The first expansion for Fallout 4, the robot-focused Automatron, is a decent enough remastering of a famed Fallout 3 side-quest – and that’s about it.
Originality
It’s only fitting, in the age of cinematic superheroes and reboots of said cinematic superheroes, that the first expansion of Fallout 4 is, functionally, a reboot of a superhero story. Venture into Fallout 3, and the first time you end up in the trader town of Canterbury Commons, you’ll come across a standoff between two costumed “superheroes;” The Ant-Agonizer and The Mechanist. Thus kicks off one of Fallout 3’s most memorable side quests – The Superhuman Gambit – where you are tasked with, peacefully or not, ending the standoff for the citizens of Canterbury Commons.
Fallout 4: Automatron is a reboot/remix of that quest, and that quest alone. Ditching The Ant-Agonizer, Automatron instead focuses on the sudden arrival of The Mechanist’s robot armies in the Commonwealth. Advocating a message of spreading peace and defending amid an opening mission that involves The Mechanist’s robots massacring a trader caravan, The Mechanist makes for a fascinating antagonist and intriguing character.
Eventually.
Entertainment
Here’s the damned thing with Fallout 4: Automatron – despite the fact that the expansion, when broken down into pure quest-based content, is only two-to-three hours long for an upper level character, it still takes absolutely forever to become interesting. The first half of the DLC, covering your first encounter with the new robotic companion Ada (named for famed programmer Ada Lovelace) at the attacked caravan and the early attempts to track down The Mechanist’s location, are spectacularly uninteresting. Ada acts as a complete blank of a character, lacking all the personality and moral fascination of the base game’s companions, and the actual things you do at first are the brand of boring you’d normally associate them with Preston Garvey. Go here, kill this, no character development, talk to Ada. Repeat after Automatron’s conclusion for post-game random missions, except even more boring.
At the halfway mark, Automatron threatens to become interesting by introducing another robotic character, and she brings a welcome bit of spunk, personality, and interesting narrative decisions to the affair. Unfortunately, Automatron never bothers to pay off the implications of her character, or indeed bothers to involve her after the expansion’s conclusion – it genuinely feels like Bethesda forgot she existed. Same goes for Ada – though she is made more interesting by expansion’s end, I had a slightly surreal moment where she was involved in the final showdown against The Mechanist, the closure of her character arc, and when I spoke to her at the end Ada acted as if she hadn’t actually been there, as if you’d left her back at a settlement. It’s a stunning absence of attention to detail, one that nearly unwinds every attempt to grant her depth.
Environment
Part of the issue of this first half/two-thirds of Automatron is how thin it actually is as new content. If the expansion can be divided into three areas of action, one and half of those are areas already in Fallout 4’s base game. It introduces a new brand of raider, the robot-themed Rust Devils, in an expanded section of Fort Hagen, but they feel like nameless cannon fodder and an attempt to build up their commander as a character fails to make her anything more than a dime-a-dozen mob boss with a cool gun.
Gameplay
Which leaves us with The Mechanist’s Lair – the savior of Fallout 4: Automatron. This final section, the biggest addition of new location content, is the moment Automatron finally gathers some momentum, and makes The Mechanist memorable and interesting as a character. The Mechanist’s Lair is a fantastic gauntlet of challenging boss encounters and intriguing gameplay opportunities — opportunities that blend into a truly creepy narrative. It is possible to get all the way down to the end of The Mechanist’s Lair without firing a shot, a rare genuine pacifist option in Fallout 4, and doing so forces you to uncover some rather dark pre-war secrets that put The Mechanist’s home in a whole new light. From the second you enter to the moment you uncover The Mechanist’s identity, this is the part of Automatron that lives up to the rest of Fallout 4’s smart use of 50s sci-fi aesthetic to talk about dark parts of American history and the idiosyncrasies of people and robots. It is fun, endearing, and the only part of Automatron’s story that doesn’t feel like spare parts.
That 50s aesthetic leads to that *other* part of Automatron – you know, the whole robot construction thing. It goes scarcely mentioned above because it is actually scarcely a part of the DLC proper – though you are required to both use a robotics workshop (built like any other crafting bench at a settlement) and build a robot as part of the story, it has no larger purpose other than installing Plot Devices into Ada/random robot. But viewed beyond just its use in Automatron’s story, and this system is exactly as fantastic as it sounds. You can, flat out, build practically any robot you can possibly imagine, thanks to perhaps the best usage of Fallout 4’s crafting system yet. Everything from basic Protectrons to gigantic Sentry Bots to weird amalgamations of every robot you can think of is possible, with all manner of tools of destruction attached to them, and they all look lovely. Fallout’s peppy 50s science fiction crossed with Mad Max pulp post-apocalyptic merges wonderfully into these absurd designs. And you can build as many of them as you have crafting materials – a robot army is yours, if you’ve got the skills and the goods.
Replayability
The final thing: part of the issue of Automatron is how jarring it ultimately feels in the context of a playthrough already in progress. Suddenly, there are just robots everywhere and the world’s changed, and fun though encounters with them are (these are some highly creative enemy designs, who don’t act like any other enemies in Fallout 4), the skills and goods picked up from the DLC feel like too little too late for upper level characters who have completed the majority of the game. However, if you start a new character, it is worth noting that the events of Automatron don’t occur until you hit level 15. This is the ideal way to experience Automatron – the robots feel like a more permanent part of the world, their gear has a larger impact on the game and matters more, and it creates new gameplay opportunities. Prior to Automatron, you couldn’t build an entire character around the crafting system – a “tinkerer” type – and now you can.
And if you do create a new character, it does one more thing for Automatron – it makes it feel more like the side quest it remasters, and less like the thin expansion it is.
(P.S. For extra superhero flavor, do the finale dressed as The Silver Shroud. You won’t be disappointed.)
