Fallout: London review - beneath Blighty’s bugs lies something brilliant

My skeleton has become detached from my body. It looks quite painful. Whenever I crouch, I find myself staring directly into a patch of my own crimson innards. I think it’s my ribcage, and it’s stopping me from being able to see the prison guards I’m trying to stealth kill from the first-person view. It’s not the end of the world. I switch to the third-person view, keep calm, and carry on what’s largely been a wonderful adventure through post-apocalyptic London.

However, like the various other technical teething issues which have plagued the release version of Fallout: London, it is there, and it is an annoyance.

Sure, Team FOLON is, as you’d expect, working hard to get them fixed ASAP, so that people can play the mod as it was intended. And as we’ve seen before, games that launch in a shaky state bug-wise can be thoroughly redeemed in this regard with time and effort. But still, right now, the bugs are there, and they're persistent.

I found at least one quest - revolving around a likely impressive battle sequence between the game’s mod-inspired Roundels faction and its skinhead Miller’s Men - that I was simply unable to complete, at least not without using console commands to move every member of a group of five or six key NPCs where they needed to be. Elsewhere, I had to rely on those same commands to magic in a calling card I needed to find to progress in the game’s main quest.

Beyond those are the crashes, which are currently a constant sword of Damocles hanging over you from the get go, compelling you to save like a madman every five minutes (or seconds, depending on how important what you’re currently doing is). Downloading the Buffout 4 mod and launching the game as an administrator from the folder does get it to a point where you can play beyond the first 20 minutes, but as of right now you’re never free from the insta-crash monster.

To be clear, the root causes of a lot of these issues seem like they could be beyond Team FOLON’s control. For example, that skeleton bug I talked about in the intro isn’t a Fallout: London bug, it’s a vanilla Fallout 4 bug that’s made its way from The Commonwealth over to Blighty.

That isn’t to excuse these issues being in there, or to suggest that they don’t need fixing, but it is is the reason I wanted to get all of this bug talk out of the way early doors, because it’s the elephant in the room, and you’ll largely have heard it all before by now, even if it definitely does still bear mentioning.

The tragic thing about the release version of Fallout: London is that, if you can hang on through the issues, the game you’ll find is something that’d be a gargantuan achievement for a much larger studio, made up of professionals, rather than modders working on a volunteer basis. It’s ambitious and expansive in its scope, without feeling like that’s come at the sacrifice of the kind of depth that keeps playing a single-player RPG past the 50 or 60 hour mark.

Fallout New Vegas is the most obvious inspiration, but it’s clear the team has spent hours and hours pouring over every other mainline Fallout game in the series and the bottomless well that is British culture for inspiration to add to their own ideas. Angel - the shadowy, scientific organisation that the game’s plot revolves around - has clearly drawn a bit from Fallout 4’s Institute in terms of having underground labs and a clandestine influence on the world above ground, but it feels much different, thanks to the bowler-hatted civil service mannerisms and modus operandi of it and its overlord, Mr Smythe.

Smythe, in turn, clearly draws from New Vegas’ Mr House in terms of being a mysterious and powerful figure with pre-war link who hides behind images on towering screens, but the pair certainly couldn’t be easily mixed up if you were to encounter them on a blind dating show.

Both the main and gang war questlines, which are the meatiest the mod has to offer and offer hours worth of quests with a lot of consequential branching paths, are rife with these kinds of love letters to the series itself and the lore of our depressing little island, but it never feels like it devolves into the smug tokenism a fan-run project like this could very easily have meandered into.

For every joke about Tesco’s horse meat scandal and John Bercow cameo, there’s a subtle moment like walking past the mural commemorating the battle of Cable Street to get into the BUF-esque Fifth Column’s HQ, which lends the game an authenticity in its delivery of a unique Fallout experience that it needs.

From a practical gameplay standpoint, the mod sets itself apart by generally being a tougher nut to crack than especially the modern entries in the Fallout series. It saddles you with two debuffing ailments early on, and never stops threatening to kill you - via enemies or radiation spikes - if you get careless, no matter how powerful you grow as you climb up through the levels and properly spec perk-wise into the build you’re going for.

As a sneaky sniper, I regularly felt pretty damn vulnerable, especially when it came to fights where creating distance or sneaking up on foes was rendered more difficult or downright impossible by the surroundings. There was the same thrill of being able to pop weaker enemies heads in one shot with a well-timed V.A.T.S strike that I’ve loved in my often Anti-Materiel rifle toting New Vegas builds, but never the feeling that I wasn’t at risk of getting my head kicked in by the numerous tankier foes that could absorb enough damage to close the distance and get their mitts on me.

While it might trigger a few sighs when a quest inevitably sends you on one more dangerous errand to fetch stuff when you’re down to your last stimpak and are out of radaway, it doesn’t get in the way of your desire to do the one thing I think just about anyone can get a kick out of in Fallout: London - exploring.

If the mod’s done one thing for me, it’s helping me to rediscover the simple joy which can come from wandering the wastes discovering points of interest in a Fallout game. Maybe this cool virtual tourism struck me so much because I’ve long known all of the other wastelands of modern single-player Fallout like the back of my hand. Maybe it was because this time I was walking around on home soil, patrolling a city I’ve actually visited, even if only briefly. Probably a mixture of both, and the mod’s array of very fitting and well-designed collectibles share the blame.

The worldspace itself is masterfully crafted, taking the actual map of London you might be familiar with, and mashing it up with enough nuclear damage to make things extra interesting. Walking around the pretty much preserved Westminster makes you feel like an actual tourist shuffling about to gawk at the likes of Buckingham Palace, while areas like Croydon and Islington have been totally turned on their heads by either nuke damage razing the earth, or pockets of lethal Tunnel Cough necessitating the use of a classic World War 2-style gas mask.

Some districts or boroughs obviously go deeper from a lore or quest perspective than others - especially ahead of the game getting the cut Wild Card questline that helps tie the gang war’s events into the part of the main story which really kicks into gear once you reach Westminster and are introduced to The Gentry, Camelot, and the aforementioned Fifth Column. At present, I wouldn’t say you feel the absence of this link too much, but it was something that, even before I knew about it, had me thinking that another option to side with main quest-wise and some more links to the fates of the gang-style factions like The Pistols, The Roundels and The Vagabonds that you have to rub shoulders with during the earlier hours of the game.

Though, it would arguably have been better in my view for the mod to forcibly introduce you to Camelot and the Fifth Column in a tangible sense before the point at which they get involved in the main quest, given that they’re up against Angel, which has been a key cog in the story right from the get-go. I appreciate part of the reason for this could well be because the game is designed to place its array of factions outside of Angel on more equal footing and introduce them more slowly, rather than risk being as exposition-heavy as New Vegas is in its setting up of the NCR, Legion, and Mr House as the big players right off the bat.

The level of patience you possess will be a big factor in whether you enjoy what Fallout London offers right now. I’m generally more willing to be forgiving of buggy games - or mods, in this case - if I can see the developers have tried to push boundaries and create something ambitious.

Right now, it’s a really cool castle built on sand, but if you can keep it from falling into the CTD sea, you’ll come to enjoy it. Or, if you put it into your backlog list to play once the fixes arrive, you’ll do the same, eventually.

---

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