Fallout London may be be the best entry in the series - and it's great on Linux

Fallout 4 - while fun to play - was disappointing. It offered a lightweight, Disneyfied version of the post-apocalyptic word, seemingly aimed squarely at console gamers and kids.

Unlike previous entries in the series, it wasn't really possible to exist in the wasteland as a terrible human being, and the player character was given too much, too soon. It was surprisingly difficult to die in the early stages of the game, and the wasteland felt inappropriately hopeful.

Fallout London - the long-awaited, game-sized mod from Team Folon isn't like that at all, and after a gratifyingly brief character creation process, we died by fire several times in the opening few minutes. Stimpacks? Guns? NIghtsticks? They're not around. It's you and your fists for the first hour. Future London feels dark, grim, and desperate in a way that the base game is not, but that is entirely appropriate for a game set in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.

We're going to skip over the installation process - suffice it to say that we found installing Fallout London on Linux to be a complete ballache that took up an entire afternoon, and failed for seemingly random reasons. If you're used to gaming on Linux, you'll be used to the various workarounds and counterintuitive actions you need to take in order to get Windows software running well.

These are our impressions of Fallout London after a few days on play.

The London look

While America was stuck in the nuclear-powered 1950s, England seems to have progressed to the 1980s, or possibly the early 1990s. The computers are reminiscent of Amstrad units, and have trackballs, as well as speakers embedded in the monitors. Abandoned police cars look like something you'll have seen on The Bill back in the day, and there are even pink wafer biscuits to add to the aesthetic of this writer's youth.

Sarcastic and often cruel replies that made dialogue in 1, 2, and New Vegas so much fun to play was missing in the borderline-PG Fallout 4, in which everyone is earnest and decent - spelling them out to you every opportunity. Witty banter is back again in Fallout London - and even more sweary. In addition to the casual A-list curses, the British slang feels just about right. We recognise and use some terms, ourselves and we're fairly sure overseas players will be able to work most of it out without resorting to Urban Dictionary.

The buildings seem authentically London, and walk into the Ship and Mitre, and you'll immediately recognise it as an English pub. It's great. All the major landmarks are there, and often plot essential. Saint Paul's Cathedral, the Millennium Dome, Houses of Parliament, Nelson's Column. It's a lot.

That litter bin in the picture below? There's an identical one less than 100 yards from where we're sitting right now.

And there are traditional British corner shops with names like Morrisingh's, Singhsburys, and Singhsbury's Local. Inside every one of them, you'll find a skeleton in a turban. There are post boxes that are visually similar to the ones around the corner from the Linux Impact offices. Do not go near them.

And what could be more British than a laundrette? Dot Cotton - eat your heart out.

Character-wise, you'll see exaggerated versions of the type of people London calls to mind when folk from outside the smoke think of the place. There are the Beefeaters - cannibalistic stand-ins for supermutants; the gents who are your typical London gents,

Two exceptions here are the Thamesfolk - a semi-aquatic object lesson in what happens when you live in and on a polluted waterway, and Hooligans - who go out wearing footie shirts and exist only to give you grief ad beat you up for no obvious reason. They seem about right, and you can probably spot a group if you venture to the capital today.

Get a haircut from Sweeney Todd, then a pie from Miss Miggins next door.

The Gameplay

Where Fallout 4 coddles you, London cripples you, and you start the main mission with a couple of serious debuffs, due to your origins as a lab rat, and a subsequent railway accident - leaving you to take more damage and deal less.

Large areas of the city are flooded. Sure, you can swim, but you'll be sucking down 250 rads per second while you're doing it. Even dosing yourself with Rad-X and using a prophylactic Jimmy hat won't prevent your health bar from flooding red and killing you in a matter of seconds.

Once you're in the world, weapons are fairly easy to come by. You're given a sweet and lethal butterfly knife by one of the first named NPCs you meet, and local hooligans can be relieved of their Boxcutters, bats, and other weapons easily enough. The Butterfly knife -- named Balisong by the way -- has its own neat idling animation. How distracting you'll find it will vary.

Like to kill from a distance? There's no shortage of guns or ammo, and although the game tends to push you more towards knives (as in the real London), it will make sure you have a gun in your hand when you need one - such as a set-piece shootout on the river.

Missions are often your usual fetch quests as you work towards a goal, but they've not been too onerous in the ten or so hours I've put in so far. One exception to this was trying to find an NPC in the dark in a flooded area by torchlight. Instadeath Ragequit.

While in Fallout 4, we could run through the game on survival mode and complete the (a) main questline in a few hours, there's no chance of doing that in London. If we have paid for the mod, we'd have felt we were getting our moneys worth. We're ten hours in, and have only just managed to get back into the Angel lab.

The bugs

Bethesda games are notorious for buggy gameplay and glitches, and Fallout London is surprisingly bug free.

We've had only a couple of crashes to desktop across the few days we've been playing. Infinite loading times were taken care of by a mod.

Gameplay-wise, we've seen few areas which made us think that this was anything less than a perfectly honed and polished top tier title.

The first was after the aforementioned gunfight on the river. If we didn't leap from the boat at exactly the right moment, we'd end up in the water in a second, and dead in two. The second is when equipped with the gask mask, we'd get debugging messages in the top left of the screen stating "Im in first person" and "Im in 3rd person." Really no big deal. If you've followed the instructions and use Heroic games launcher, you shouldn't have many - if any-problems.

It's awesome, it's awe-inspiring, and it's astonishing that this was made by volunteers up against obstacles seemingly put in their way by Bethesda.