Fallout 4: Automatron Review

It was interesting to watch the world turn against Fallout 4. When I posted our review with what I thought was a controversially low score of 8.5 I expected a backlash, instead the general player consensus seemed to agree with me that Fallout 4 is a prettier but shallower version of Fallout 3. It’s still a massively fun game with a lot to do, but I personally am one of the people that got bored with it just because I felt like I was repeating everything I’d done in Fallout 3.

Now it’s the perfect time for some decent DLC from Bethesda to spice things up, especially since they doubled the feckin’ price of the Season Pass. Automatron is the first expansion out the gate, but is it enough to reignite this Fallout fan’s passion for the series?

Ada, your slightly useless new robot pal.

In a word: no. Let’s not beat around the bush here. What Bethesda calls a “$9.99/£7.99 DLC episode” I call “an expensive patch”. In essence what we have here is a new quest, a new robot-using gang to fight, a couple of new weapons, and a new workbench that allows you to create customisable robots. Cute stuff, certainly, but hardly the stuff that wasteland dreams were made of.

Let’s start with the quest and setup. After responding to a distress call your wanderer encounters a caravan under attack by killer robots. After defeating them the only thing left standing is a robot named Ada who asks for your help in defeating the source of these attacks: a robot creator called the Mechanist (no, not the villain from Thief II). But first you’ve got to track him down, and that might be easier said than done.

After your rescue of Ada the quest line goes like this: go to location, find and kill Robobrain, build Robot Workbench in base, install Robobrain beacon on Ada, find two more, confront Mechanist, win. That’s pretty much it. There are a few minor twists with the introduction of one other robot character, and new gang the Rust Devils are pretty cool, but the quest is over before it really begins and nothing truly unexpected happens. Still, I like that the Mechanist acknowledged that I was wearing the Silver Shroud costume and played the role of a 1950s supervillain with me.

Eek!

The quest is neat enough, but there will be only two reasons anyone buys The Automatron: some sweet new loot, and the Robot Workbench. The sweet loot consists of a few new amusing weapons, such as the lightning Tesla gun that’s like something out of Red Alert and a robot’s head that’s extremely powerful but irradiates you as you use it. I personally was happy with my current weapons, but I appreciate their inclusion no matter how slight it feels.

Now regarding the Robot Workbench, I’m going to give a warning. If you are not the type of gamer who loves crafting things for their settlements and enjoys collecting literally every bit of junk they find, well then do not buy The Automatron. The Robot Workbench alone must be built to continue the questline and it needs a lot of scavenged materials of various types to do so. I am absolutely not a person who enjoys hoarding junk, and most importantly I hate being forced to hoard junk and go through houses wasting time looking for aluminium cans and soft toys when I could be shooting robots, talking to crazy people or exploring new locations. Which you have to do if you want to continue The Automatron. I had to Fast Travel back and forth in several locations to find all the stupid goods I needed, and that’s just to continue the quest - if I wanted to follow the whole point of this DLC and build my own robot army I’d have to spend several hours combing the Commonwealth Wasteland for rubbish.

Expect to see this screen a lot.