Fallout: London review – There’s something fascinating hiding beneath the British leaks

My skeleton has been detached from my body. It looks painful. Every time I crouch, I find myself staring straight at a deep red viscera. I think it’s my ribs that are preventing me from seeing the prison guards I’m trying to stealthily kill in first-person. This isn’t the end of the world. I switch to third-person, keep calm, and continue on a fascinating adventure through post-apocalyptic London.

However, like various other technical issues encountered in the launch version of Fallout: London, it is there, and it is annoying.

Of course, as you would expect, the FOLON team is working hard to fix these issues as quickly as possible so that people can play the mod as intended. As we have seen before, in a game that is unstable in terms of bugs, with time and effort, these issues can be completely fixed. However, for now, the bugs are still there and they always are.

I found at least one quest—centered around a potentially impressive battle sequence between the game’s mod-inspired Roundels faction and the skinhead Miller’s Men—that I simply couldn’t complete, at least not without using console commands to move each member of a group of five or six key NPCs to where they needed to be. Elsewhere, I had to rely on the same command magic to work in the calling cards I needed to find to advance the game’s main quest.

On top of that, there are the crashing issues, which are hanging over your head from the get-go, forcing you to frantically save every five minutes (or seconds, depending on how important what you’re currently doing.) Downloading the Buffout 4 mod and launching the game from a folder as an administrator does allow you to continue playing after the first 20 minutes, but as it stands, you’ll never be able to escape the clutches of instant crashes.

To be clear, the sources of these issues appear to be beyond the control of the FOLON team. For example, the skull bug I mentioned in the intro was not a Fallout: London bug, but a vanilla Fallout 4 bug that made its way to the UK from the Commonwealth.

This isn’t to excuse these issues or to say they don’t need to be fixed, but the reason I wanted to get all of this discussion about bugs out of the way early is because it’s such an obvious one and you’ve basically heard them all by now, even if it’s still worth mentioning.

The tragedy of Fallout: London’s release is that, if you can stick with it, you’ll see that the game is a monumental achievement for a much larger studio, one made up of professionals rather than modders working on their own accord. It’s ambitious and wide-ranging, but it doesn’t feel like it came at the expense of the kind of single-player RPG depth that keeps players playing 50 or 60 hours into the game.

Fallout: New Vegas is the most obvious inspiration, but it’s clear that the team spent a lot of time studying all the other mainline games in the Fallout series, and drawing from a bottomless pit of British culture to flesh out their ideas. The Angels – the mysterious scientific organization around which the game’s plot revolves – clearly takes some inspiration from Fallout 4’s Institute, with its underground labs and secret influence over the aboveworld, but it feels very different thanks to the mannerisms and ways of the bowler-hatted civil servant it and its overlord, Mr. Smith, do.

And Smythe, in a clear reference to New Vegas’ Dr. House, is a mysterious and powerful figure with pre-war ties who hides behind a towering screen image but whom you wouldn’t easily confuse for someone like him if you met them on a dating show.

The main questline and the Gang Wars questline are the mod’s most fleshed-out offerings, offering hours worth of quests and plenty of relevant branching paths, rife with love for the series itself and the lore of our depressing little island, but it never feels like it’s going to devolve into the smug tokenism that fan-run projects like this can easily fall into.

For every joke about the Tesco horsemeat scandal and John Bercow cameo, there’s a subtle moment, like walking past a mural commemorating the Battle of Cable Street and entering a BUF-style fifth column headquarters, that gives the game an authenticity in delivering a unique Fallout experience, which is exactly what it needs.

What sets the mod apart from an actual gameplay perspective is that it’s much harder to crack than modern entries in the Fallout series. It inflicts two debuffs on you early on, and if you’re not careful it’ll always threaten to kill you–either through enemies or radiation spikes–no matter how powerful you get as you level up or how you configure your skills correctly when building.

As a stealthy sniper, I often felt very vulnerable, especially in combat where the environment made it harder or impossible to get the distance or sneak up on an enemy. I enjoyed using VATS precision strikes to one-shot weaker enemies in the head, which felt like the New Vegas version of the anti-material rifle I often carried, but I never felt like I didn’t have to worry about getting kicked in the head by the many tanky enemies who could absorb enough damage to close the distance and attack me.

When you’re down to your last stim and out of radiation, the missions will inevitably give you a more dangerous task to get something, and while you may sigh a few times, it won’t stop you from doing the one thing I think almost anyone can have fun with in Fallout: London – exploring.

If there’s one thing this mod has done for me, it’s that it’s helped me rediscover the simple joy of wandering the wilds and discovering interesting locations in the Fallout games. Maybe I was so drawn to this cool virtual tour because I already knew all the other wastelands in modern single-player Fallout games. Maybe it was because this time I was walking on my own land, patrolling cities I’d actually visited before, albeit briefly. Probably a bit of both, but also thanks to the array of very appropriate and well-designed collectibles in the mod.

The world space itself is beautifully crafted, taking a map of London you’re probably familiar with and mixing it with just enough nuclear destruction to keep things interesting. Wandering around the well-preserved Westminster makes you feel like a real tourist, wandering around places like Buckingham Palace, while areas like Croydon and Islington are completely destroyed by nuclear devastation, or have a deadly tunnel cough that requires the use of a classic WWII-style gas mask.

Certain regions or boroughs clearly have more depth from a lore or quest perspective than others – particularly with the Wild Card questline you get at the start of the game, which helps tie the events of the Gang Wars into the main story, which really kicks off once you arrive in Westminster and are introduced to The Gentry, Camelot and the aforementioned Fifth Column. At this point, I wouldn’t say you feel the link is missing too much, but even before I knew it, I thought of the alternative of having more of a connection in terms of main quests to the fate of gang factions like The Pistols, The Roundels and The Vagabonds, who you have to deal with very early in the game.

However, I think it would have been better if the mod had forced you to introduce Camelot and the Fifth Column before they became part of the main quest, since they are up against Angel, who is key to the story from the beginning. I understand that this is partly because the game is trying to put factions other than Angel on a more equal footing and introduce them more slowly, rather than risking a massive introduction like New Vegas did by making the NCR, Legion, and Mr House the main characters right from the start.

Your patience level will be a big factor in whether or not you enjoy what Fallout London has to offer so far. I’m generally more willing to forgive a flawed game – or in this case, a mod – if I see a developer trying to push the boundaries and create something ambitious.

Currently it’s a really cool castle built on the beach, but if you can keep it from falling into a sea of ​​CTD, you’ll enjoy it. Or if you put it on your to-do list to play once the fixes are complete, you’ll eventually do that.

---

Fallout London is out now via Fallout 4 and is playable on PC via GOG and Steam.