Atomfall review

I've spent years wandering many an inhospitable wasteland, so Atomfall's pleasant post-apocalypse is pretty inviting. They've got tea here. And bakeries. And it's extremely green—not because of radiation storms, but because it's all pastures and woods and verdant hills as far as the eye can see. It'd be a nice place for a ramble, if it weren't for the fire-spewing robots, lethal flora, bandits, cultists and conspiracies.

With its '50s-inspired retro-futuristic setting, Atomfall has needed to contend with the spectre of Fallout since it was first unveiled, but the similarities are only surface deep. That shallowness is probably Atomfall's defining feature: it's chock full of systems and obvious inspirations, but it rarely digs into them and struggles to find anything to set itself apart.

Roaming

It flirts with Fallout, Stalker, RPGs, survival games, and all sorts of different systems, and it pulls you in lots of different directions.

They all end in one place, though: escape. You're stuck in this picturesque prison, trapped by a quarantine that's already in its fifth year. Inspired by the real Windscale fire—a 1957 nuclear disaster in what is now Cumbria, England—Rebellion swaps radiation for a sci-fi macguffin and a potentially fatal cover up. And of course only an amnesiac without a personality can find a way out.

Meandering is how I'd have to describe the road to freedom. Finding the right people to help you escape, and completing the tasks they set you, will see you wander across five open areas, including a massive underground facility, all the while filling in blanks and connecting loose threads.

Rather than traditional quests, Atomfall doles out leads, which despite how developer Rebellion frames them are basically just quests with a bit less hand-holding and a more investigative bent. Sometimes you'll discover an interesting building, hear rumours about a point of interest, read a letter that reveals another conspiracy, or get sent on an explicit task—all of these could be leads, which then come with subtasks and get fleshed out by your findings.

While this structure doesn't shake things up too much, I did enjoy the more freeform approach, and the sense that I was rooting around, trying to understand this weird place, rather than exclusively being sent on odd jobs. And a lot of these mysteries are properly compelling, set as they are in a world where you can't really trust anyone's motivations.

The way they connect and intersect elevates them, too. I'd been working with another survivor on an escape plan and had decided I trusted them more than anyone else in the quarantine zone. But while I was helping them, I randomly wandered into an abandoned building and, beneath it, discovered a deserted hideout, which eventually led me to another location and a new survivor, who offered another way out. It didn't work out, but this chance meeting eventually helped me join the dots, revealing new details about my other ally—who it turned out was not as trustworthy as I'd previously assumed.

Following another lead, I was forced to make a tricky call: betray an ally, or leave an encounter without getting the information I wanted. I opted for betrayal, and was betrayed in turn, leading to me fleeing the area while pursued by an army. I made amends with my betrayer, worked with them again, but the red flags kept appearing. This inspired me to help another character, screwing over my frenemy. When I saw them again, we fought to the death, which ultimately ingratiated me with another character hours later.

It's really fun stuff, but I can't help but imagine how it would work even better if there'd been more of a focus on it, perhaps even scrapping one of the less compelling systems (my vote is crafting, ugh) to free up the resources. Maybe some proper Telltale-style social puzzles, or some actual conundrums. Something that's more involved than just bumping into a new lead.

Grab bag

Actually embracing its RPG side would have benefited Atomfall's leads system even more. I enjoyed all the big decisions, betrayals and shotgun alliances, but the impact is lessened when you're playing as an amnesiac with zero personality traits. Sure, you can choose to be a do-gooder, a liar, a straight-shooter or whatever, but when you're picking these options you're never embodying a tangible character.

This extends to the very slim progression system, too. As you explore, you'll find drugs that give you skill points, and books that will reveal new skill lines for you to spend them on, but my god are they boring. A buff to radiation resistance! More range with throwing weapons! Stealthier kills! Yes, it's all generic stuff, and you're not really making a build. I only found a couple of them especially useful (and one of them stopped actually working), and none of them ever changed the way I played or opened up new avenues for me to explore.

Atomfall has similar problems in its approach to combat and survival. By the end of the game I was trying to avoid most fights simply because their simplicity couldn't make up for their repetition. Firearms are everywhere but ammo is scarce, and there's not much more I can say about the guns—ranged combat is functional but uninspired. I do appreciate that most human enemies will go down in a single headshot, though.

Melee's in a rougher state. The scarcity of ammo suggests melee is the way to go, but you can't dodge or block, which turns these brawls into slogs where you're just slashing away while walking backwards—occasionally kicking to give yourself some space.

So I did quite a bit of sneaking, which is as close as Atomfall comes to giving you superpowers. Technically you can only hide in tall grass (or at least that's the only time the game told me I was hidden), but in reality you can sometimes hide in plain sight. I got a good laugh out of watching some outlaws try to find me when I was simply on the other side of a transparent fence and they were staring right at me. Windows have a similar effect. And if you're spotted, enemies give up hunting you at the drop of a hat. Just leg it around a corner.

I should add that this is a bit inconsistent, and sometimes enemies will be more dogged. Monsters, meanwhile, seem to just know where you are the moment you get close enough. Which is a shame, because they also tend to be damage sponges. This is not to say these fights are challenging—they're just too long.

On the survival front, there's very little going on, to the point where I think Rebellion is being a wee bit cheeky pitching Atomfall as a "survival-action game". There's crafting. You can make drugs, bombs and weapon upgrades (though I never did find any of the latter). I used bandages and molotov cocktails a lot, but never felt compelled to use many other items from the list. There's also food, which heals you, and a metal detector that lets you "scavenge", but really you're just digging up caches with loot. Usually garbage loot, too.

While the environment is hostile, with dangerous wildlife and some areas covered in noxious gas, it's not the kind of hostility you might expect from a survival game. The weather, for instance, is static. It's a sunny day all day. No radioactive storms. No dark nights where you can't get around without a torch—which makes the inclusion of a torch a bit baffling. Even when I was spelunking in some mines I could see everything clearly.

Snapshot

This speaks to one of its biggest problems in regards to Atomfall's setting: it's actually quite plain. There are patrolling enemies (I should note that these are not always immediately hostile, and they'll often try to keep their distance and avoid bloodshed, which gives them a compelling human side), the odd environmental hazard, and that retro-futuristic aesthetic, but the rolling hills and druid-infested woods often feel rather static.

Worse, that aesthetic never goes any further than window dressing. Where Fallout uses its setting for satire, skewering capitalism, Cold War paranoia, nuclear proliferation and political regimes, Atomfall simply mentions these things, almost in passing. It doesn't actually have anything to say about them.

And while cults of Wickerman-inspired druids, big stompy automatons and the scattering of '50s cultural artefacts do contribute to an overall quirky vibe, Atomfall is exceptionally dry. And it fails to make up for the lack of humour with the grittiness or desperation evoked by other post-apocalyptic fare.

This makes it sound like I was having a bad time, but to my surprise as much as anyone else's, I actually rather enjoyed playing Atomfall. I love a good mystery, and Atomfall genuinely makes untangling its conspiracies engaging, and like an adventure game even lets you feel quite clever at times.

A lot of revelations are nestled within the Interchange, a huge underground facility connected to each of the four other maps. This is where the scientists worked before the disaster, and it's now the most dangerous part of the quarantine zone. Since you can get to any map from it, it serves as a shortcut (there's no fast travel, which is fine for a game of this size and interconnectedness), but it's also labyrinthine, fortified and often fatal.

Inside the Interchange (and a bunch of bunkers dotted around the world), you'll do some light puzzle-solving with a gizmo that changes the flow of energy to different power boxes, opening doors, shutting down turrets or accidentally creating new environmental hazards (like a swarm of killer rats). It's one of the few places where Atomfall succeeds in creating an unnerving atmosphere, and at times it even evokes the likes of Half-Life's Black Mesa or Metro's titular tunnels.

The way you make a bit of progress, find yourself stumped, and then return with more knowledge and tools, makes the Interchange feel almost metroidvania-esque, and by the end you'll be running through it like a life-long denizen, completely au fait with its threats.

So there's fun to be had here, but Atomfall is undone by its fear of commitment. It never really goes all in on anything. It dabbles. Some basic crafting. A bit of simple stealth. The tiniest bit of NPC factional rivalry. It doesn't have Fallout's free-form RPG systems, Stalker's highly-simulated world or even Far Cry's dedication to carnage—the sort of thing that all these other systems can orbit—so I've spent much of my time feeling adrift.

As compelling as the mystery of the Windscale disaster is, with all of its leads and conspiracies, it's not enough for a central hook. Like everything else in Atomfall, Rebellion doesn't take it far enough.

It's competently made, and I'll never say no to the opportunity to do some detective work (I once considered setting up a private investigator firm with my dog), but it's just missing a spark. It's Rebellion's most ambitious game, but it falls short of the likes of Sniper Elite, where everything exists to serve a specific fantasy—one where you're a death-dealing assassin, putting bullets in Nazi skulls in gratuitous slow-motion. Atomfall just doesn't have this clear identity.