I’ll start off by telling you a thing you probably shouldn’t do in Atomfall.
It’s a bad idea to not bother equipping any weapons, venture out, and immediately end up having to try and beat a gang of druids (who keep saying stuff about soil) to death with your bare hands. If you’re anything like me, you’ll get a few of them, but then your health’ll get too low, and before you can whack out a first-aid kit, you’ll be lying on the floor, having right-hooked your last radgie gadgie.
The good news is that Atomfall offers you a bunch of ways to potentially avoid this fate. Offering you plenty of choice in terms of what you do, and how you do it, is one of the game’s core tenets. The formal quest system has been stripped back into one that has you chase “leads”, little smatterings of information you pick up in the world that gently nudge you towards specific people or locations – but don’t go as far as giving the full waypoint marker treatment or making it clear what might come of you doing the thing. Hello, Ubisoft.
You’ll decide which of the non-hostile NPCs – who share an open-world split into distinct areas with plenty of people and creatures who just want to batter you to bits – to trust in your efforts to escape the Lake District quarantine zone that everyone’s trapped in. Naturally, Rebellion’s head of design Ben Fisher confirmed that all roads eventually lead towards figuring out what happened to cause the Windscale Atom Plant to go up in purple-ish smoke before you arrived, unleashing some interesting effects on the surrounding landscape.
Basically, there’s purple goo strewn about in some places, often near or on wildlife, and some people have been affected and developed mutations like purple eyes or a purple stain on their coat. It’s all very mysterious, not least because one of the things that’s been affected in one location I found were beehives. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have tried smashing one with a cricket bat – a lesson a swarm of possibly radioactive bees were quick to teach me.
Aside from that, I found smashing stuff with my bat to be pretty effective, all in all, though it’s clear that Atomfall takes its survival elements pretty seriously. While you’ll not be having to stop to eat and drink to fill up hunger and thirst meters, combat feels deliberately geared to be a bit clunky – in order to make battles a bit more of a realistic struggle.
The guns I had access to all boasted decently lengthy reload times that didn’t seem to trigger automatically, meaning that the likes of rifles and shotguns, with only single or dual shot firepower at any given time, had their high damage and ranged advantage balanced out by clunky close-quarters handling. Good.
Melee is the opposite – very effective, provided you can close distance quickly, avoid taking any pretty lethal ranged hits, tank any hits you get back, and make quick work of each attacker to avoid getting surrounded by enemies. It’s all a balance, and one that makes you think on your feet (and fists, I suppose).
As is often the case in these kinds of games, I settled into using a bow as a nice middle ground between the two, with the added bonus of being silent, which was a big boon to the stealthy playstyle that feels like the natural way to scrap your way through Atomfall. There are skills you can use to augment your abilities and spec into a certain build, with the ones I opted for being the ability to deliver some stealth takedowns in classic sneak up behind a guy fashion. Hello again, Ubisoft.
Ironically, it’s feels like a Sniper Elite-style interpretation of the tougher, grittier, and less gun-dependent battle against a post-apocalyptic would the Fallout: London delivers – in that case through the veil of a Fallout 4 combat system that lacks a visceral, tactile punch to it compared to what Rebellion’s delivered here.
I did find some of the NPC AI to be a bit janky in terms of how it negotiated the landscape. For example, there was one point at which a druid tried to vault a barricade to get at me, and seemingly couldn’t back out of this action once it became clear that I was occupying the spot he’d need to land in, leading to a kinda floaty-looking cricket bat kill as I easily battered him to death while he tried to work out what to do. This kind of thing was pretty rare, so it’s not necessarily anything resembling a dealbreaker, just a quirk you may like or dislike if it’s still present in the full release.
As I said, the combat in general lends itself towards stealth, and that’s the place where Atomfall really comes into its own. There’s a post-apocalyptic scrappiness you don’t often get in the likes of Fallout unless you crank the difficulty up or enable a survival mode. You’re a lone ghost, carefully charting your course across what are openly hostile environments unless you’re in the village of Wyndham – though that’s still occupied by British soldiers dubbed The Protocol whom you start off having an uneasy peace with, but that are still a forceful presence whose heavy-handed law-dispensing you may well end up going against.
You’re sneaking along woodland paths in Casterfell Woods, trying not to alert gangs of psychopathic druids who’re otherwise busy building creepy wicker-men. You’re ducking through an abandoned farmstead and briefly stopping to scavenge supplies or have a breather following your last beating. You’re stumbling across a stuffy old cellar, and discovering diary entries revealing that it used to be home to some undercover Russian agents whose fate you’ll then get a lead to follow if you want to investigate. All of these spaces pack visuals and flavour that make them feel vibrant, dour, spooky, or otherwise in different ways to Fallout’s singed urban sprawls or deserts, with the British veneer on top adding to Atomfall’s unique character.
When you run across an NPC that will chat to you, the conversation and barter systems feel stripped back to facilitate role-playing without fully delving into traditional RPG territory, in a similar fashion to the lead system. You’ll pick between options classified by words like ‘prying’, ‘vague’, ‘lawful’, ‘wary’, and ‘honest’, allowing you to get into character a bit and shape what kind of person you want to be – something that in turn will change which answers and outcomes you get.
All of these mechanics are an interesting way of coming at things in a manner that helps separate Atomfall from comparisons to Fallout or any of its other post-apocalyptic brethren. That said, I’ll be keen to see whether in creating something designed to put player freedom first and limit railroading, Rebellion has managed to pack in enough storytelling depth to really deliver on the potential Atomfall’s world and premise drip with.
It’s all very well to pick up the receiver of a mysterious ringing red phone box in the wilderness and be told ‘Mother Jago is compromised’ by an unidentified voice, creating intrigue about the seemingly friendly old lady you’ve just bought some herbs from, but will the reasoning behind that which you end up uncovering later be delivered as more than just a short lore note on a table you can pick up if you go a certain way? It could well be, but I’ll have to wait until I can return to Cumberland for more druid fisticuffs to find out.
Atomfall launches on March 27 for PC, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS5, and PS4. It’ll come to Xbox Game Pass on day one.
