War never changes. In the case of Fallout 4’s first DLC titled Automatron, that is a very good thing.
The first DLC for Fallout 4 was a joy to play and provided me with around four hours of playtime. The DLC includes four main missions, two new ‘dungeons’ to explore, and tons of robot mods to craft and play with. If you do just the missions, your experience will be shorter, but if you’re anything like me, the urge to explore the Wasteland will go into overdrive when you jump back into Fallout 4. I haven’t played Fallout 4 since I finished the main story a couple months ago and I did my fair share of exploring, but I knew there was still plenty more to see. This DLC gave me the opportunity to do so while still having a story to work towards.
The DLC will start the moment you load up your save file. You will be notified of a new radio signal and you are tasked with listening to it. After listening to it you need to go investigate where the signal is coming from. It is at this point you meet your new companion, Ada. Ada is a robot with a machine gun for an arm, so she’s pretty awesome. I won’t go into any more details surrounding the story for the sake of avoiding spoilers, but I will say it is an interesting story to dive into.
The robot enemies you will fight in the DLC are all individually different but follow several class types. You have the Sentry bot, Assaultron, Eyebot, Protectron, Robobrain, Dualbot, and the Tankbot. Every bot is different thanks to the multitude of robot mods in the game. It’s really fun to use VATS and watch the robots tear apart piece by piece. One warning about fighting the new robot enemies: They explode. I warn you of this because I always kept getting too close during combat and was getting killed by the exploding remains of my enemies. Another fun part of the DLC is the ability to build and customize your robot companion. You can mod to your heart’s desire and even create a flamethrower wielding death machine if you want to!
Summary
I did encounter some minor technical issues while playing the DLC though. The main issue was frame rate drops when robot enemies were exploding during combat. This only happened sporadically and didn’t detract from the overall experience. I really wish the developers could get a handle on the performance issues though. The main game still has plenty and while patches over the past few months have improved the performance, a lot of little annoyances remain.
Overall, the first expansion for Fallout 4 is a fun and memorable experience. I definitely recommend picking it up if you are in the mood for some more post-apocalyptic exploration. Bethesda knows how to keep users engaged and I can’t wait for Far Harbor.
Jonathan was a regular ICXM contributor between 2015–2017, publishing 57 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @jtainsworth13.