Look, I've written like, two different 5 page reviewers of this and erased both. There is so much wrong with Atomfall. It's scopeless, its derivative, it does everything a Bethesda game does but worse. And yet, by the end of it, I was Googling "Have they announced Atomfall DLC".

I know people are comparing it to Fallout, and I knew reviewers are saying, "Don't compare it to Fallout". I, personally, compare it to The Outer Worlds and Avowed, because they are really following the same playbook. They are looking at a Bethesda game and from the very first days of pre-production, they are asking, "What can we cut?" Which means that the game is going to be pretty bland. It's going to be a diet version of whatever inspirations they are looking to. The Outer Worlds was a bland Bethesda RPG, and we don't talk about Avowed here.

Where Rebellion seems to differ from Obsidian, is that they then asked a second question. After cutting the scope of the world, cutting the scope of the side content, cutting the scope of the combat and the progression, and basically eliminating RPG elements all together, they then at least had the temerity to ask, "What can we add?"

The answer is this: They duct taped a little metroidvania onto the story and then they stapled a little immersive sim into the combat.

So, did it work? I think so. It tastes a little less bland, at least. In truth, I can't really tell you why I loved Atomfall. It's not a masterpiece, and you can really still feel its diet scope. The immersive sim element was an abject failure leading to a herky/jerky progression feel, and the metroidvanian element is awesome, but ultimately as shallow as everything else. Stealth sucks, combat is unchanging from the first hour to the 20th hour, and the world is the same from zone to zone. But there is just enough there, just enough added, to cover up some of the bad taste. It's not just Bethesda light. There's a sprinkling of DIshonored in there. There's a dab of Half-Life/Black Mesa on top...

Give it a shot while it's on Gamepass. I don't think you'll regret it.

Atomfall is a game with a bit of an identity crisis. Coming from a developer, Rebellion, that is mostly known for its Sniper series, Atomfall seems to lack the confidence to meet its own potential.

Structurally, the game is amazing. There's so, so much cool going on here, and the first few hours of the game are very promising. Ostensibly, you have amnesia - you wake up in a bunker, you don't know where you are, nor why, and an Among Us-lookin scientist fella gives you a magic keycard with which to escape and enter a locked-down facility. After that? You have no goal, in a good way. You wander around the world, looking for people you can interact with. You don't know who you can trust, you don't know whose information is reliable, and you don't know what each NPC's agenda is... You have to sus that out yourself.

This dialogue and fact-finding portion of the game is... World-class. The way quest lines weave into one another, the way you'll find notes off the beaten path that paint an NPC as dishonest, the way you can lie or dodge responsibility to advance through a quest line... This is all amazing. My favourite example of this was a quest line where I agreed to spy on the local villagers for an occupying military commander in exchange for interviewing a prisoner in their penal complex. I ratted on a man who murdered a local girl to get on his good side. Then I entered the prison, unlocked every single prison cell, and returned to the military fella. After expressing his profound rage at me, I countered by saying, "It couldn't have possibly been me who freed the prisoners - why would I be stupid enough to return to you if I had done that?" And he believed me. It was wonderful.

Trouble is, the rest of the game actively gets in the way.

The game heavily guides you toward a subterrean complex called The Interchange - a hidden space under the region full of locked-down passageways that requires you to progressively power up and unlock segments of the area. Again, this is really cool, conceptually. But the Interchange also epitomizes where this game fundamentally fails - the combat and the enemy AI. Light spoilers ahead. As you progressively unlock the Interchange, enemy factions from the overworld will progressively filter in. This could have been a cool idea, but the thing is, the combat in this game sucks. Instead of being able to unlock the complex, you are constantly impeded by mobs aggressive enemies that will kill you in short order, leading to repeated restarts.

The stealth in Atomfall is... Non-existant. It purports to have a stealth system, it even has something of a caution state. Thing is though, as the game progresses, the caution state is removed entirely and enemies will instantly aggro on you. Not only this, they will spot you from very far away and pursue you to the ends of the goddamn Earth, even chasing you through doors and loading zones. The only way to shake a pursuing enemy is the break their sight line... Which is tough when the game is 75% flat, open fields.

I had intended to play this game as a pacifist run; not killing a single living human. The game makes it seem like this is possible, but as the game progresses, you are faced with frequent situations where progress is impossible without engaging in massive firefights. I have seen a few YouTube reviews mention, "The game falls apart in the final 3rd", and this is exactly why. The game loses confidence in its excellent dialogue and narrative system and devolves into a series of mindless shooting. I am not entirely sure why. It's such a baffling decision to me.

Ultimately, Atomfall feels like a game that could have unironically been better without combat. It could have been a game where you are a stranger in a strange world, with little to no means to defend yourself, and where information is the greatest resource. But somewhere along the way, either the developers lost confidence in their own system, or felt compelled by the market or the publisher to focus on shooting - something the developer is known for. There's a really great game in here, and I ponder if mods could fix it in the long term. But as is, it's a deeply confused experience that lacks the confidence to lean into its strengths, and instead winds up feeling like an exercise in "could have been" rather than a GOTY contender. Alas.

I feel like these kinds of (ex)-Euro jank kind of games want to be games where there is no wrong way to play Unfortunately, I had no idea what the fuck was going on my entire playthrough so I think there IS a wrong way and I probably did it!

I killed the first 4 people I met without talking to them and... whoops, it made for a very confusing 5 hours until hitting credits.

I like the look of the game and the controls and interactions were solid. Everything felt like the Sniper Elite series, which makes sense but WAS kind of weird. Also it highlighted flaws in this game.

For example, the shooting in this game sucks. It is stiff and weird and firefights never feel good. In a sniper game you can be a lot more forgiving of this. In this one, I found using melee made the most sense but just running like a chicken with the head cut off worked the best!

Which had a cascading effect that meant that I was scared of everyone which means I did not learn any story or lore or do most quests. I just did a lot of running and dying and reloading to the finish.

ehh...

I remember seeing Atomfall advertised around the same time I was still playing through Fallout London and was excited at the chance to explore what seemed to be the post-apocalypse in the English countryside after experiencing it in London. It was finally on a deep sale of like $20 on the PS Store, so I picked it up.

The first thing anyone should know going into Atomfall is, this is not a Fallout game. After watching a few reviews, I kinda knew that going in and tried to set my expectations accordingly. Still there are a few online pundits that refer to it as British Fallout, because that's the most well known post-apocalyptic franchise. Like how Atomic Hearts was an Eastern European take on BioShock, Atomfall is a British take on STALKER. The game is set during an alternate reality 1960s, but besides the robots there's not much retro-futuristic about this game. The guns are all regular post WWII guns, the village looks like a normal English village. If you take out the robots, there wouldn't be anything retro-futuristic about Atomfall, outside the atomic plant itself.

I wouldn't call Atomfall an RPG. You do have scavenging and crafting that's important, but you don't have a skill tree, and there's no skill checks or XP. Instead, Atomfall handles upgrades more like Far Cry 5. You collect skill points through the world, framed as “training stimulants” here, that you can then use to buy any skill that helps with combat, healing, or crafting. You can unlock any skill you've got the points for, none are locked behind a per-requiste skill. You also have a limited inventory, so inventory management is an important skill. You can only carry 4 long weapons along with healing items, small weapons, and grenades. I don't think I ever came across an increase carrying capacity boost either. I was a little annoyed that you can hotkey weapons to your quick item menu, but you can't hotkey any healing items. I can admit this could be an intentional thing, but I didn't like having to dig through my backpack to use a bandage in the middle of a firefight.

Exploration is a big part of Atomfall, it's how you uncover new weapons, skill points, and side quests. They do something I like with quests, where you get a note with some location mentioned with either coordinators or a name and you have to explore the area to find it. There's everything from abandoned manors to underground bunkers. There's 4 main world spaces, they aren't huge, but not small either. It's a good size, but there's a lot of backtracking through the game and having a fast travel of some form would've been nice. There's two areas that are rolling fields, one that is the deep woods, which I didn't visit often, and the village of Wyndham, which serves as a hub area. Anyone familiar with Fallout's vaults know they can be these long, winding things that I think overstay their welcome. Luckily most of the bunkers here are usually short dungeons that aren't too winding and long. I prefer it because they aren't too short, but also don't feel like I'm making a 5 hour investment every time I go into one.

When it comes to combat, you need to pick and choose your battles, especially early game. You can find guns early on, but it takes a while to build up a substantial amount of ammo for them. I never found I was desperately low on ammo, but you also can't carry around 100 rounds of pistol ammo. There's enough that I could use firearms in fights, but not enough that I could be wasteful with my shots. Luckily, most enemies go down with one headshot, only towards the end do you come across some bullet spongy enemies. There's melee combat as well, and it is what seems you have to start with at the beginning of the game, but I found the melee controls to be lacking. Enemies always seemed to be better at melee and there's no block button. You are also a glass cannon. You can't take a lot of damage, usually only a few shots or a couple punches are enough to knock you out.

Early game, I found stealth to be the best option. One thing I do like is that if enemies do see you, they often tell you to clear off, it's not go time the moment they see you. That is undone some when after they chase you off, they'll then start searching for you. I do wish there was some form of distraction tool, even just throwing rocks. It's easy to hide places, but if you are trying to sneak into a place, you can't redirect guards. The only way to interact with enemies is through active combat, which then often alerts all nearby enemies.

A majority of enemies you come across are just guys with guns or melee weapons. They are dangerous, especially in large groups, but easy to dispatch once you've got ammo of your own. There's the Outlaws which is your generic bandit faction. They dress like they're headed to a football game and the game uses them most as filler enemies to repopulate areas you've cleared out of the original tenants. Then there's the British Army, going by the name of Protocol, as they are enforcing the Quarantine Protocol. I assume they call themselves Protocol and not just the Army because STALKER's factions had names like Duty & Freedom, They are cut off from the main British military and have set themselves up in Wyndham as “benevolent occupiers”. There's a lot of tension between the military and the villagers, who often view the soldiers heavy handed rule as Gestapo like. The soldiers have the better weapons and robots to fight with them. The final faction is the druids. These are people who didn't take the quarantine well and have gone back to the woods and reignited the pagan practices. I didn't have to deal with them often, because they mainly reside in the woods area I didn't visit much, but they are constantly talked about. The conflict between the Army and the druids is one of the main points of the story. They use bows and poisons when fighting, but aren't as tough as the soldiers. There is that narrative vs gameplay disconnect where this village must have had 5,000 people living in it to explain all these roving bandits and druids.

The other 10% of enemies you'll come across are people infected from the atomic plant explosion. The common infected are basically feral ghouls, but they come with a ranged spit attack. The Thralls are the bullet sponge enemies I mentioned earlier. These are spooky enemies because they just march at you slowly with glowing blue eyes. Their design reminds me most of the Ghost People from New Vegas' Dead Money DLC. Fighting them was the one time I was concerned about my ammo supply. There's also hostile plants that can explode like proximity mines and others that work like stationary artillery, they also soak up way too much damage.

While there are plenty of hostile NPCs in Atomfall, I was surprised at the number of friendly NPCs you can come across. I'm used to survival games like these having maybe one or friendly NPCs in the whole game. Obviously, there's the town of Wyndham that has plenty of NPCs, but you also come across friendly NPCs in certain dungeons throughout the wild. And this game takes the Morrowind approach where you can kill any NPC you meet, and then live with those consequences. I ended up losing a trader because I wanted to get in good with the Protocol forces. The NPCs aren't particular deep or engaging. Most have a side quest or trade items, but your dialogue choices are mostly for you to flavor your character, not learn more about the people around you. The one benefit of talking with NPCs is they can give you new locations or intel that help with your exploration. Trading with NPCs works on a barter system. There's no money in Atomfall. You aren't collecting pounds, or caps, or bullets to use as currency. I was a little annoyed at this at first, but I came around to the idea. It makes trading more impactful “Are you willing to trade your 3 grenades and a knife for that crafting recipe?” and avoids the common late game issue of being a millionaire who can buy whatever. It keeps you grounded in that survival mindset.

So, the story of Atomfall. Again, I wouldn't quite call this game post-apocalyptic. It's like STALKER in that the rest of the world is doing fine mostly, there's just this one area where everything's gone to pot. You are in the Windscale Quarantine Zone. The game totes it's based off real events, the only thing it shares with real history is that there was a Windscale plant in England. It caught on fire, whereas the one in Atomfall exploded. That's where the based on true events stops. You play as an unnamed, silent protagonist who wakes up in a bunker in the zone with no memories. A dying scientist tells you to find the Interchange and to leave before he becomes something 'else'. It's effective at setting up the tone. When you leave the bunker, there's a red phone booth with a ringing phone. I admit, I do like that cliché of a random pay phone ringing. Answering it, there's a robotic voice that simply says “Oberon Must Die”. Then you go out and explore the world, learning about the druids wanting to return society to the soil, the military trying to get out after being trapped here with the villagers, the villagers wanting to get rid of the military boot on their throat, and the weird fungal growths spreading across the land. You meet people who promise to help you escape and so your main goal is getting into the Interchange, stopping Oberon, then escaping. The game does have alternate endings depending on who you help, how many people you interacted with, who you killed, how you defeated Oberon, etc.

Spoiler parts, but we find out that the atomic plant was actually a front for a mining operation that was harvesting an alien asteroid and it's gooey organic interior, Oberon. It's one of the rug pulls I really like because the villagers remark that if the nuclear plant exploded we should all be dead with radiation, but we're not, so that's fishy. Instead it's a tale as old as time, science gone wild. The scientist were using the asteroid to build batteries for the robots and the organic material to enhance human intelligence. They dug too deep though and the explosion turned them into the ferals and thralls and caused the fungal growths in the zone. The druids want to help spread the fungus to the rest of England, everyone else wants to destroy it in some form or another. You get a shot that is supposed to make you more resistant to the fungal spores, but I wonder if my game glitched, because I still took a lot of damage every time I walked into the spore fields.

The game is surprisingly short. I got through it in 14 or so hours. I wasn't expecting a 100 hours long RPG, but I did expect this game to be a little longer, especially if I'd paid full price for it. I think there was plenty of things the story could have developed that just weren't. Like our protagonist, I've never been a fan of silent protagonists. Unless it was buried in a random document somewhere, we never learn who we are or why we were locked in that bunker. I guess you could say we were just one of the test subjects or a solider from the wrecked convoy that tried to enter the zone. I just wanted something more about our character's background and how they ended up in that crumbling bunker. I get silent protagonist are for you to make your own story, but even New Vegas explained why you were in that shallow grave, you were a mailman with a dangerous package.

In it's attempts to be a STALKER like, I think Atomfall lacks a certain part of the charm that makes those Eurojank games endearing. Those games from the former Soviet bloc often have these philosophical idea underlying them, where our hero or NPCs will wax on about 'what truly determines a man's value' or 'do we truly deserve our hapiness'. They may not always answer them the best, but the fact they go for it is, what I consider, an important part of the mold. Atomfall instead plays it pretty straight and is more focused on the mystery plot. I do like the slow burn of the start of the game as you work to piece together what happened, what's Oberon, whose left, etc. The mysterious phone booth caller shows up a few other times and while I usually like this type of mysterious character with unknown intentions, it gets squandered. It's a delicate balance of being vague and being obtuse. The phone voice loves to talk in half sentences and most of the dialogue is just 'hey don't trust that person you just met'.

All in all, I enjoyed my time with Atomfall. The gameplay was fun if a bit limited. Being able to explore around and find things based off clues in notes was fun. While not retro-futuristic, the world was fun to explore. I do think the story was a bit too thin in parts, leaving it a bit forgettable. I've always considered Rebellion to be a solid developer, but also the most AA developer ever, and Atomfall continues to prove they're painfully average. It's a fine game, but very much limited in scope. I would recommend this game, but only for a sale price given how short this game is.