If there was one thing I did a lot of in Fallout 4, it was collect junk. Microscopes, coffee mugs, aluminum cans, any type of glue, desk fans; you name it. If it wasn’t bolted down, I grabbed it so I could modify my growing arsenal of power armors and craft bizarre “Do It Yourself” pistols and rifles.
If I wasn’t making rocket launchers out of garbage cans, I was stripping down alarm clocks for all of their copper and using them to wire the lights of my ramshackle house. Dangle a legendary weapon in front of me or a pile of random rubbish, I’m going to take the knick knacks because the game just lets me do more stuff with them.
Fallout 4’s first piece of DLC, Automatron, feels as natural an extension of the main game’s crafting as anything that could be made. I daresay that it is a perfect addition to the game.
By defeating robots, you discover various parts and designs that you can mix and match to make your own robotic creations to take with you while explore the Commonwealth. With access to higher-tier character perks, you can expand your repertoire further and truly make some nasty pieces of science. It’s wonderfully implemented, easy to understand, and incredibly gratifying. Building settlements was always a bit iffy in the core game. Making custom buildings or intricate communities could be a battle, particularly if you were playing on console. Automatron’s robot creation is a walk in the park. It’s a mischievous bit of mix-and-match Frankenstein action that is perfectly in tune with the series’ aesthetic.
Lest you think that Automatron is just a small crafting addition, there’s a full campaign to play through as well. It’s brisk, clocking in at maybe two to three hours – but it’s a whirlwind of great science fiction, fun characters, intense combat, and a welcome dose of cheese.
The Commonwealth is beset by the rogue robotic army of The Mechanist and it is up to you to stop them. It mixes well with the main game’s focus on synthetic humans and artificial life without getting too bogged down in philosophy. Automatron is honest enough to drop the main game’s pretensions at being incisive science fiction and manages to strike a looser, more casual tone.
The campaign itself is a little heavy with nostalgia for Fallout 3 and it still hasn’t taken any steps to make the game more approachable for less combat-focused characters. But this is balanced by its brisk pace and encounters that, while unavoidable, never seem insurmountable.
In fact, Automatron’s biggest flaw is that it holds the player’s hand a bit too much in guiding them through the campaign and introducing the new features. It lacks a sense of exploration and experimentation, assuming you are following the objectives from point to point. While this ensures that players are rarely confused, it does take away some of the sense of discovery that makes the Bethesda model of Fallout so appealing. This experience is highly curated and the campaign, while it has some fun twists, doesn’t really encourage you to play around with your new tools. Instead, it shoves you down the path towards the Mechanist.
To get the most out of Automatron, you’re going to need to take a little more initiative than the game expects. While you could sprint down the critical path, the more important thing is to spend time building your robots. You want to build a deadly melee monster with a flamethrower and sword? Go for it! Ever dreamed of a protectron with miniguns for hands? Today is your lucky day! Automatron thrives off these flights of fancy. My crowning achievement was a floating assaultron I lovingly named Qwerty. She had a skull for a head, no legs, metallic wings, and two gatling lasers for hands. And it was awesome.
I had more fun in a handful of hours with Automatron than I did in hundreds in the main game. It’s such a natural and fitting addition to the Fallout 4 experience – building robots is fantastic and made up for the rather slim campaign. It’s a promising start and gives me hope that further DLC will augment Fallout 4 into the game it always had the potential to be.
