Atomfall Review

I’m not from the United Kingdom. Even though Jump Dash Roll is, I’m its only Yank writer, and probably the only person on staff who hasn’t seen all twenty trillion seasons of Doctor Who. I also don’t care for tea unless it’s in the form of a delicious Wisconsin-made liquor, am biologically required to despise monarchies, and have more ammunition in my truck than London’s police force does in its armoury. The reason I’m bringing all this up is because Atomfall, Rebellion’s stab at making a survival-lite, is more British than a soccer-loving bloke with a Union Jack tattoo on his back. And that is, for better and worse, the only genuinely good part about it. The rest of it isn’t bad, but it is too reminiscent of other titles in the genre to be worth paying full price for.

Atomfall isn’t a terribly difficult game to describe. It’s essentially just Fallout set in Northern Britain with the bulk of the survival aspects of that franchise replaced by ones from the Sniper Elite franchise. Following the events of the real-world Windscale disaster in 1957, part of the U.K. has been quarantined off. Your unnamed and voiceless character wakes up in a bunker within the QZ five years after the nuclear accident, and is tasked with escaping the zone that’s ruled by an assortment of groups, while also trying to uncover the mystery of what caused the scenic countryside to turn into an especially colourful hellscape. So, after a dying NPC teaches you how to craft health kits and you grab a cricket bat, you’re sent on your soon-to-be miserable way without so much as someone telling you to keep calm or carry on.

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Atomfall never holds your hand throughout its 5-to-15-hour-long runtime. It doesn’t have many tutorials, by default there aren’t any quest markers on your map (even though you can enable them if you so choose), and resources are extremely scarce. You can and will die frequently whenever you get into a firefight or fisticuffs, you can and will spend a lot of time wandering around its handful of interconnected open world maps looking for your quest objectives, and you can and will have to make a handful of difficult story decisions. It’s usually satisfying to do all three of those things, with both the title’s gameplay and characters being a particular highlight.

The former is, in a word, fun. Hitting blokes over the head, sneaking around enemies, and occasionally making a perfect headshot feels good. Atomfall’s gameplay isn’t exactly complex, and shares a lot in common with the simplistic stealth and combat of the aforementioned Sniper Elite franchise, but is extremely satisfying while working exactly how it should. The latter, by which I mean its NPCs, are enjoyable if similarly simple. There are plenty of characters to interact with, all of whom want something from you but can offer you something vital in the main quest in turn. Their dialogue is well written and you always have a handful of options on how to deal with them. Even though their pathfinding occasionally doesn’t work as it should, their amazing accents alone mean it’s worth listening to them.

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But the issue with them, and Atomfall as a whole, is that it really just doesn’t have any actually unique elements. There are a handful of arguably innovative mechanics, like how your stamina bar is portrayed as your heart rate and how you can kill literally any NPC including story-vital ones, but ultimately it just plays like a slimmed-down version of the aforementioned Fallout.  It’s nice to not have to micromanage your inventory, or worry about an overly complex skill tree, or focus on properly role-playing any specific character archetype. It isn’t nice to have a perpetual feeling of “been there, done that” while playing, though, which you’ll likely have through the game’s relatively short runtime. 

Really, the only thing that sets Atomfall apart from its contemporaries is its setting. It’s the video game embodiment of everything British, and that alone might make it worth paying full price for if you’re into Blighty. Whether you’re fighting football hooligans, using Earl Grey tea to heal yourself, or not having an endless amount of ammunition, it’s a title that clearly prides itself on not being made American. Almost all of its lore ties into traditional folk tales from the country my homeland fought a war with in the 1700s, using red payphone boxes while talking to a mysterious man who occasionally guides you during your journey is always a treat, and its depiction of the English countryside is absolutely stunning.

However, the operative word in the previous paragraph’s second sentence is almost. The proverbial price it pays for being British is that it ultimately lacks the same social commentary of other post-apocalyptic fiction. Fallout was all about how horrifying the Cold War was, the recent S.T.A.L.K.E.R has plenty of references to the Russo-Ukrainian war, and Mad Max made it pretty clear what its writers thought about global warming. Atomfall, despite being a title about what could happen after a nuclear disaster, really doesn’t say much about anything besides British culture, though. You can pick up documents describing what happened outside of the beautifully rendered prairies, mind, but they don’t replace one of the staples of media set in worlds that have gone to absolute shit.

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Which is Atomfall’s ultimate problem. There’s nothing wrong with it, and if anything it does almost everything right from a technical perspective. The game has a solid enough story, satisfying gameplay, an interesting setting, and is absolutely steeped in a culture that most video games don’t care about. It’s almost entirely bug-free, too, and runs remarkably well on the PC we played it on. However, it removes too many elements from the post-apocalyptic games that inspired them and exclusively replaces them with references to British culture. Its story is generic, its gameplay lacks the depth of its competitors, and by and large it doesn’t discuss anything that doesn’t pertain to the land of tea and crumpets. It’s worth playing to be sure, if for no other reason than its world is more gorgeous than a bottle of Glenmorangie Signet Single Malt Whisky. However, like that bottle, there are plenty of other things like it that are worth experiencing while you wait for it to go on sale.