In 1957 in North West England, the worst nuclear accident in UK history happened – the Windscale fire. If you’re not familiar, this was when a fire burned for three days in a nuclear military facility in the Lake District, spreading radioactive fallout across the UK and the rest of Europe. Atomfall is set in the wake of this disaster, inside a quarantine zone errected around the facility, where things are somehow even worse than they were in real life.
The game begins with you waking up in a bunker with no memory of who or where you are. Stepping out into the open you’re greeted by a view of the glorious Cumbrian countryside. Also the Atom Plant shrouded in a hazy purple glow and an out-of-place red telephone box that starts ringing as you come closer. Should you dare to pick it up, an unsettling and very mysterious voice comes down the line, telling you that “Oberon must die” and to go power up something called the Interchange.
A lot of Atomfall is like this; flummoxing, strange, and thoroughly endearing. It’s easy to draw comparisons to Fallout with the setting, and it’s remarkable how well that comparison can stick – it’s set in the early 60s after five years of quarantine, so any sci-fi robots are right out of the vision of futuristic tech from that era, and could fit right in with a Fallout or The Outer Worlds. Atomfall has its own identity, though, both with the setting and the gameplay. I’m actually from the North West of England and hearing accents local to me in this game was actually a little strange at first.
Being set in the Lake District also brings with it some stunning environments, as well. Sharing a game engine with Rebellion’s Sniper Elite series, the game can look great as you look out across the landscape, but it’s fair to say that character models, lighting and animation feel pretty dated – this game is also coming to last gen consoles. It’s nothing too egregious, but it is noticeable in comparison to the quality of the environments.
The main thing that sets Atomfall apart, though, is that the threat here isn’t just radiation and we’re not in a post-apocalyptic world. Sure, there’s radiation around, even some poison, and an occasional electric wire hanging from the ceiling that always manage to walk into, but the biggest threat here is actually an infection. Ominous blue-y purple clouds and growths have taken root in places around the quarantine zone, seemingly the cause of people hearing voices and of the blue-y purple zombies known as Ferals that you’ll find.
Atomfall leans in on this for a good part of the mystery running through the story, but there’s no getting away from the familiarity of the gameplay they present. Ferals are tough to kill, growths explode when you go near them, it hurts when you stand on infected floors, and an infection meter fills up when you’re in the gas. It’s all rather standard. The novelty of unwrapping the game’s mystery wears off a bit after fighting off the third wave of zombies. I’m still very much interested in getting there, I just wish there was a little less stuff in the way.
Even when facing against roving groups of bandits and druids, there’s a roughness to the combat that starts to wear on you. The survival game leanings mean that you’ll be crafting throwables, using your ammo supplies sparingly, and wanting to use stealth and melee as much as possible. When you do go toe-to-toe with someone, the lack of a block means you’ll almost inevitably take damage – that always feels like failure to me.
Enemies tend to be in groups when they’re patrolling the open world, some of which will have ranged weapons. Getting the drop on a group or using stealth is key, whether that’s trying to do a stealth takedown or going all in with thrown Molotovs and shotgun blasts. They’ll happily empty multiple magazines of ammo in your direction, given the chance, but in true survival game fashion, they will only ever have a few bullets on them when you loot their bodies. Ammunition is conspicuously scarce in this game and only through meticulously looting everything – sometimes whilst in the middle of combat – was I able to find enough to avoid melee combat. Thankfully the shooting itself feels good enough.
Another issue is that your inventory is very limited. Important items you need take up space in there, including quest items. A single bandage, which heals maybe a third of my health, takes up one of your twelve inventory slots and they don’t stack, so just healing supplies will always take up a big chunk of space. Atomic batteries, an essential item for powering up the Interchange, also take up slots, as do any pistols or small melee weapons, painkillers I’m saving for a tough fight, or anti-infection drugs. This is addition to carrying items to sell to traders as there is only a bartering system and no currency, means you’re constantly evaluating and dropping stuff, which feels like it really gets in the way. The most generous part of the inventory is having four slots for long guns and weapons, and you’ll need all of them for switching as you run through your ammo stocks. Crafting supplies are gathered separately, thankfully, though this is constrained in its own way to keep you from having too big a surplus.
The main driving force is really the desire to keep exploring the lore and background of the world and setting. The narrative is structured around finding and following leads, whether they come from talking to people or picking up scraps of paper and notes from around the environment. You’ve got maps of each area, but points of interest are only filled in as you find them, and you’ll often find clues that lead you to map coordinates, or have someone mark a spot for you to follow up on. You can also just merrily stumble your way into some discoveries, giving a freeform feel to some parts of how the game’s story unfolds, beyond picking dialogue options and deciding which faction you want to align with.
A lot of the game experience can be adjusted and tweaked in the granular difficulty settings. There’s a bunch of presets that can put the focus more on survival or narrative, when compared to the standard suggested difficulty, but within that there’s individual settings to tweak up and down if you want to really customise it to your tastes.
Unfortunately, there’s some bugs that give the game a few blemishes, though mostly of the amusing or slightly advantageous varity. I cleared out a whole station of soldiers by climbing into a cafeteria and shooting them as they took cover behind two pillars, only to clip through to the other side. I’ve also had other AI oddities with enemies that inexplicably lose interest in me, or struggle to get to me, and I once saw one of BARD robots just shooting at a wall for some reason. I wasn’t even behind that wall, so maybe it was a random swarm of rats that the AI could detect, but I couldn’t see? I also encountered a couple of frame rate drops in combat on PS5, one specifically when I shot a giant robot in its gas cylinders, with accompanying fire and explosions. A patch is coming for release to address some issues, but we’ve found some that weren’t noted in the patch notes we’ve seen.
There’s a few quirks and hang ups, but I’m enjoying Atomfall. The world, setting, and story have me very interested in seeing how it pans out, though there’s a little voice in the back of my mind that says I’ve seen these story themes many times before, so maybe the ending won’t be as novel or unique as it wants to be. I still don’t know just yet, but it’s been an enjoyable time so far. Keep an eye out for our finished review, once I’ve finished exploring the deepest, darkest parts of Cumbia.