Author: Game Infliction

Ubisoft is the latest video game company to be hit with another wave of layoffs.

As first reported by Bloomberg and later independently confirmed by IGN, 45 staff across the Assassin’s Creed publisher’s San Francisco and Cary, North Carolina locations were impacted by layoffs yesterday. Those affected will receive severance and career assistance, though further details about what those offerings include have not been revealed.

Editor’s Note: Yes, we’ve reviewed a mod! It’s true that this isn’t something IGN normally does, but seeing as Fallout London is a project on a scale that rivals a full game, we’ve made an exception.

It’s easy to see how a long-running series could fall into a rut. As gameplay conventions become increasingly entrenched, lore bloats, and deviation from what fans expect becomes riskier, it creates a lot of inertia in one direction that can be hard to redirect. That’s where something like Fallout London can shine. FOLON, the mod group behind this enormous (and completely free) total conversion for Fallout 4, approached the project with fresh eyes and ideas and no fear of alienating the Fallout faithful. Setting it across the Atlantic, where the America-centric Fallout universe has never officially visited, frees the story from the burden of most of the series’ decades of lore. Sure, a fan-made Fallout lacks the polish and ease of use we expect from a major developer – but it’s not as if Bethesda RPG fans aren’t accustomed to toughing out some technical issues as part of the price of admission to these worlds, and Fallout London is effectively a whole new, fun game that takes the series to a cool new setting.

As big and grand as Fallout London is, it can sometimes be easy to forget that this is a mod and not an official sequel. London itself is massive, around the size of Boston from Fallout 4. It’s also extremely dense with buildings to explore, bandit dens to clear, and all manner of interesting sights to see. In addition to the city, there are separate zones for many of the individual boroughs, each with distinct styles and factions. It may be dirtier and more chaotic, but I can’t help but prefer the punk rock vibes of the Pistols in Camden over the clean but snooty Gentry that inhabit Westminster. That variety in locations does a great job projecting the fact that a city the size of London isn’t a cultural monolith, and visiting one of the areas for the first time and discovering what it’s like is exciting.

I’ve never been to the real London, but the realization of the city matches up to my expectations based on how I’ve seen it portrayed in movies and television. Tight streets with dense residences, interesting shops, and no shortage of pubs form the residential neighborhoods. Iconic landmarks like Big Ben and the Tower Bridge beckon in the distance, and provided me with a strong motivation to reach those areas to see what’s become of them in the post-apocalypse. And who among us hasn’t wanted to sneak around Buckingham Palace at least once or twice? Sure, there’s no Fenway Park, but it does have medieval history, with swords, maces, and armor to go with it – and that’s great. Whether it’s the Capital Wasteland or New Vegas, modern Fallout games are at their best when they let the setting be a starring character, and London has that in spades.

The atmosphere throughout is excellent. Whether it’s the classic Fallout radio stations bringing back the oldies (including some very, very British tunes) or the thick and gloomy rainfall, it’s easy to just stand on a street corner staring at a double-decker bus and feel pulled into Ol’ Blighty, as the current inhabitants call London. I was surprised by how much setting a Fallout game outside of North America made everything seem fresh, despite the now decade-old foundation of Fallout 4 (which, let’s face it, wasn’t exactly on the cutting edge of graphical fidelity in 2015). Small touches, like swapping out the wrist-mounted PipBoy for the handheld Atta-Boy, felt like cute nods and adaptations, while mixing in new fauna like irradiated foxes and badgers broke the routine that came with decades of fighting radscorpions.

Still, this game is clearly built on Fallout 4. If, like me, you enjoy gunplay, sneaking, and V.A.T.S. combat, then know that it does all that and it feels the same. Most of the perks seem lifted straight from Fallout 4, but a few options, like the Numbskull trait that boosts your strength, endurance, and luck at the expense of a very low ceiling on your intelligence, give options for fun new builds. Outside of the aforementioned melee blades and clubs, there isn’t much in the way of weapons that feel distinctly new. There are some neat gimmicky weapons like the Dirty Weldy, which launches enemies into the air, but I found pistols, rifles, and shotguns to be the most universally useful weapons, as usual. The apparel options, while dashingly British, don’t functionally change much. I do like that you can craft upgrades and build settlements just like before, too, if you’re into that sort of thing (which I am).

Again, though, there is a major barrier to entry here. It needs to be understood that you can’t just download Fallout London and jump in. This is a mod, and it requires that you jump through a series of hoops: You will first need Fallout 4 and all of the DLC, then go through a careful step-by-step process to downgrade Fallout 4 to an earlier version (the most recent update broke a lot of FOLON’s work and they haven’t been able to address everything yet), and finally install Fallout London itself. It’s not exactly rocket surgery, but it is much more complex than just pressing the install button, and some scary-looking windows pop up during the process.

Even with a proper install, technical issues are common, and a big enough problem that it can’t be just written off as, “Yup, that sounds like Fallout!” Crashes are all too frequent, and if you aren’t diligent about quicksaving, those can be major progress killers. This can be especially frustrating thanks to load times that are exceptionally long, even with an i9 processor and RTX 3090-powered rig. Every time I loaded a save or fast traveled I was stuck waiting for close to a minute. Given how often you’ll need to do those two things in a playthrough of Fallout London you can expect to stare at that loading screen for quite a while, which is a shame.

So as much as I enjoyed exploring post-apocalyptic London, the looming threat of bugs hung over my head the entire time. Sometimes companions would just disappear, and multiple times quests simply broke, with whatever was supposed to happen at key moments not triggering. Anytime this occurred I was able to find fixes online or in the Fallout London Discord, often involving inputting console commands, but that’s something that not everyone will have the patience or technical know-how for. To its credit, the team at FOLON has continued to work on fixes, and the first big patch has reduced – but not eliminated – the crashes. And if you want to mod your mod, I found that BUFFOUT and the Long Loading Times Fix helped a bit… or they could lead to more problems. That’s the risk of playing with mods.

Fallout London’s story benefits from the clean slate afforded by being out of North America. The setup is simple: you awaken in a lab and are sent to track down Mr. Smythe, the mysterious person behind whatever led you there, for some answers and/or revenge. The fact that you don’t have to deal with the baggage of the Forced Evolutionary Virus, Super Mutants, Enclave, or Brotherhood of Steel means there are actual surprises and mysteries to uncover, which makes for a compelling and much less predictable story than we’ve seen out of this universe in a long time.

Impressively, there are multiple endings, each with branching paths of their own. The two versions of my ending that I saw after a nearly 40-hour playthrough were as surreal and cinematic as anything I’ve seen in the series, and left me intrigued to see what the other potential conclusions look like. I really enjoyed the story overall, and found uncovering who Mr. Smythe was, and what he was after, to be every bit as interesting as meeting President Eden in Fallout 3, though it lacked the emotional pull of Fallout 4. I particularly enjoyed my time as a Peaky Blinders-esque ruffian with the Vagabonds, and earning the respect of their dirtbag-with-a-heart leader Sebastian Gaunt.

There’s a lot to do, and I could easily invest another 50 hours working through every faction’s story and exploring all the points of interest. My biggest gripe, though, is that a lot of the hours I invested reaching the end, particularly in the middle act, was spent on busywork. As invested as I was in uncovering the truth of what was going on in Ol’ Blighty, the momentum would get stalled for hours at a time as I was sent to deal with problems and missions unrelated to the central plot to progress. At one point, just as I felt like the story was sucking me in, I had to spend the better part of a day literally collecting signatures. I’m all for giving us a lot to do in an open-world RPG, but making those things mandatory is an unnecessary pain and kills the story’s momentum.

The actual mission design is a bit of a roller coaster, with plenty of ups and downs. Much like the vast majority of RPGs, most quests simply send you to a spot to kill stuff, which is fun for a while but eventually gets old. Several really stand out, though: there’s an exciting ferry ride shootout, a battle against waves of ghouls as you wait for some laundry to wash, and more. The best missions include unexpected twists and turns, like one that inserted me into a battle for control over the Roundels, a faction vying for domination over the Hackney area. I backed the candidate I thought was the most pragmatic, with the best interest of the group at heart. What followed was an absolute bloodbath involving an accidental drug overdose, a miniature civil war, and a body count that would look at home in an ‘80s action movie. I didn’t see any of that coming, and it ruled.

The companions who can join you all have fun personality quirks, like Kiera, who has delusions of being a master thief. They have interesting stories of their own, and earning the trust they need to open up is very worthwhile. There’s a great Dogmeat stand-in in the lovable bulldog Churchill, or Archie, if you prefer a street urchin who isn’t much of a fighter, but is great at picking locks for you. There’s a half dozen or so to recruit, and each is fun and weird in their own Fallout way. I appreciate that the companions and NPCs throughout London are well acted and produced. It sounded professional, which helped immerse me in the experience.

The frustrating issue I kept running into, however, was that the layout of paths and objectives within missions was often unclear. For example, one very early section has you exploring an underground lab, and the only path forward is a pitch-black door hidden in shadow, while the lit hallway next to it is a dead end. Another otherwise fun exploration of the Bank of England is derailed by the need to find exceptionally easy-to-miss keys. Both of those were big enough problems that there are entire guides online now explaining what to do. It’s the sort of thing one would hope would be caught and corrected in playtesting, and it’s the one area where Fallout London comes off as amateurish – which is actually praise, since so much of the rest of it could easily pass for the work of a professional studio.

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I’ve never been so utterly blown away, yet simultaneously so unbelievably frustrated by a game as I have been with Black Myth: Wukong. This is, undoubtedly, one of the most ambitious and impressive action games I’ve played. It’s stunningly gorgeous; its combat is fantastic; it’s incredibly challenging, but always satisfying to overcome; and the setting is refreshingly unique and steeped in rich Chinese culture, just to sing a few of its praises. Despite all of that, it often feels like it’s barely holding it all together. I suffered numerous crashes on PC (the PlayStation 5 version wasn’t made available for this review), despite having a top-of-the-line setup with a GeForce RTX 4090, not to mention the multiple times I fell through the ground and died just as I was on the verge of defeating a particularly tough boss, or the way characters would randomly switch from English to Chinese, or the way the dialogue audio would drop out all together and leave me completely in the dark during an important cutscene. It’s a rickety roller coaster for sure, and there were definitely spots during the ride where I was not having a great time, but taken as a whole this is one adventure where the bumps are worth it.

Black Myth: Wukong’s story is somewhat of a follow up to the classic novel Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en, a book that I only personally know thanks to very loose adaptations like Dragon Ball and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. That surface-level familiarity didn’t help much though, as the interpretation that the developers at GameScience have crafted here is laden with references to characters and events from the novel without doing a great job of bringing you up to speed on who Sun Wukong is or what he encountered on his titular journey. I had to look online to understand who Zhu Bhajie was, what his history with Wukong is, and what the significance of certain encounters were, because otherwise I’d have been completely lost at times.

You play as The Destined One, a literal monkey who wakes up one morning and decides to set out on a roughly 40-hour journey to locate the six relics of Wukong. While the moment-to-moment storytelling is fairly unremarkable – largely due to a mute protagonist and side characters that aren’t given enough screen time to develop – each of the six self-contained chapters culminates with a stunningly gorgeous animated vignette that tells a short story about that story’s main antagonist. Each one is done in a completely different art style, with one drawn to look like a storybook, another using stop-motion animation, and another done in the style of an anime. Every single one of them is beautiful and poignant, and I couldn’t help but wish that the main story managed to move me in similar ways.

My initial read on Wukong was that it was a soulslike, given the checkpoint system, the stamina bar that governs your actions in combat, and the dodge-heavy fighting style. But as it turns out, Wukong has more in common with traditional action games like what you might expect from Bayonetta developer PlatinumGames than it does with anything FromSoftware has made. Most of the usual soulslike conventions are missing: There is no penalty for death outside of respawning at the nearest checkpoint (no corpse run is required to regain your loot); you don’t use a shared currency to level up your stats and purchase items or upgrades; and while there is gear and stats to consider, you largely just go and swap out the old equipment with the new as opposed to making choices as to what kind of weapon or piece of armor you want to hold on to and upgrade.

And even though I’m a big fan of soulslikes, ditching those mechanics feels like the right move for the game that Wukong is trying to be. It’s far more forgiving, focused on keeping you in the action rather than poring over menus or retracing your steps to regain your lost currency after dying, and Wukong is a better, more distinctive game for it.

To be clear, though, when I say it’s more forgiving I don’t mean that it’s any less difficult than a From-style game. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that between this and Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, I had more difficulty getting through Wukong’s toughest challenges (and, no, there aren’t any difficult options). But at the same time those challenges never felt unfair, and overcoming some of the tougher boss fights was always a satisfying combination of learning their attack patterns, figuring out where I could maximize my punishment windows, and tweaking my loadout in ways that made the best use of my chosen powers.

Combat in Black Myth: Wukong is simple and elegant, thanks in part to some tools that are really fun to play around with. Success hinges on a delicate balance of twitch reflex-style gameplay mixed with careful resource management that largely revolves around a Focus Meter which builds up when you land hits and perfectly dodge enemy attacks. You gain a Focus point whenever that meter fills up, which you could then spend in the middle of a light attack combo for a “varied combo,” or you can just use a heavy attack on its own for a powerful strike that can be charged even further if two, three, or even four Focus points are consumed all at once.

You also have access to a small handful of spells, governed by a mana meter, that are versatile enough to be useful in a wide array of situations. The Immobilize spell, for instance, freezes enemies for a short time, allowing you to get in some quick hits and potentially stagger them to allow for even more free damage; Cloud Step turns you invisible and creates a decoy for your enemies to focus on while you break away, heal up, and then hit your foe with a surprise attack that can crit; Rock Solid briefly turns you into a statue that will cause an enemy’s attack to bounce right off of you, giving you an opportunity for a counter-attack; Ring of Fire creates a barrier around you that will initially repel enemies, and grant you some health restoration and enhances any stat altering drinks you may use while standing inside of it; and finally there’s my personal favorite, a Pluck of Many, which lets you make multiple clones of yourself to all gang up on an enemy.

Separate from that you’ve also got transformations, which allow you to morph into powerful creatures that you’ve already bested in battle. What’s really cool about these is that they don’t cost any mana (they’re tied to a very lengthy cooldown instead) and they turn you into a totally different character, complete with an all new moveset, special moves that use your focus meter, and more. For example, one of the first bosses you fight is a wolf with a fiery dualblade that has a lightning fast dash attack. When you defeat him, you’ll gain his transformation and be able to do that very same dash attack to your enemies, and once you build up his focus meter, you’ll even get to do a hugely powerful leaping strike that can ignite foes and deal damage over time to them.

And finally there are Spirit Skills, which are earned by defeating certain more powerful versions of enemies and absorbing their essence into your gourd. These are effectively transformations that only last for one attack and are also tied to a fairly lengthy cooldown, but it’s great to be able to, for example, use the Wandering Wight’s powerful headbutt attack to get an extra stagger after immobilizing an enemy. These Spirit Skills can also be leveled up, which makes it so that even early game Spirits never lose their strength as the campaign rolls on.

It’s an excellent blend of options, especially when mixed with some truly incredible boss fights, and Wukong introduces all of these elements at a thoughtfully measured pace so that I never felt overwhelmed. Make no mistake: The Destined One is extremely powerful, and being in control of him is definitely a heck of a power trip – even beyond the many powers and abilities he has at his disposal, nothing beats the feeling of just slamming a 50-foot bo staff down onto an enemy’s head – but I still had to be smart with how I used my spells due to the fact that mana restoration is actually very difficult.

This is where the resource management aspect of combat comes into play: I had to carefully consider what spells were actually worth the mana cost, whether I should save them for a more difficult second phase of a fight, and whether or not I could capitalize on the opportunity if I were to spend the mana in the first place. For instance, even though its my most powerful spell, I often had to hold off on casting my Pluck of Many spell that duplicates my monkey since it has an extremely high mana cost – if i cast it at a bad time, the boss could simply wipe all of my clones out with an AOE attack before they even got a chance to get some damage in. Sometimes the adjustment I had to make when I was stuck on a boss was a simple change in how I used my abilities, and the act of coming up with a new strategy and having it pay off was always extremely satisfying.

While boss battles are where Wukong is at its best, there’s also a highly respectable amount of enemy variety in its regular fights. Level design is of the “wide-linear” variety, usually with a clear main path that leads you from checkpoint to checkpoint, but plenty of opportunities to venture off that path to discover optional goodies. The rewards for exploration are great, too: I’ve found rare crafting materials to make new weapons or armor, special enemies that drop a new Spirit Skill, Curio items that I could equip to enhance my build, and treasure chests that might permanently increase my max health, mana, or stamina, all of which made the time I took to find them feel well spent.

On top of that, there are several secret boss fights to discover, key items with mysterious uses that I still haven’t figured out, and plenty more reasons to stray from the beaten path and keep an eye constantly scanning the environment. The main one being that Wukong is one of the most gorgeous games I’ve ever played – every environment is brimming with detail, from the chipped pieces of bark on the trees in the forest, to the real-time deformation of the snow as The Destined One moves through it while dragging his staff along. Not only that, but the animation is incredible too, with wonderful touches and flourishes like the way your character will do a little hop step while locked on to an enemy, then change to strafing around them as opposed to just straight on running while keeping their head turned. The music and sound design is fantastic as well, with epic drum-thumping battle themes and melodic flutes and chimes adding to the air of wonder and mystery as you explore the unknown.

All that said, this game would have benefitted from a map, plain and simple. The lands you explore in Wukong are beautiful, no doubt, but they’re far too big and too crammed with secrets to not give you some sort of navigational help, especially the second and third chapters. This, along with the fact that it’s aggravatingly hard to tell what obstacles can actually be climbed over and what’s an invisible wall, can make exploration quite cumbersome. It’s a good thing the rewards are worth it.

However, it’s hard not to feel like all of Wukong’s splendor and detail came at a great cost. I experienced numerous crashes, with one particular heartbreaker happening right after defeating an extremely tough boss that I then had to defeat again. Several others were more minor and would typically happen as I was loading up a new chapter or fast traveling to another level, but they eventually add up to a lot of frustration.

In addition to that, several times during important cutscenes, all dialogue audio and subtitles would drop out completely, leaving me without any clue as to what was being talked about and no way to rewatch the cutscene; characters would occasionally switch to speaking in Chinese all of a sudden despite me having the audio set to English; the lipflaps of the English dub do not even remotely match what’s being spoken; and most of the journal entries you find along the way haven’t even been localized yet into English.

The worst, though, was one particular fight in which the boss would plunge me down through the ground during the transition to its final phase, only to have me fall through the world once I regained control of my character. This kept on happening to the point where I thought my game was unavoidably bugged and I wouldn’t be able to reach the end, but my insanity of trying the same thing over and over again eventually yielded a different result for no discernible reason.

These are the kinds of technical problems that GameScience will hopefully look to address in post-launch patches – and it’s not outside of the realm of possibility, as even Cyberpunk 2077 was eventually whipped into shape after its own buggy launch (another game that conspicuously didn’t let anyone try its console version before release). I hope those fixes come swiftly, because while I still wholeheartedly think the things Black Myth: Wukong does so right are worth dealing with those problems, I would love to be able to recommend it without those caveats.