Fallout London

 

With the age of the Fallout TV show it was believed that we would be waiting many years until the renewed fandom of the Fallout world would be rewarded with fresh content in this most fertile of a playing world and- well, we were all very wrong. As it would just so happen the inbetween game was just around the corner. You know, 'the In-between' game, just like Fallout New Vegas bridged the gap for us all those years ago now we have Fallout London, the fan-made mod, and it- yeah, it really does feel like the official leap between games that Bethesda has refused to provide us with. Developed over the course of four to five years, Team FOLON has slapped together what might just be the most acutely fitting mod into the existing Fallout world ever created and I genuinely wonder what impact this is going to have on the lore community at the very least. (Never before have I wondered if a mod was good enough to be considered canon!)

Fallout London has come out with the help of GOG on the pre-next gen version of Fallout 4 proving the Bethesda truly have put out the single most inferior edition of their seminal game which can't even access the best mod of the game's life span with headache inducing role backs. (Seriously, they need to mix that stutter bug they made, what are they doing?) Now, if you are wondering just how easy is it to jump into this thing and give it a shot- I'm sad to say that Steam versions of the game have a couple of hoops to jump through- annoying hoops at that. Otherwise I really would recommend downloading all of the suggested mods presented on the Steam page that vast swathes of the community seem to be ignoring- they're mostly all plug-n-play and if the grumbled early impressions are to be believed one in particular will save you from dozens of needless crashes. (I've had 1 crash in my 8 and a half hours of playing. It really has been a stark contrast to the early experiences of the under-prepared)

Actually sitting down to play the game I'd say that the biggest initial shock to me has been how different this game feels from the base Fallout 4. Surviving in London is the absolute other end of the spectrum to Boston. In that base game, as has been much discussed, you are introduced to a minigun and the over-abundance of power armour within the first hour of play. In London I was yet to find my first gun until about the second hour- and I'm only just getting comfortable enough with the amount of Ammo I have to enter fights shooting first. Scavenging for supplies feels essential, fights feel like tooth and nail scraps against the desperate and hungry, power feels like a commodity scrounged up and spent in bursts of precious ammunition. I feel bare.

And yet I don't feel totally starved of the tools to have fun- which is a very careful balance to maintain for a lot of the games that veer close to the, shall we say, 'survival horror end of resource proliferation. Trading bullets in a gunfight feels desperate, but rewarding- in a way that kind of loses it's lustre all to quickly with the base Fallout 4. It's a very particular approach to design and I somewhat respect it- particularly given the greater emphasis on exploring the ruins of post-war London and not just shooting through it. Team FOLON spared no expense with brand new assets, fresh world spaces, easter eggs and references and general paraphernalia literally all across of London- again, this is the kind of effort a paid team of developers would throw in. This team were real serious about making this here demo reel of their talents.

What intrigues me most of all right now is the amount of genuine British references that persist throughout the game. I always imagined that this would a case of American's staring at another country through the lenses of 'exotic weird other place'. Some of these 'escapades' can easily fall into deeply out-of-touch tourist dives into somewhere unrecognisable to the locals. How many times have we seen modern day Egypt represented solely by the 'solitary figure' of the ancient ruin Pyramids as though an entire modern city doesn't surround them these days. The very idea of that 'Fallout London' concept felt borne from distinctly vapid tourism, but I'm glad to say I was wrong.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the amount of genuine and authentic references to actual England has convinced me that a significant portion of this team must hail from ol' blighty. It's the only explanation! Seeing the famous graffiti references to 'Killroy was here' is so delightfully British that most of us just recognise the weird little guy without even knowing where he comes from. I honestly don't, but I'd know him anywhere. Then there's our national supermarket chain Tesco, which becomes 'Fesco' in this universe with all the expected signage twisted on it's head. They even went so far as to replace Deathclaws with horrific monsters called 'Wombles', named after a supremely old school children's show from back in our day. It's pitch perfect.

All of that is of course on top of the more obvious references. The Red Postboxes that turn into killer death-bots when you approach, curiously redesigned red busses and even a certain blue telephone boxes in back alleys. And to tie it all together- the voice actors they picked for the game seem to be genuinely British- which puts them one over Ubisoft who somehow struggled to pull that off when making Watch_Dogs: Legion. Their performances are generally pretty decent as well, with decent snappy writing that I somewhat consider more true-to-the-nature of Fallout than the strangely horny TV show. It seems professional. Which is the highest plaudit I can muster.

There have been some that have gone so far as to call this the best Fallout since New Vegas, and that is where I agonise. I think I would have to go through the entire game before I can put this up against Fallout 4 as a whole and declare a victor, but the fact that I've even giving that consideration the time of day should speak wonders as to how quality Fallout London is. When everything is working and the crashing is toned down, Fallout London delivers an authenticity rarely found within the modding scene to such a high level of quality that I'm just wondering how long it is before Bethesda start trying to box this up and ship it to consoles.