(Note: For those of you that purchased this on its launch day and discovered it was unplayable, a corrected version is now on Xbox Live marketplace and will be provided at no additional cost if you already paid for the DLC pack. Links to help you clear the old version from your system will be provided at the end of this review.)

The Pitt is the second of three sets of downloadable content for Fallout 3, and it’s a significant departure from Operation: Anchorage. Where that pack had you going through a series of gunfights to arrive at a pre-determined outcome, The Pitt provides several new quests that let you choose how the story ends. As the name suggests, most of these new quests take place in the ruins of Pittsburgh. Your character is brought in to investigate a slave uprising in the area, but it turns out there’s more to it than anyone initially lets on.

Most of the action takes place in and around the steel mills of The Pitt, populated by a mix of raider guards and the slave workers. The early parts of these quests basically railroad you along one route, but about halfway in the story becomes much better written and offers you plenty of interesting choices to make. Some of the events you respond to draw their history from things you heard in the main quest to Fallout 3, and it’s quite nice to see. Interestingly enough, not all choices available to you are purely good or evil; there is a lot of ’shades of gray’ going on in The Pitt. It’s hard to explain this without spoiling things though, so I’ll simply leave it at this: I felt the quests in this DLC pack had some of the best writing in the game.