"Atomfall" Review - Apocalypse Nowt

Publisher: Rebellion Developments

Developer: Rebellion Developments

Platforms: Playstation 4, Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Let me get this out of the way right from the get-go: the youtubers are lying to you! In the weeks leading up to Atomfall's release, online personalities have been calling it Fallout in England. While it's certainly true that the game takes place in a locale that wouldn't be out of place in a Fallout title, this is a misleading moniker. We'll get into that later, but I want to set that expectation early.

To give kind of a bird's eye view of my thoughts before I get started on the review proper, I'd say my enjoyment of Atomfall was a rollercoaster...but not a big one. It has some highs, it has some lows, it has an undeniable charm that kept me going, but it's not exactly going to set the world on fire...and as I always say, that's totally fine. What's a little less fine is the fact that I fluctuated between fascinated and bored as much as I did. Still, despite the credits having already rolled, I keep coming back to do stuff I haven't yet done, so there's clearly something here that works. So, whether you crawl out through the fallout or stay right here (because they have things like the atom bomb), join me on this journey!

In Atomfall, you play as an unnamed British person who wakes up in a bunker inside an exclusion zone affected by the fallout from the Windscale disaster. The Windscale disaster was an actual nuclear disaster in 1950's England, so Atomfall is an alternate history story where that event shook the country more than it actually did. After awaking, you meet a scientist who tells you to find a secret location called "The Interchange" out in the world, and from there, we have our basic setup. After exiting the bunker, you come across a red telephone booth (because of course you do, it's England) and find the phone ringing. A sinister voice on the other end gives you a cryptic message: "Oberon must die." And from there, we have an additional wrinkle in the basic setup. 

As I'm reading over what I've written so far, I realize that I've used Britain and England pretty interchangeably, and I've been made to understand that's not exactly proper...

Sadly, I don't care.

Anyway, whatever you've guessed from my limited synopsis of the setup and the world, you're correct. Fascistic military power? Check. Neopagan cult that views the disaster as a call for humanity to return to its roots? Check. Government secrets at the heart of things? Check. An overwhelming British amount of pastries and tea? Check (and that's not a joke). The gang is well and truly all here. But what I find interesting about this plot is that it isn't as straightforward as I've made it sound. Rather than being given one critical path, you're presented with a bunch of "leads" that could help you reach the credits. Each lead intertwines with other leads in certain ways, so how this story actually goes is largely dependent on which rabbit holes you choose to go down. I wish this world would've been a bit more unique, but I can't deny that this storytelling structure is intriguing (keep in mind that I haven't played through a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, which evidently uses this as well). 

So, that's the story wrapped up, but I do have to say something else. It isn't a "negative" per-se, but I legitimately had to look up whether or not the team at Rebellion was actually from England as I played this. Why? Because the outlaws in Atomfall wear things like ceremonial bearskin hats, bowler hats, use cricket bats as weapons, say things like 'let's not have a barney", etc. It's all so stereotypical that I half-expected someone to break out a chimney sweep dance, put on their best Dick van Dyke impression, and scream at the top of their lungs about how they don't like spam! But no, this is indeed made by a studio in England. So I guess stereotypes are, in fact, based on truth. Like I said, not a negative, but I couldn't help but feel like the whole thing was a little silly at times. 

With gameplay, we come to what I was talking about in the intro. Despite appearances, Atomfall is not an RPG. There are some skill upgrades that can be purchased, but nothing resembling stats or character growth. That's going to be an automatic disappointment if you go into this with the wrong expectations, so be aware of it. That said, most of the time, the actual gameplay experience more than makes up for that!

Let's start off with basic combat. You have three major ways of engaging with enemies: fists, melee weapons, and ranged weapons. This being not an RPG, there are no numbers or anything like that involved here. Rather, when you pick up a weapon, you'll see its effectiveness represented in descriptors. For example, a small knife might say "low damage, fast attack speed, causes bleeding." Nothing quantifiable, just some guidelines to help you decide, for example, which of two shotguns to use. For ranged weapons, you'll also see descriptors for things like range and accuracy. You also have access to thrown explosives, but those need to be crafted and are generally less available than regular weapons.

As for how combat actually flows, let's start off with plain fisticuffs. This is how you take down the first enemy you come across...and the second I finished fighting him, I thought "holy crap!" It's simply the best-feeling hand-to-hand combat ever. The game makes excellent use of the PS5's dualsense controller to make each punch land with a palpable weight, and the same can be said of the melee weapons. When it comes to ranged weapons, there's a similar effect, but it doesn't stand out as much since great-feeling guns aren't anything new. 

But all of that is, for all intents and purposes, secondary to the experience. Atomfall, to its detriment, highly emphasizes stealth above all else. Well, when in areas with instant combat, that is. Certain areas will see you considered "trespassing" if you enter, at which point enemies will shoot on sight. In these areas, there are insane amounts of enemies and not a lot of cover to hide in. Plus, just about everyone is eagle-eyed, so even if you find somewhere to hide, you'll likely be spotted a mile away before you make it. If that happens, though, you may be in luck if a patch of the now-mandatory insta-vanish grass is nearby. It's a bit sparse, so you may not be lucky every time, but if you are, you're home free! For if you duck out of sight into the grass, enemies won't be able to find you unless they happen to walk through the grass right into you...which is a shockingly infrequent occurrence. The AI is intelligent enough to spot you and instantly recognize you as a threat from the other side of a quarry, but the second you duck into grass, there's nothing for it! From there, you can pick people off with a sniper rifle until you've cleared out the whole area, as adversaries will continue to rush your location looking for whoever killed their friends. Easy enough, right? Well, as I said, this grass is a bit sparse. In fact, a lot of the time, it seems to only be on the fringes of restricted areas. So, if the area is big enough that not all enemies can hear your guns, you'll still have to try (and fail) to make it through without being seen. And that's just with outdoor areas! There are also plenty of indoor restricted areas where there's obviously no such grass. In these areas, you're at the mercy of your foes' impeccable yet agriculturally-blinded senses. So...despite the heavy emphasis on stealth, the stealth itself is either laughably easy or unreasonably hard depending on a coin flip. And while the combat that breaks out when stealth fails is always fun, these situations are almost always triggered when you aren't prepared. You're almost always out in the open when you're noticed, and you die from only a few hits. Remember, this isn't an RPG, nor are there any armor systems in play, meaning you'll always die in a couple hits. So that lackluster stealth ends up coming back to bite you throughout the runtime. Thankfully, once you have some good weapons and get better at aiming quickly or utilizing stealth in short enough bursts to give yourself an advantageous position, things get a lot better, but it takes time to do that. 

Now, all of that seems to imply that there are times when enemies don't shoot on sight, and that's true...but it's more like there's a slight delay on them shooting on sight. See, if you run into aggressive foes on your way somewhere and you're not in a restricted area, they'll first call out to you to tell you to stand back because they don't want any trouble. Your goal is then to back away or circumvent them so as not to set them off. But 9 times out of 10, they're standing in the only path you can take to get where you're going, so you're in for combat anyway...and in these cases there's obviously no stealth involved. What's more, even if you can easily take another path, a lot of the time an enemy patrol will just keep walking your way, their alert meter growing more and more with each step. So, even if you keep backing up, they're practically begging for a fight. When these fights inevitably break out, they're easily the hardest fights in the game, as you can't get yourself in a strategic position and just have to skirmish out in the open. The act of combat feels great, and it's especially great when you win, but Atomfall seems to try its best to keep you from that at times. 

Speaking of ways that Atomfall seems to want to keep you from fun, there's one last aspect to combat that needs discussion: swarms. This being a nuclear disaster zone, certain animals have become hazardous and aggressive due to radiation: rats, leeches, hornets, and crows. These "swarms" will appear in certain areas for no reason other than to be the biggest pains in the ass you'll likely find this year. Everywhere they appear, you'll need to either stomp wildly or swing a melee weapon around wildly to kill every member of the pack. And your moves have to be exact. You have to kill every single member of the swarm individually with precisely-aimed attacks, and each swarm has as many as 15-20 members...sometimes more if there are nests nearby. So, these enemies totally blow, but they're at least rare enough not to be a constant fixture.

Aside from the combat, gameplay also consists of some "survival" elements. I put that in quotations because it's not what any of us would normally consider survival elements (i.e. hunger, thirst, etc). Rather, it's a delicate dance of crafting versus inventory space that incentivizes careful use of resources to be prepared, but not so prepared that you can't carry a valuable thing you might find...still, the various menus where you can tweak these things are called "survival," so that's what we're going with.
Essentially, you'll pick up a variety of resources in the world that you'll use to create throwable weapons or medicines. A shot glass off a bar table would count as a glass resource, the bottle of whiskey next to it would count as an alcohol resource, the rat poison bottle someone mistakenly put next to that whiskey would count as a poison resource, you get the drift. 

The most common item you'll end up crafting is bandages, which require cloth and alcohol resources. Beyond that, you also have things like burn salves or radiation resistance tonics, just about any buff concoction you can think of. On the opposite side of the healing spectrum, you can craft things like nail bombs with scrap and gunpowder resources, or makeshift dynamite, etc. 

But you can't just craft all these things from the get-go. You start off with just the bandage recipe, and you unlock more options by finding the recipes out in the world or in the hands of various merchants. This is a bit of a double-edged sword. We'll be getting into the specifics of bartering in a second, but a positive side of this aspect of crafting is that it's always exciting to speak with merchants to see if they have a new recipe. Recipes give you a incentive to engage with the bartering system for things other than ammo and healing items, in other words. It also adds an extra layer of enjoyment to exploring the world. When was the last time you were overjoyed to find a crafting recipe as a reward in an open world game? I can't think of an example, but Atomfall is the closest I've seen! In addition, if you come across a recipe you've already learned, you can still take that recipe and use it as leverage in bartering. As this implies, multiple copies of any given recipe can be found in various spots all over the world, meaning you don't have to seek it out in one specific place.

However, these positives can mainly be viewed as concessions to help with the inherent drawbacks of such a system. Engaging with the world will obviously net you all the recipes you need, but it doesn't even remotely mean you'll have these recipes when you need them. And if you're sneering at me right now and thinking about what a filthy casual I am, don't worry, I had that thought myself as I wrote that. But in my case, my issue with this wasn't so much about difficulty or survivability as it was missing out on key content or systems. 

Let me give you the example that prompted this particular tangent in the first place. I had gone through the whole critical path, gotten what could be considered the "basic" ending, and reloaded my save from before I opened up the critical path's door to go back into the world and do all the side content I hadn't already done. In this reloaded save, I took some time to do some more exploring around the game's central bunker. In doing so, I came across a security door that I hadn't noticed before. I found the keycard required to open it, went in, and found a crafting recipe that made my jaw drop.

Weapon upgrades.

I'd gone through the WHOLE game, completed the main plot, and taken on some of the hardest enemy camps with the basic rusty weapons you find in the world because I was certain higher-quality weapons would become available as time went on (like in most other games). But no. The ability to upgrade weapons was right there...under my nose the entire time. I'd been managing totally fine with the rusty weapon variants as evidenced by the fact that I'd taken down several of the high-powered security robots and cleared the heaviest military camps...so it's not like I needed those upgrades to survive...but all this time I could've been collecting every weapon I found to put in storage and use to get shinier and shinier versions of the weapons I ended up liking. I'd basically been treating the weapons like a drop and go resource up until that point: unless I was completely attached to a weapon (like my rifle), I might drop one shotgun for another with better stats or replace a pistol with an SMG if my pistol ammo was too low. It fit with the survivalist theme, after all, so why would I suspect anything different? Keeping things like medicine locked behind gradually-uncovered recipes is all well and good, but I feel like maybe weapon upgrades could have been handled better in a couple ways:

1): they could've been "available" from the start, but at the cost of heftier resources in order to execute.

2): higher-quality weapon versions could've gradually flowed into the world as main objectives were crossed off the list, like in most other games.

3): either the higher-quality versions OR recipes for such weapons could've been rewards at the end of particularly difficult quests. 

Whatever way you slice it, this particular side of the crafting feels a little silly to treat in the same way as medicine. One would expect to need new and improved medicines to survive a wasteland. One might not necessarily expect that of weaponry, especially when there's pretty organic reasons to believe that folks like that fascistic military power might already have hold of better weaponry. It's a relatively small thing to go off on for so long about, I realize, but weapon upgrades are a hell of a thing to stumble across only after starting the lower-stakes faffing about part of the sandbox experience. 

With all of that out of the way, let's talk about the bartering system. First things first: there's no currency of any kind. This is a purely old-timey trade system, where you offer up items of your own in exchange for items a merchant has on hand. Different items will have different weight to the trader, usually based on things like the region they're in. A trader in the more civilized part of the world might, for example, place less value on a shotgun but be fascinated by a bow and arrow. On the other hand, a trader in the druid woods might be keen to get his hands on a proper weapon to defend against bows and arrows. Same goes with the items they have. Merchants will typically be less keen to part with recipes or story macguffins  than they will with first aid kits, bandages, or ammo. So, successful bartering is all about creating a balance between the value of your items and the value of the items you want, and you only reach a deal when the merchant views the proverbial scales as either equal or leaning in their favor. It's never an exact science, so you'll sometimes have to get a bit creative (I occasionally was able to secure a deal by throwing in a couple bullets, for example). Right off the bat, I have to say that I respected this idea. A general lack of inventory space (with no way of upgrading) makes it feel a bit more stacked against you than it should, but I still couldn't help but find it endearing.

On the subject of things feeling stacked against you, it's time to discuss the game's myriad of accessibility settings. There are, of course, your usual suite of visual, audio, and UI settings, but you also have various sliders for combat, exploration, and survival. Each setting has sliders ranging from easy to extreme, so you can craft a custom experience. For my purposes, nearly everything was set to "normal" save for a handful of the exploration settings which were set to easy. So, when I said that the bartering system felt a little stacked against you, I meant that it had that feeling on normal settings. Were you to change it to easy, item value would be more weighted in your favor. The same can be said for things like enemy group density and tactical prowess. Easier difficulty levels see fewer enemies in camps, easier kills, and more traditional stealth mechanics, for instance. A whole host of options are available, so if anything I've said thus far sounds too complicated, you might find a setting that'll take some of the load off. 

Finally, we have the technical side of things, which is something of a mixed bag...as I find myself saying far more often than I'd like. For starters, there are some odd design choices like the health bar's size and placement. It's this teeny tiny little bar at the bottom corner of the screen, and this means that most of the time you aren't actually going to know how much health you have left. It just isn't a spot you're going to naturally look at, so if you're anything like me, you'll end up dying without knowing you were close to death. In addition, enemy NPCs are constantly spouting the wrong lines. How can I know this? Well, the druids out in the woods reject technology and modern weaponry because neo-pagan cult earth mother crap...and yet they'll taunt you in battle by suggesting you just come out in the open because "bullets aren't cheap." They'll also use phrases like "Satan's tits" or "Jesus Christ," phrases that don't exactly fall under the tree-hugging soil worshipper cult banner. It's clear that enemy dialogue is shared among all human enemies with few exceptions, either that or there aren't enough checks in place to keep enemy variant x from pulling from the dialogue for enemy variant y. Then there's the UI, which is terrible. If you want to see your entire inventory (whether just out in the wild or in the bartering menus), you have no choice but to hide the "details" for items, otherwise the detail window blocks basically everything. Also, if you want to see the map, you have to open up your inventory and move two tabs to the left (as far as I've been able to tell). Then there's the constant lead pop-up while you're walking around. If you're actively tracking a lead, you'll get a pop-up on the top left of the screen reminding you what that lead is. If you aren't tracking a lead, you'll get the same pop-up, just with "No lead tracked". A lot of the exploration accessibility settings are centered around the UI and what shows up on the HUD...but there's no setting for the lead tracking pop-up. Finally, there's the world itself. The overall look is beautiful. Easily one of this year's best-looking worlds...but it's all in service of fairly ho-hum design. Granted, this is England, so they don't have much to work with in terms of general scenery, but the level design didn't have to be as uninspired as this.

But it isn't all bad. Generally the visual aspects are top notch, there aren't any meaningful glitches outside of AI oddities, and as I've already said, the sound design on the weapons as well as the punchy feeling of the melee attacks do wonders for the combat. Above all, though, is a small feature that meant the world to me: the ammo check. I'm a serial reloader in shooting games. I'll have a full magazine but habitually press the reload button. I'm never really nervous about having insufficient ammo or anything like that, it's just something of a habit. Well, Atomfall finally gives people like me something meaningful. If you press the reload button with a full weapon, you'll open up the chamber to double-check your ammo count. This comes with sound effects as satisfying as those found in the shooting. In this way, the game offers a sort of stim toy to players looking for something else to do with their hands while they move around. It sounds like a small thing, but I would love to see this replicated in other titles. 

In the introduction, I mentioned that my experience with Atomfall was something of a small rollercoaster, and I still think that's the best way to describe this game. I highly doubt this is going to rock anyone's world, nor do I think it's going to top anyone's GOTY list. It is, however, a charming little sandbox with some equally charming systems holding it up. There's a lot here that doesn't work in my opinion, but there's nothing that offends in any meaningful way. I'll be honest, I'm running out of things to fill out a conclusion with, so I'm going to move on to scoring.

Let us review:

Combat/Stealth Design - 1.0

The Swarms - 0.5

Odd survival choices - 0.5

Tech issues - 0.5

The final score for Atomfall is...

7.5/10 - Pretty Good

Good effort, Rebellion, good effort.