Rebellion’s survival-action game, Atomfall, is set in an alternative 1960s Lake District, five years after the real-life Windscale fire incident in 1957. Whereas the real story was a nuclear facility fire that is currently the UK’s worst nuclear accident to date, nearly causing a Chernobyl-scale event, Atomfall’s situation is much more dire.
We awaken in a bunker with no recollection of who we are or what we’re doing there. As we find our way out of the bunker, we discover that we are in the Lake District, five years after an incident at the nuclear facility in the area resulted in the facility and the areas surrounding it being walled off from the rest of the country. As we wander around the scenic countryside, a telephone box we pass rings, and a mysterious voice on the other end of the line (yes, one that we later find out has been disconnected) tells us to investigate the facility in order to escape.
While in real life, the Lake District is a beautiful location for a UK holiday filled with hiking and canoeing, you could probably still do this in Atomfall’s Lake District, only you would have to avoid being riddled with arrows, blown up, or torched to death by the Quarantine Zone’s hostile inhabitants. After you’ve scurried your way to what looks like a secure settlement, the idyllic Wyndham Village, you can take a breather and enjoy a cuppa… only to notice that the army presence in this village is quite severe – and is that an armed robot? While a lot of the Lake District’s locals who have been walled into the Quarantine Zone have taken refuge in Wyndham Village, it’s under the protection of Protocol, a faction formed of soldiers sent by the British government to keep the peace after the incident – only, they were told shortly after arrival that they aren’t allowed to leave either. Thus, they’ve continued their assigned task with an iron fist; shooting those who don’t obey and burning any evidence that some kind of strange vegetation is growing across the region, using the power of The British Atomic Research Division (B.A.R.D)’s abandoned robots manufactured as part of the technological advances from its nuclear research to do so. Those who refuse to live in the village have joined one of two factions: The Outlaws and The Druids. While the Outlaws are your average run-of-the-mill, top hat-wearing apocalypse group of nasties, the Druids are a cult that worship the voice in their heads caused by whatever infection is spreading across the region due to the incident, they believe in returning to nature and condemn any technology.
Our investigation will lead us to the underground facility abandoned and locked down by B.A.R.D on the day of the incident, known as The Interchange, that forms a network of tunnels underneath the region. The voice on the telephone wants us to find all of the region’s doors into The Interchange in order to bring it back online so that we can access and destroy Oberon, the project the scientists had been working on.
Rebellion makes it very clear from the get-go that Atomfall is the player’s story and I think this is the game’s strongest quality. Although markers will be placed on your map to direct you to new locations that have points of interest, this is as far as the game will go in guiding you in your journey. Your quests are listed in your journal but instead of objectives, you have Leads. Rather than telling you exactly where to go next, what to do and what to say, the game instead sorts all of the relevant notes, conversations and any other information into each Lead. It’s then up to you to read and/or listen to these and decide where to go next. Sometimes you’ll be approaching a quest one way, will find a letter while snooping around, and that will take you in a different direction. Sometimes, your leads will oppose one another and it’s up to you to make a choice. Quests have multiple different endings, including the main storyline of the game as you will come across multiple people who want you to approach Oberon differently. Because of this, Atomfall is very much a game that can be played multiple times as different playthroughs will offer a different experience.
This also applies to traveling across the region, which is split into three different areas not including Wyndham Village and The Interchange. While there is no fast travel in Atomfall, there are multiple ways to reach your destination via different paths or even through the underground networks such as The Interchange, sewers, or abandoned mines. Different factions patrol each region, so having multiple routes to take is handy for avoiding unnecessary combat. This also accounts for exploring indoors; there are often multiple ways to travel through a building from waltzing right through the front doors, guns blazing, to traveling quietly through air ducts and crawling through holes to move through rooms.
And avoiding combat is key in Atomfall, especially if you’re playing it on the developer’s recommended difficulty setting, Survivor, which is the second one down from the highest. In this instance, ammo is incredibly scarce and you will cherish each bullet. It’s been a while since I’ve played a game where ‘pick your battles wisely’ has genuinely applied, and throughout the whole game too. If challenging gameplay isn’t for you then the difficulty options can also be customized. As mentioned before, Atomfall provides plenty of options to approach quests without going in guns blazing due to the lack of ammo. While encountering enemy factions outside of their territories, they will often give you the chance to back off and retreat before they resort to attacking you. Inside enemy territory, you have multiple ways to reach your destination via stealth tactics.
That being said, the enemy AI is your worst enemy when it comes to avoiding or even pursuing combat. Enemies will either spot you with the precision of Homelander, or they’ll be completely oblivious to you. In combat they’ll sometimes forget you exist the moment you step out of their line of sight. At one point I punched a guard off a ladder and he seemed surprised to see me again when he climbed back up it. I also found that I would be exploring a building, minding my own business, and a patrol would spot me from outside the building and start hurling warnings at me. This also extends to allies who will attack you if an enemy has followed you to them – hey, attack them not me!
Like most survival games, Atomfall is very punishing with its inventory space and there is sadly no way to increase this. Unlike most survival games, a lot of your items won’t stack. There is the Pneumatic Dispatch Tube Network in B.A.R.D facilities that acts like real life pneumatic tubes and allows you to store inventory in them and access it across any other B.A.R.D facilities. Unfortunately, these are few and far between and are only really useful for storing atomic batteries and quest items rather than the rare case of surplus resources.
In fact, there are multiple tweaks that Atomfall could really do with to improve its gameplay as it’s filled with plenty of annoying quirks. For one, the game has a lot of focus on stealth but there’s no way to move bodies out of sight which felt very much missed. There’s also no ammo count on screen for ranged weapons and the only time you know how many bullets you have is when you reload. This also meant that when I would try to reload and would take damage, I wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t finished reloading and would attempt to fire an empty weapon. Enemies also respawn way too quickly; they will often do so when you leave an area but I found them respawning when I would clear an outside area, enter its building, and then emerge again five minutes later. Areas you have already cleared will also sometimes respawn enemies when you reload a save.
However, the worst gameplay quirk I found was the healing system – there is none. While you can hotkey weapons, you can’t use one of your hotkey spaces for healing items for whatever reason and you need to go into the inventory, which doesn’t pause the game, in order to heal during combat which is incredibly frustrating. While I don’t mind not being able to pause the game while in the inventory, it makes no sense that we wouldn’t be able to quickly grab a bandage off our belt like we would a gun. The game also doesn’t pause when reading which was a real pet peeve of mine as I was really invested in Atomfall’s lore and felt like I was missing material because I was unable to stop and read it while running away from enemies. You can later visit the material in your journal, but you would also need to have remembered exactly what you picked up. While I’m all for immersion, I think some liberties can be taken to make sure players are able to take in lore and story.
Exploration was another highlight of Atomfall as I felt like it captured the feeling I love from Bethesda’s games of spotting a building to investigate and finding a story inside. At one point I walked across an abandoned house and found it had a cellar I could enter. Inside, I found notes from a group of Russian spies that had successfully infiltrated the UK, only to end up being walled inside the Quarantine Zone. Details such as this really made exploration worth it in Atomfall, along with the added touch of being able to find new recipes to spend valuable resources on which gives further options for survival. I do wish that hunger, thirst and sleep was also part of the survival mechanics as I feel like Atomfall would be built well for this, similar to how the Fallout games often offer this as a difficulty option.
Atomfall‘s exploration appeal is further magnified by how utterly gorgeous this game is. I couldn’t believe how much detail this world had the first time I laid eyes on it and I think the developers made the right choice of opting for smaller open world areas rather than a sprawling, empty countryside. There’s so much pretty scenery in Atomfall and my hard drive is now chock-full of screenshots. The developers have really done the beautiful Lake District justice and now I want to visit it more than ever.
Unfortunately, the soundtrack isn’t very strong to match this and there’s very few pieces that were memorable besides one piano-focused combat piece. It mostly sounded extremely generic and I feel like a game with as much visual charm and stylized design as this would have benefited from some more original music. While using 1950s songs may have pushed the game further into Fallout comparisons, the soundtrack could have definitely taken more inspiration from them to stand out and be more memorable.
Atomfall‘s setting and premise is fantastic, even giving me insight into an event that I didn’t realize had even happened in the UK. On top of this, the build up in its story was really engaging and I was filled with so much intrigue into what the Interchange was and what I would find when investigating further. I wanted to know who the voice was on the telephone and the fact that so many of the key characters in the main storyline seemed utterly untrustworthy really excited me and made it feel more like this was my story and I had control over who to trust, rather than being everyone’s busboy. Unfortunately, I feel like Atomfall‘s story really fell flat at the last hurdle. It could have been a few hours longer in my opinion, as I completed the game in just over 16 hours and felt like the different pathways for the main storyline could have been more detailed. On top of this, there were some really significant questions that went unanswered which was incredibly frustrating.
I had a really fun time with Atomfall despite the flaws in its gameplay. I love the freedom it allows the player and this was one of the few survival games that genuinely felt like I was struggling to survive at every turn, counting my bullets and crawling through air ducts when I could in order to avoid enemies. That being said, the drop in its main story was heavily disappointing and left me feeling really unsatisfied.
Jess reviewed Atomfall on PC with a provided review copy.
