Atomfall review: a seriously swift survivalist scramble through a scenic section of Sadness Island
When I played a few hours of Atomfall at a preview earlier this month, the main question Rebellion’s action-survival game left me with (aside from ‘where’s the nearest place I can buy a vegetarian pasty to eat for tea?’) was just how interesting would the bits that lay beyond what I’d played be?
How deep would the intrigue go, once you’d really started to crack open the razor-blade covered pastry of this rough and rugged trip to a Cumbrian quarantine zone set up after a fictional variant of the real life Windscale fire?
As it turns out, the answer is perhaps a little less deep than I would have liked. But here’s the thing: I think it depends a lot on exactly who you are whether this lack of depth will be a positive or a negative. To properly rip the hastily-crafted bandage off, here’s the situation. I reached the ending to my first playthrough of Atomfall after just 11 hours. That was with me pursuing a few of the main quest threads that each offer a different way to attack the ending, but not quite all of them.
I was on the recommended ‘Survivor’ difficulty (the second toughest the game offers), so I wasn’t doing anything that might artificially shorten my run-up by potentially mismatching the general hardness of things to my already not uber-MLG abilities. I didn’t have any special pre-order bonus gear or anything to help out either. Atomfall’s just a game that, if you’re not planning on taking many prolonged breaks from pursuing whichever main story leads you’re prioritising to turn over every stone and comb through every location in the zone, doesn’t have that long a runtime.
That’s not to say that what is in the game isn’t regularly intriguing, charming, or satisfying. Nor will you come out of whichever ending you opt for feeling that you’ve been short-changed. But this truncated runtime makes the game an interesting one to grade.
Given a chance to properly settle into a build and crafting setup, I gravitated towards a general strategy of moving everywhere stealthily, then taking out most foes by sprinting up to them, dodging any shots or swings as best I could, and bonking my enemies to death with a trusty cricket bat.
Once I took a perk to boost my character’s melee damage, I found I could finish off most human enemies with two or three hits, and as long as I kept a steady stockpile of alcohol and cloth to craft bandages I could use whenever food and first aid kits weren’t plentiful, I could easily recover from most damage this strategy exposed me to.
In scenarios when I didn’t want to risk charging in, I used guns and a bow from a distance, with the latter and a bolt-action sniper rifle serving to whittle down enemies with a decent chunk of health from range. Meanwhile, my fourth large weapon slot held an SMG that I could save for the most brown trousers-time encounters in order not to burn through its relatively scarce and easily burned-through ammo.
Towards the end, I started using one of my smaller backpack slots for a pistol I could whip out in close-quarters fights against weaker foes if I fancied. The toughest foes – giant BARD robots with flamethrowers and machine guns – I just snuck or ran like hell past, as the game very much seems to intend. On the other end of the scale, you can kick or slap swarms of rats, bats, pigeons, and leeches to death. Which is fun.
The majority of my perks, however, went into survival and conditioning. Stuff that helped toughen me up and better prepare me to fight the hostile environments you spend the vast majority of the game in. Three of these – Casterfell Woods, Skethermoor, and Slatten Dale – are open air regions of the game’s above-ground sandbox, and each is patrolled by its own enemy faction that’ll shoot you on sight. Masked druids, rowdy-looking outlaws, and British army troops known as The Protocol, they’re all to be dealt with in whatever fashion you deem most practical as you explore each of these thematically-distinct areas that all boast a rugged beauty matching their dangerous atmospheres.
Wyndham is the fourth bit of the puzzle, and it’s the largest of the rare safe havens that you can dip into when you’re beaten down and in need of a quick reprieve from the kicking Atomfall gives you. That is, unless you mess with the Protocol soldiers who’re occupying it, so it’s a bit less safe than you might first think. There’s some decent intrigue going on across all of these areas, a decent roster of friendly NPCs to chat to, leads to chase, and little mysteries to investigate.
As you push towards the end game, however, you’ll find yourself spending a lot of time in The Interchange – the secretive underground bunker you’ll need to gradually bring back to life and gain access to different bits of in order to discover what happened at the game’s version of the Windscale plant to kick into effect the quarantine. I’ll not delve too deeply into spoiler territory, but I will say that what you uncover feels like it pulls bits from video game apocalypses you may well have played through before.
I was very much reminded of some elements from The Last of Us, along with Fallout: New Vegas – specifically the Dead Money DLC. None of that’s an issue in a vacuum, Atomfall delivers its tale with just about enough unique flavour to keep you hooked, but I do feel like it only scratches the surface of the potential its premise exudes from a narrative perspective.
The mechanic that delivers the story works well. Unless you opt for a lower difficulty that enables things like map markers and extra hints to aid exploration, Atomfall’s detective-style lead system is a refreshingly stripped-back alternative to the UI-heavy quest and navigation systems you’ll find in most open-world games (you know the ones I mean).
It meshes well with the narrative tone Rebellion’s gone for, which is very understated and keeps a lot of its cards close to its chest. That style of storytelling is very British, and is part of what makes Atomfall feel different from the likes of Fallout, with the latter often being more open – either in terms of just pulling back the curtain as to what’s going on and why, or in acknowledging the philosophical discussion at play.
In theory, both work just fine, but I do feel Atomfall’s approach holds it back in places from delivering something more compelling or with a bit more depth. A lot of the lore – for lack of a better term – about The Interchange, the events of the quarantine, and the mysterious Oberon lying at the centre of it all, is delivered via notes or short conversations that often feel like they stop short of really captivating you and delivering a proper whiff of the interesting tale Atomfall’s constantly teasing that it’s got brewing away.
I’ve seen four different endings to the game so far, and all of them felt a bit flat, like they were failing to or breaking off before they could conclude things in a properly satisfying fashion. There are times when Atomfall’s mystery-weaving serves it well as its narrative progresses and you get some nice short-term choice in consequence, but it doesn’t drop the curtain much, even when you reach the point when you feel like it should be, and the reveals you do get sometimes feel like they’re the least interestingly delivered outcome possible.
It reminded me a lot of The Chinese Room’s Still Wakes the Deep in this way – well-crafted, unquestionably good fun, but with a story that feels like it’s probably the weakest part of the thing, either because it’s leaning a bit too heavily on genre tropes or holding back from actually committing to delivering on the elements that could go beyond that.
There’s still a good chance you’ll still love it. The gameplay loop is satisfying, the environments are fun to explore, and the short runtime makes it an ideal Game Pass thing you can give a go without having to fork over 60 hours that could well get a bit stale by the end. However, I think Rebellion’s left what could have made Atomfall a great game rather than just a good or ok one on the table here.
It’s closer to puddle deep when it could be a lake or ocean given its cool premise. Or, to put it in a more Atomfall way, it’s a pasty that doesn’t quite deliver a filling that matches how tasty the pastry looks.
Atomfall launches on March 27 for PC, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS5, and PS4. It’ll come to Xbox Game Pass on day one. This review was conducted on PC using a code provided by the publisher.