Fallout 4: Season Pass Review

It’s almost been a full year since the release of the most anticipated sequel to one of Bethesda’s star series, Fallout 4 and it’s garnered a large range of reviews with mostly positive feedback. The developers have been releasing loads of downloadable content since then from “Automatron” to the final “Nuka-World”, all of which are purchasable together in the Season Pass at $49.99. These DLC have added more variety to the workshop along with new missions and areas to conquer, only swallowing the player for even more gameplay time. We’re going to have a look at all six and let you, the players, know whether the Season Pass was worth the large price-tag or not.

Get more brainwashed with workshops: Fallout 4 had the feature since the beginning to build atop certain settlements throughout the Commonwealth which attracted players familiar with The Sims and Minecraft building; this Season Pass made it even more expansive and life-absorbing by including exclusive items to each respective DLC. The “Vault-Tec Workshop” adds the largest amount of build-able items including a variety of Vault-specific objects and useful items like a stationary bike to power electronics when a dweller peddles. Little extra stuff like neon alphabet lights and display cases for weapons have been added to spruce up players’ settlements in order to make it more original to them. The largest mind-teaser for any builder wanting to make something convoluted is the assembly lines, as you can make an intricate system of conveyors and machines to manufacture weapons, armor and more. It’s safe to say that Bethesda really wanted those anal players who loved Forge in Halo games to make some spectacular creations to share.

Your own robots, creatures & Vault: The player is now able to create their very own robotic bodyguard, own a Deathclaw, and oversee the new Vault 88 area in-game in “Automatron”, “Wasteland Workshop”, and “Vault-Tec Workshop”, respectively. Customizing your own mechanical warrior, Ada, is fun to do and creating others to protect settlements is worth the time and effort in collecting Junk to build them. Players will find new mods for the machines by killing death squads sent after you by The Mechanist and completing more of the quest-line accompanying the DLC pack. With “Wasteland Workshop”, players can capture creatures of the wasteland to patrol their town or fight to the death in a raider-like arena crafted by you, which is fun and exciting and adds more of the Mad Max-type apocalypse some players crave more than others.

New adventures with good stories: “Far Harbor” offers quite a bit in the way of story-telling and does a good job with it. Being the priciest of all the content in the Season Pass, it’s pretty meaty in terms of quests. Not only that, but even some of the workshops contain minor quests to accomplish to unlock more items like in “Vault-Tec” with the Overseer’s crazy experiments. Overall, the plots and quirkiness that accompanies this crazy wasteland’s quests range from the odd to the adventurous to entice the player into wanting more only to be disappointed that there’s not. Although these are well-written quests it’s not the send off we expecting as the last DLC for Fallout 4, unless Bethesda was to announce a Season 2 Pass.

It’s freezing and lagging in Boston: While the Xbox One version of Fallout 4 has always suffered from this problem, it’s only gotten worse with the inclusion of the new content the console has to process while roaming. Traveling to Boston is the biggest issue, as Super Mutants and Gunners might be fighting in the background while you’re taking on a deathbot hit-squad, explosions causing pieces of debris and body parts to fly around the screen; simply put, the console can’t handle this much going on with the DLC installed and there’s lots of commotion. (It’s been noted that the game froze 5-6 times within an hour and a half while traveling through the Boston area.) Other than this problem, it mainly runs smooth in all other areas except for rare circumstances involving multiple parties of enemies generated on the map.

Nuka World & Far Harbor not very large: It’s sad that the content of a newer generation console can’t be more expansive than its predecessors in terms of the size of the map. Although the stories for “The Pitt” and “Operation: Anchorage”, for examples, were very entertaining in Fallout 3 they failed to be very large and the same goes for this DLC. Although the “Vault-Tec Workshop” added a very large work area for players to get lost like a busy-body, “Nuka-World” and “Far Harbor” should have added more of the environment to explore as they are story-driven more than focusing on the workshop-aspect of the game, giving it a somewhat disappointing appeal especially when the Season Pass was so highly priced.

At the end of the day, and especially for the price it has been listed for, I wouldn’t recommend purchasing the Fallout 4 Season Pass until there’s a deal. For those players just looking to sink more of their time into building crazier settlements and adding cool functional items then it’s better to simply purchase the workshops separately from the Pass. The quests are unmistakably well-made and grab the players interests but for the price it’s only for the die-hard fans of the series considering there’s only really two large expansions to the game that aren’t that big. The Season Pass as a whole is somewhat disappointing and leaves the player craving even more adventures like previous Fallout downloadable contents but will still provide loads of game time performing extra tasks in the Commonwealth.

Fallout 4 was developed Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. It was released for Xbox One [reviewed], PlayStation 4 and PC on November 10th, 2015 while the final piece of DLC, “Nuka-World”, was released August 30th, 2016. A press review copy was provided for The Hidden Levels. Many studios submit copies for site review but this is in no way factored into our review scores. Games are scored on their individual merits and our rating system is explained here.