth wall by asking questions about the simulation itself are met with confused or uncomprehending responses. Which is all pretty great in its way, although it may perhaps have benefited from some more ‘Hey! This isn’t real!’ moments, but of course it also means that you can only interact with flashing red objects, you can’t loot corspes, and you can hardly ever just do your own thing. That word again: confined. Just about the only RPG-ish aspect of O:A is the constant drip feed of experience – my character went from low level seventeen to almost level nineteen in the three hours or so that I spent playing it (for those that don’t know, Fallout 3’s level cap is twenty, so that’s a fair  amount of XP I got from offing those pesky Commies).

So: Operation: Anchorage is an entertaining diversion from the main game, with a very different feel and focus and some entertaining-if-shallow combat. But do you remember what I said at the beginning of this post? £8.50. Atmosphere Trailer is by no means a buyer’s guide, and I’m hesitant even to be writing this paragraph, but … Christ. Operation: Anchorage costs 800 of Microsoft’s supremely idiotic and obfuscating ‘Points’, presumably used because we can’t be trusted with real money, which weighs in at about £6.80. But, of course, I can’t buy 800 points, or indeed pay in any other currency; instead, I have to pay £8.50 for a thousand points and then spend my days glaring viciously at the two hundred points I have left in my regrettable Games For Windows Live account, which I can spend on precisely fuck all. The end result of all these shenannigans is that Operation: Anchorage effectively costs more than its already high price. The only other time I’ve paid three pounds per hour of play time is Portal, and I think I can say with some confidence that Operation: Anchorage is not as good as Portal (and I’ve played through Portal about eight times now anyway).

There’s a but. I don’t really regret spending my despicable Points on O:A, because I have a weakness for something that Operation: Anchorage does well at: stuff. I adore stuff in RPGs, to the extent that my apartment in Tenpenny Tower is crammed full of very carefully arranged weaponry and armour, and the new items introduced in Operation: Anchorage prod viciously at all the right buttons to make me go ‘Oooooh’. The Gauss Rifle is fantastic, the Stealth Armour is fantastic, the Winterized T-51b Power Armour is amazing and nostalgic for a past I never experienced … there isn’t that much of it, but what is there – lining the shelves of the secret vault I spent so long trying to open – I found tremendously exciting. It’s new things! For me! It is for this reason that I will never attempt to play World of Warcraft, and it is for this reason, despite the ludicrousness of the pricing, the horrible-ness of the download service and the relative slightness of the product, that I liked Operation: Anchorage.