Fallout: London is a truly impressive modding achievement that mostly hits the mark, but it's barely playable right now

GamesRPGFalloutFallout 4Fallout: London is a truly impressive modding achievement that mostly hits the mark, but it’s barely playable right nowWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Bethesda/Fallout London Team)

Man in tuxedo holding Lewis machine gun

I’ll give Fallout: London (FOLON) this—it crashes smoother than any Bethesda game I’ve played. Ordinarily, hitting a hard stop in Fallout 4 or Skyrim means my PC blacking out, leaving me groping in the dark for a way to kill the process. Alt-Tab? No. Ctrl-Alt-Del? No. Hang on, I appear to havejust opened LinkedIn.

(Image credit: Team Folon)

A skeleton clutches a bottle of cider in Fallout: London.

At first, I thought I must have done something wrong when installing it, but I don’t think so now. After a clean reinstall of my GOG copy of FO4 and the mod itself (without the hi-res textures and with cloud saves thoroughly disabled), I’m still running into my own personal apocalypse every 5-15 minutes.

Although Fallout’s post-apocalypse has always been distinctly Americana-flavoured, it transfers well. The FOLON writing team is smart enough not to just slap a Union Jack on the pearly-toothed, ’50s American optimism of the main series, so the mod feels a bit Peaky Blinders instead. It’s all flat caps and cockney thugs and razor blades, and even the guns have a distinctly interwar, I-brought-this-home-from-the-Somme aesthetic vibe in contrast to the gee-whizz futurism of regular Fallout’s arsenal.

When you can find them, anyway. The mod starts you out with your fists before upgrading you to a butterfly knife, and I used that for a good long while. My god, but it felt like I’d played the game for an age before I finally got my hands on a shooter. This is Britain, after all, which means guns and ammo are a lot more sparse than they are in the States.

(Image credit: Team Folon)

Fighting the Isle of Dogs Syndicate in Fallout: London.

It’s an aspect I wasn’t expecting but which I enjoy a lot. At least in its opening hours, FOLON has the feeling of a wide-open survival horror game rather than a Bethesda RPG. I have a few piddly guns that I treasure like my own children, and which have a restricted supply of ammo I have to constantly nurse. It feels downright Metro 2033-ish at times, particularly when you find yourself trying to get north of the Thames through the flooded, irradiated and ghoul-filled pitch-black tunnels that run under the river. Honestly, I’ve not managed to get across yet: I’ve not had the ammo, health, or radaway to make it through the gauntlet.

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FOLON has the feeling of a wide-open survival horror game rather than a Bethesda RPG

Difficulty is not a factor that ever entered my mind in Bethesda’s games. It is here. I suspect it’s harder than it’s really meant to be, and the game will be patched to go a little easier in its early hours. Either that, or it’ll risk alienating players used to the freedom of the main series as they try to explore the world and get repeatedly murdered for their trouble.

(Image credit: Team Folon)

Peering down an eerie hallway in Fallout: London.

The New Vegas inspiration doesn’t stop there. FOLON has enlisted an army of amateur voice talent—of varying quality, but all charming—for its NPCs, but your avatar is voiceless. In place of FO4’s widely mocked four-option convo wheel comes a good, old-fashioned dialogue box filled with all kinds of options to define your character’s attitude.

(Image credit: Team Folon)

Chatting with Vagabonds leader Sebastian Gaunt and telling him about your train crash in Fallout: London.

The writing isn’t New Vegas-level, which isn’t really a fair standard to hold a mod to, and can be a little less than tight. Dialogue can be over-expository, or unnatural, or just take too long to get to the point, and I’m still not sure why the phrase “mind the gap” keeps cropping up unless it’s just to remind me I’m in London. I know I’m in London. You can tell because the place is a post-nuclear wasteland but public transport is still more reliable than it is up north.

But these are minor quibbles. Chatting to the game’s gaggle of weirdos is mostly a joy, and has even gotten a laugh out of me once or twice. Heck, I’m enjoying it a lot more than I did Starfield’s dialogue.

(Image credit: Team Folon)

A shopkeeper thanks you for saving her from bandits in Fallout: London.

Alright, sunshine

It just needs to, you know, work, especially when plenty of people who aren’t lucky enough to own FO4 on GOG (where installing the mod is mercifully easy) have to followan absurdly laborious processto get it working on their Steam copies, even if that’s Bethesda’s fault rather than the mod team’s.

(Image credit: Team Folon)

Selecting perks in Fallout: London.

So would I recommend playing Fallout: London? Absolutely. Would I recommend playing Fallout: Londonright now? Ah, well, not quite. This one needs a few more weeks in the oven before I can unequivocally recommend trying it, even if it’s free. Gosh, it’s almost like a proper Bethesda release after all.

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Alright, sunshine#

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Alright, sunshine