If you fancy the idea of a post-nuclear fallout survival game but want something less intense than Stalker and shorter than Fallout, Atomfall might just be what you are looking for.
Atomfall is a survival first-person shooter from British game developer, Rebellion Developments, which had previously created the Sniper Elite series.
Set in Windscale in Northern England five years after a nuclear disaster in 1957, Atomfall reimagines what would have happened if there was something more insidious at play in this post-apocalyptic landscape.
Once upon a time
You play a nameless individual with amnesia. With no idea why you are in the locked-down nuclear quarantine zone or what you are supposed to do, you start the game on a blank slate.
While trying to unravel the mystery and figure out how to escape from the quarantine zone, the protagonist has to talk to people in the area, look for clues and investigate leads while fighting off hostiles and scavenging for scraps.
Atomfall features branching dialogue options that have consequences and affect outcomes. You have the option to be curious, prying, honest or outright deceitful, depending on how you want to play.
Populating the world of Atomfall are members of various factions, including scientists and staff from the British Atomic Research Division (BARD), soldiers from the Protocol military, cultists with folksy superstitions, as well as hapless individuals caught in between.
The factions with their own agendas may help, hinder or harm you, and you will have to choose whom to aid. Certain decisions may cause individuals to refuse cooperation and close off any future opportunities.
Your decisions can also force the demise of certain non-playable characters (NPCs) by your hand or indirectly by your doing as a matter of consequence. Some potential leads can disappear or ghost you, which makes it wise to follow up on as many leads as possible to hedge your bets.
The characters in Atomfall are mostly one-dimensional and forgettable, but have enough ambiguity to make them seem rather shifty and untrustworthy. What’s interesting is that it’s tough to play as a people pleaser, as you need to pick a side eventually.
With six different mutually exclusive endings, I was struggling to switch alliances, being forced to renege agreements and even betraying certain NPCs in a bid to progress in the game.
Fancy a cuppa, love?
Atomfall is peppered with plenty of British humour, with a liberal use of British slang like “owt” (anything) or “nowt” (nothing) which I find quite refreshing.
Throughout the game, there are also iconic red British telephone booths with a mysterious voice providing obtuse hints and advice. I was delighted that you can gain health in true British fashion by going around eating pastries, cakes and having a cup of tea.
The game takes place in five main areas, including a village with lots of NPCs to talk to, a forest full of cultists, military compounds and a huge interconnected underground facility known as The Interchange. The maps are not very large but there are plenty of bunkers and caves to explore.
There is no fast travel option in the game but fortunately the zones are interconnected with shortcuts to be discovered. But there are many instances where certain NPCs or tedious fetch quests deliberately send you back and forth to places you have cleared just before.
The lack of fast travel means having to fight the same respawned enemies over and over again when passing through the same areas, which gets really tiresome late in the game.
What I appreciate about the game is that it lets you customise the difficulty levels for survival, combat and exploration — great for those who prefer less hand-holding in exploration but prefer not to be killed too often in combat especially since enemies keep respawning in areas you have to keep traversing!
In terms of combat, you can play stealthily by hiding in tall grass, sneaking up behind enemies and knocking them out. But I found the stealth mechanism pretty clunky, with enemies being super sharp-eyed and perceptive to your presence even when you’re just peeking around the corner.
The best way to sense enemies is to listen out for their conversations and whistling but there were times when I heard the enemies commenting that they saw me even without me seeing them.
Atomfall has a wide variety of hostiles including swarming rats, bats, and even fish, as well as human outlaws, cultists and militia. In the deep bunkers, there are also fast-moving radioactive ferals as well as slow but tough thralls with glowing blue eyes that take many hits to defeat.
Some enemies, like the roaming robots, can be too powerful to beat, especially if there isn’t enough ammo, so you have to run, hide and duck around them.
But keep an eye on the heart rate monitor which puts a cap on how much energy you exert before you get sluggish and become unable to fight or flee.
This cat-and-mouse game can get pretty thrilling especially when you are forced to slow down somewhere while powerful patrolling robots are passing close by!
Bits and bobs
Atomfall plays like a Stalker-lite game on a much smaller scale. Since it’s a survival game, there are usually meagre pickings of scrappy weapons like rusty firearms, old school bows, and even a cricket bat, which turns out to be a pretty good melee weapon.
You will also need to scrounge for crafting materials such as scrap, alcohol and bits of cloth to upgrade weapons and craft items.
These items include bandages for healing, consumables such as painkillers, burn salves and anti-radiation potions, as well as projectiles like molotov cocktails, nail bombs and makeshift grenades. Unfortunately, ammo cannot be crafted, so you have to be very thrifty and make every shot count.
You can also acquire tools like a torch for dark places, a metal detector to find buried caches and a signal redirector to turn off security turrets and solve some current switching puzzles to unlock doors. For avid collectors, there are also collectibles like comic books and lunchboxes to find, so it pays to leave no stone unturned.
Atomfall’s inventory is extremely small, so you have to be very selective in what to carry. Thankfully, there are useful pneumatic tube storage systems scattered in key areas that serve as a “catch all” cache for spare weapons and consumables but not for storing crafting materials and ammo.
The game features a limited and simplistic skill tree for improving ranged and melee combat skills, survival and conditioning. As there are no experience points to gain in the game, the upgrading of skills or unlocking perks is accomplished by finding and consuming training stimulants.
Likewise, new skills are not unlocked unless you acquire training manuals, which makes scavenging and looting more critical than scoring kills.
Without a currency system, trading is done in the form of bartering where a weighing scale will show the shortfall or excess of your trade with a trader.
It can get quite time consuming and irritating especially since you cannot haul around a huge collection of items to trade, and have to keep running back to a pneumatic tube system to get some higher-value items.
Atomfall’s environments offer a nice contrast between the bright, pretty countryside and dreary, creepy underground bunkers. The perpetual daytime is especially welcome after spending a long time in the dark bunkers.
Although the game is what I would describe as light horror, I did get pretty jumpy as there were quite a lot of sudden unexpected loud noises, which are a rather cheap scare tactic.
TL;DR
Atomfall’s branching dialogue and decisions with consequences, as well as ambiguous and untrustworthy NPCs offer some interesting gameplay and replayability. However, most characters are rather one dimensional and are not very engaging.
The lack of fast travel and deliberately repetitive quest lines that send you back and forth gets tiresome eventually. With the limited inventory and bartering trade, it makes transactions rather cumbersome.
Despite this, Atomfall does offer some thrills in trying to unravel the mysteries and clarifying the perspectives from different factions.
If you are looking for a Stalker-lite survival shooter and don’t mind traipsing through the English countryside or dark bunker while culling enemies repeatedly, Atomfall provides some intrigue and thrills in a British setting.
Atomfall is available for the PC on Steam at S$42, and is included as part of Xbox Game Pass and for purchase for Xbox Series X|S in the Xbox Store at S$87, and for PlayStation 4 and 5 in the PlayStation Store for S$81.39.
Atomfall offers pretty good value if you are playing on PC for an open-world game with six different endings to try out. It is significantly more expensive for consoles unless you already subscribe to Xbox Game Pass.
