Atomfall was a thoroughly intriguing, if flawed, game. Set in the Great British countryside after the worst nuclear accident in the UK’s history, its rendition of Cumbria featured four beautiful areas to explore, sleuth through, and shoot things in. Now it’s time to wander down the jetty, hop on a boat and visit the ominously named Wicked Isle DLC.
Wicked Isle runs in parallel to the main game, which is to say, it’s another region you can access alongside the others. This being the case, it intriguingly features a new story that is both self-contained, but also connects back to the main story and provides new endings to reach. All you have to do is go to the dock in Wyndham and chat with a grizzled, old sea captain. He’ll give you a quick boat ride to a place called Midsummer Isle if you agree to find something for him – some literally blessed mead, as it turns out.
This is an interesting enough pitch for those wanting a bit more Atomfall, but once things get going, you’ll quickly realise that this is largely more of the same as the main game, except now there are some monks involved. I don’t just mean that this feels similar, I mean that the specific story for this island is close to a complete retread of the plot. Once you realise this, you notice how little information you’re actually finding most of the time, just letters from people about the mysterious voice, being one with the soil – you know, the usual.
The most helpful information you gain comes from memories of conversations from many years ago, as shadows or ghosts of monks have conversations. These lack impact for a few reasons, not least of which being that you’re just stood there awkwardly watching them unfold, and it’s far from a unique method of delivering information in video games. If this DLC had been part of the original game, it would fit right in and perhaps be a highlight, but for anyone who’s completed a playthrough, an expansion needs to bring something fresh or new, and this one doesn’t. Even the new endings are extremely similar, with just a few details changed, to the ones in the main game.
This feeling persists into the gameplay as well. I experienced some AI oddities in my run through the main game, but in Wicked Isle they were all over the place. Enemies were getting stuck when trying to climb over something because they keep inexplicably jerking back away from the ledge, enemies were just not moving or shooting at all, clipping through cover, or just generally being poor. Maybe I got lucky on the main game playthrough, or unlucky here, but it’s felt particularly bad.
There’s the same mix of enemy types to encounter – bandits and the infected – but there are two new foes to face. One is a boss fight that was quite novel and fun, the other is an aquatic feral, which would be a nice surprise if the first thing I thought when I saw one wasn’t “that is a drowner from the Witcher 3, isn’t it?” because they look, move, attack, and sound exactly like them, but are even more annoying to fight because you can’t dodge or block!
Returning to Atomfall also means returning to its gameplay systems. Honestly, I don’t know how I played through the game on the recommended difficulty. I was miserable when I first returned to play this DLC, constantly running out of ammunition, still wishing for a dodge or block in melee combat, the severely limited inventory, and infected enemies that can literally soak up six full shots to the head from a sniper rifle. I ended up tuning the difficulty by making ammo more common and enemies far less tough and it was a huge improvement. Sure I could still run out of ammo sometimes, but now at least I have a chance of meleeing everyone, even without being able to block, which is still one of the most mystifying decisions I’ve seen in a combat system. Walking around awkwardly in front of people to try and dodge their attacks is the least immersive form of combat I’ve ever encountered. It feels like a Monty Python skit.
Once I’d fixed the difficulty a bit, I was having fun. There are some highlights here mostly in the new characters, who are as delightfully odd as you’d expect, but then it decided to give me fetch quests back to the mainland. A side quest wanted me to traipse about the Interchange finding messages to discover what happened to someone, muttering swear words under my breath the entire time (that wasn’t a quest requirement, it happened naturally). Yes, your first guess about what happened to that person is correct, but the game wants you to wander around and to collect messages from areas that not only have enemies in them, but sometimes those enemies respawn or are replaced with other enemies when you slightly leave the area to look around a corner.
I wasn’t going to bother doing this side quest, but then the main story of the DLC also sent me to three different regions on the mainland, this time to spend five seconds in each digging something up, so I thought I may as well do both missions and waste as much of my time as possible. They were both very unsatisfying and just felt like obvious padding to extend the length of the DLC.