Fallout: London

I went into this with high expectations and my first impressions were that is was absolutely wonderful. The graphics are beautiful. The game is smooth. The locations are superb. However, a few hours in I'm very disappointed. This game is geared towards melee play. There is no ammunition for a ranged/VATS player. You won't find a decent gun anywhere anyway, or at least not in any place you can actually get to. Exploration is an exercise in punishment since virtually every location has a mob of enemies that you have no way to defeat with your 6 bullets. And good luck sneaking; even with the perk they'll notice you. I'm a Fallout veteran; I've played for thousands of hours in the Fallout Universe, I can't play this game. Even on Easy the game is punishingly difficult. When you make exploration unpleasant in a sandbox game, what's left? Not much, I'm afraid. It's too bad.

Just to get this out of the way - I totally get that this is a passion project, and should not be held to the same standards as a game made by a massive studio with a multi-million budget. And I wanted to like this game, I saved for the GOTY edition for months just to play it! I loved the map and environment - it is incredible and gorgeous, and I loved the cultural references sprinkled generously (Bwonez Beans are my favourite). Now my main disappointment is this: the downfall of Bethesda's Fallout was over-ambitious goal of a fully-voiced dialogue. This, as pointed out by many critics, meant they had to dumb down the dialogue and severely limit player's options - just to stay within a reasonable voice acting budget. And team FOLON, with their volunteer passion project and no access to Bethesda's voice acting slave dungeon decided to do the same! Yes they didn't voice the protagonist but it's immediately apparent how many corners they had to cut. Characters would just say a few words and a quest would appear in your log, and some actively tell you to not ask questions because "there's no time". The tone is this generic bemused/neutral/borderline bored one too - another testament to how much strain was put on the voice actors to boast that huge dialogue figure. I also don't understand why they had to replicate Bethesda's starter dungeon - first hour of the game is a straight railroad, and it doesn't get much better from there. They even railroad you into a dog companion, my least favourite part of F3 and F4, for Pete's sake! I wish they would have gone the F1/F2 route and only voice key characters, I think it would unleash their creativity and allow more effort to go into the actual writing, which can be a bit all over the place. All in all I appreciate the effort, but I wish they would carve their own path instead of copying Bethesda at their worst.

Works nice and looks nice and they got it to us for free! Can't ask for more

First off, i mostly start games i don´t know on normal - for learning and exploration. All i write are my personal experiences and opinions. Trying to cut myself short, first off the pro. The world (london) looks amazing, lots of plants, debris and tiny details, love that. Music and speech sound pretty professional for a mod - in this case a total conversion. Exploring the ruins makes fun and makes me crave for finding more. NPCs and weapons look awesome. Now we hit the cons. Tickets (previously bottlecaps) are scarce as well as ammunition (even if you choose the perks to find more). As i said i am playing on normal to learn this modification but it feels more like i am playing a soft survival mode currently and this is not what i expected from something that is labelled fallout (for sure, my personal opinion). Enemies (for example the maneaters i met last) take 3 shots of a .303 service rifle to their heads on normal mode, that feels too spongy and damages the immersion. Doggo churchill has currently problems getting over smaller high-differences. All in all i like the optics overall but i think stuff like damage and item distribution could use a bit more finetuning, it´s ok if you want it to be a bit harder but not that intense that even the lower difficulties feel like soft-survival. I prefer a smooth feel while exploring.

Fallout London over the course of playing it has crashed over a hundred times, my saves have gotten corrupted over a dozen times, and I've had to restart the entire game about a dozen times. Terminals are copy-pasted around the map and lack any detail, collectibles are haphazardly placed with some in unreachable areas, certain "settlements" contain one or two generic merchants and nothing else. I was excited to visit the London Eye only to find it had one particularly broken quest and one merchant, the rest of it was just set decoration with no substance. The Rounders questline is particularly broken, I had to use numerous console commands and roundabout solutions just to be able to finish it. Several quests are key hunts, The Lost Tommies in particular being a particularly egregious and unfun example but far from the only one. Keys are often hidden in such a way to make them very hard to find, to the point where I've had to look up solutions for several quests because the key was in the hands of a skeleton hidden in some obscure corner. At least two quests required following blood trails which was, again, unfun. Many of the guns are poorly balanced and have little in the way of modifications, with few of the uniques I managed to find being worth the trouble. Some of the characters are well-written to some extent, and I like the Thamesfolk, but way more of them are poorly written. One of the quests is basically verbatim the 'A Lovely Letter' quest from Skyrim with two men vying for a woman's affection, except they screw it up by not letting you expose both men's scheming. The London Eye quest, besides being what seems to have corrupted my last save, also misunderstands the lore and motivation of a certain Fallout 3 character and makes him into a whiny mustache-twirling villain. Also, I called the "twist" ending during character creation, as soon as Smythe walked in and started talking. I won't say the twist, I'm not that much of a dick, but I knew immediately.