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

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 have just opened LinkedIn.

Not so in the big smoke. When FOLON flatlines, it does it with an alacrity I find almost impressive. No muss, no fuss: You'll be jaunting around Bromley By Bow one second before finding yourself face to face with today's Windows Spotlight wallpaper the next. No black screen, no "Fallout4.exe has encountered an error" pop-up, just the process swiftly self-euthanizing without so much as a how-do-you-do. 

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.

I'm beginning my impressions of FOLON here because a lot of my impressions of FOLON have been informed by its insatiable death drive. It's been a rocky launch for one of the biggest Fallout 4 mod projects in years: Bug reports abound, and the devs are hurriedly handing out maths homework to fix the more egregious issues as they promise improvements and patches. It's unfortunate, because although I've had to play FOLON with one hand poised permanently over the quicksave key, I've genuinely enjoyed its bouts of playability.

London Bye Ta-ta

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.

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.

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.

Although the mod gives you the opportunity to chuck in the main quest very early on in favour of picking a random direction and walking, I wouldn't recommend it. For one thing, London is tight and maze-like. Getting anywhere, for me, is a long process of encountering insurmountable walls between me and my destination and finding a way around them, which itself means running into pockets of enemy factions who all have more guns than me and dying. Better to stick with allies and, by extension, the main plot.

So it's more New Vegas than FO4, despite the game it's based on. Where NV strongly discouraged you from beelining directly to the Strip with a gamut of cazadors and deathclaws, FOLON gently encourages you to stick with its main plot for a bit by making you relatively defenceless in London's roughest boroughs. Hey, been there.

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. 

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.

Good thing, too: The people who aren't shooting at you tend to be quite chatty, and FOLON has a long list of factions for you to get to know. Right now, I'm still knocking around with the Vagabonds gang and their leader, a man doing his absolute best Tommy Shelby impression, but I've also run across Redcoat-flavoured Jack Tars, the criminal Isle of Dogs Syndicate, and I've heard tell of the aristocratic Gentry; the mutant Thamesfolk; and the 5th Column, who seem to essentially be the fascist Norsefire group from V For Vendetta. All fun, thoroughly British pastiches. There are plenty of others and absolutely none of them seem normal.

Alright, sunshine

The only problem, of course, is that all of that stuff is currently occluded by the fact I can only experience the game in 15-minute chunks (at maximum) before it dives off a cliff. My few hours with Fallout: London make me think that the team has hit its mark and created a genuinely impressive thing: a national transplant of a beloved series that mostly hits the mark. 

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 follow an absurdly laborious process to get it working on their Steam copies, even if that's Bethesda's fault rather than the mod team's.

So would I recommend playing Fallout: London? Absolutely. Would I recommend playing Fallout: London right 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.