This is a free overhaul mod, so anyone deciding to try this out needs to understand going in that crashes and glitches are going to happen, and this is true even for official Bethesda releases so this really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. That said, I am surprised at how unstable this release is for something that is being promoted on GOG. I feel as though I've barely scratched the surface of Fallout London. What little I have been able to see so far has been amazing story telling, amazing environments, great moody music, great voice acting and compelling world-building that is constantly sidetracking me away from quest lines. Unfortunately, I can no longer load my last save file. The game crashes every time my last save is loaded. I'm not sure if this is a corrupted save file issue (probably) or something that is not loading correctly within the game itself at the save point (maybe). I really don't want to start over because I literally just established my first settlement and finally cleared my inventory. To be blunt, I don't want to jump through more hoops to try to get the game to work again, I just want to play the game. Yes, Buffout 4 is installed and working. Yes I uploaded the crash log. As far as I'm concerned, if I can't play the game because it's broken, I would rather play something else than try to get it working again even after all the time I invested getting this mod overhaul to work in the first place. I very badly wanted play Fallout London, so much so that I literally bought a second copy of Fallout 4 GOTY on GOG because I was having too much trouble getting Fallout London to work with my Steam copy. Even with a financial investment into getting this to work, I've reached my limit of frustration and I'd rather just wait and see if the team releases a bug fix update. If that happens and it fixes my problem, I'll revise this review, but for now unfortunately I can't recommend it because it is just not ready for the average player.
Bearing in mind this is a video game and I'm probably not the target audience, I loved the character development, story, artistry, design and was pleasantly surprised by the "procedurally generated" nature of the game. Typically those particular buzzwords give me the heebie jeebies but in this case it was well executed and improved the game considerably. The music was excellent, voice acting was entertaining (albeit over the top), and the environments beautiful. There were some questionably positioned floating tufts of grass that marred the world design, however, and animations were janky when following an NPC uphill, but I tended to overlook that as this game was clearly not made by a triple-A studio. I found the use of the Antifa logo to represent the Black Brigade to be jarring and inappropriate given current events. Thankfully the story did reveal to the player that members of the Brigade were not always the "good guys". The main villain was an obvious bad guy associated with right-wing government, however the story made it clear that his actions were what made him evil as opposed to his political affiliation. It would have been nice if the use of red to denote right-wing and blue to denote left-wing had been replaced with less obvious color choices. One of the main characters is portrayed as "confused" for having chosen to be a police officer working for the government, which felt very contrived to establish the "woke" narrative and again inappropriate based on current events. I have to wonder how much influence Hewlett Packard's OMEN team had on the story development based on the company's overt political influences they displayed over the past year. Overall the game delivered a solid, emotion invoking story that provided the player with a variety of choices as to how to proceed, and while the narrative feels politically heavy-handed most of the time, it was still worth playing through to the end. Four stars if the "woke" elements were addressed in a patch.
