NOW PLAYING
In Now Playing articles PC Gamer writers talk about the game currently dominating their spare time. Today Ben builds a friend from scratch.
Me and my travelling robot are a regular odd couple, he with hammers for fists and me with human-sized fists, he grappling with the quandaries of existence, me fairly comfortable in my sentience. Oh how we laugh when poison gas from his rear-mounted toxic canisters suffocates a group of super mutants, HA. HA. HA. That s actually what I ve named him, the tip of the silicone mastication module taking a trip of three steps down the platinum palate to tap, at three, on the bone fangs. After playing through Fallout 4 s Automaton, an expansion that lets you create companions from the building blocks of life ie, oil, screws, plastic I can t imagine the Commonwealth without this bucket of bolts.
I can customise HA. HA. HA s appearance at my workbench in Sanctuary. First, I arm him with weed-whackers, give him a grinning skull through which to communicate using beeps and boops, and paint him jet black, but I m finding him hard to like. A bit inaccessible. I want a companion both charming and despicable the boundless enthusiasm of a dog mixed with the deadliness of a tank so I embark on Automaton s questline.
It sends us hunting a mysterious figure called the Mechanist, whose merciless machine army is causing havoc. Where is he hiding? A brain in a jar of liquid promises to reveal all if we build her a body.
It isn t quite what I had envisioned, Jezebel remarks of her new vacuum cleaner arms and squat refrigerator torso, but I suppose it will have to suffice. Rude. And she kills people, too.
Assisting a human to the best of my abilities only affords a 25% survival rate, she says. Therefore it s better to hasten the human s death and put them out of their likely chance of misery than to deplete my limited time. Once she tells me the Mechanist s location, I use my new arsenal of toys to blow her up. This DLC gives me a hollowed-out eyebot to wear on my head, Tesla T-60 power armour that decorates my pauldrons with hissing electrodes, and the laser-pulse-emitting head of a salvaged assaultron bot I hold by the spinal cabling.
Robot De Niro is the smiley emoji taken to its frightening natural conclusion.
All this I bring on my exploits with companion 2.0, Robot de Niro. He is the smiley emoji taken to its frightening natural conclusion: an expression of joy carved into rusted sheet metal, with a drill on one hand and a flamethrower on the other, and sleek people-shaped legs for that much-needed form factor. Bless him, he often brings me gifts, like lightbulbs and dishrags and broken toasters. Thankfully his carrying capabilities dwarf mine due to the extra packs and pockets I ve strapped onto him, so I immediately give it all back, and he s glad of the work. My dog-tank dream is a reality.
We finish Automatron in an hour or two, but with hordes of rogue robots still out there, the adventure is just beginning. I ve found a friend in this cold, calculating, and endlessly configurable robot.
