Fallout London [Mod] (PC)

Geoffrey Wright | August 9, 2024 | Review | No Comments

It’s been a long journey with work starting back in 2019, but Fallout London is finally here from team Folon. Offering a fully standalone experience within a new location (so long as you own Fallout 4), this DLC-sized mod looks to give plenty of new weapons, characters, locations, factions etc all within a lore accurate depiction of London. Sounds interesting? Lets take a look.

Set during 2237, 160 years after the bombs have dropped, and 40 years before the events of Fallout 3, this mod heads somewhere unique for the lore – London. The game opens in a typical fashion, but instead of trying to get out of a vault, you’re instead what appears to be the product of an experiment in a secret laboratory under the streets of London. Some scavengers breaking in inadvertently allow you to escape, but what to do with this new found freedom in a city you no longer recognise. Don’t forget that Atta-Boy on the way out.

Story & quests was probably the weakest aspect of Fallout 4 for me, so an interesting start here with a whole new world and culture to explore instantly feels like a win. After thwacking my out of the underground lab and surviving a train crash (literally), you’ll meet up with some Vagabonds on a crossway. Here is your first choice, go with them or seek out the Thamesfolk on your own. I declined their offer, can meet up later anyway, but it did leave me alone in the dark streets of London with nothing but a bowler hat & walking cane. Not long after I got my companion, Churchill, and started meeting up with colourful characters for quests. There’s a main quest of course, but in typical fashion there’s a whole lot more off the beaten path. You’ll get plenty out of this, at least 60 hours or so, stretching to a hundred if you want to soak it all in.

The original release of Fallout 4 never really looked visually impressive to me, the same could be said about London too, but it does try with what’s available and almost succeed at times. Great use is made of god rays etc in numerous spots to create genuinely atmospheric locations. The fractured and overgrown look to London doesn’t distract from how recognisable it is either, the tight streets and buildings give off a looming, oppressive feel when the sun sets. Aiding this is the copious amounts of new models and textures to really draw you into the world. As a Briton there was so much recognisable throughout, even stores may have slightly different names but familiar brand, leaving you mind to automatically fill it in for you. There’s such variety, from the various faction designs to the simplest of items or weapons, that its no surprise to see that 60GB+ download size when installing.

Audio is another aspect that is well done, there some unique radio stations and plenty of voice acting for the characters to give the mod a presentation more akin to an official release. With the Fallout 4 core, performance is simple. My system (R7 5800X3D/32GB/RTX 3090) had no issue for maxed 4K/60, unlocking the framerate would see it hover between 90-110 mostly, so plenty of headroom for tweaking down if you system requires it.

So what about stability? I think this would come down to your own system and what other mods you use. For me, outside of the train crash near the beginning, I only encountered maybe one or two crashes every few hours. I run it as vanilla as possible which may aid with keeping crashes and glitches as low as possible.

Well, it is a Fallout 4 mod, so the game at its core has a familiar feel with mostly similar systems in place. Gameplay is fine, gunplay is much improved over previous games for example, and the recognisable Special & Perk system for levelling up is still in place. While a lot of how things play out is very Fallout 4, it doesn’t mean that’s all there is to it. On my playthrough at least things took an interesting turn. It actually felt more like a survival horror for the opening several hours. I pretty much only had melee weapons for a while and had to scavenge armour pieces from hooligans, eating rat meat and drinking dirty water to keep health up, and wasn’t until I was amongst the Thamesfolk that I felt at all safe.

The lack of projectile weapons early meant these hours were engaging as overconfidence or one encounter too far meant certain death. Compounding this is a lack of ammo and currency to quickly build an arsenal like other Fallout releases, luckily Churchill can seek out chests filled with defensive goodies to keep you upright. It took finding a basement camp of vagrants a couple of hours in, and sneakily cracking skulls with a walking cane, to finally get some good weaponry. Radiation is also brutal, water is a killer alongside radiated items so Radaway & Rad-X actually have some use here. The dark and confined nature of London’s streets also play into this survival feel, as well as all manner of new mutated bugs ready to spring out from the overgrowth – having things like mutated ladybugs genuinely caught me off guard at first.

For me Fallout London is an awesome achievement. Sure there’s some crashes, expected given the scope of the mod on Bethesda’s creaking engine, but its obvious to see the care and effort put in by the team. There’s a whole host of new content to see and get through, the setting itself brings along a fresh perspective of the world, so as long as you can keep crashes at bay it can feel as if you’re playing an official/Spin-off release. Given it is free, so long as you have the GOTY version of Fallout 4, there’s really no reason to not give this a try.