Atomfall review: doomsday adventure is stuck in the blast radius

When you were a teenage boy growing up in the early 2000s, you got asked one question a lot: What is your apocalypse survival plan? This is something that you needed to have an answer to — and a good one, too — in order to remain in high social standing with your friends. I always had my go-to response rehearsed. I’d work my way to the coast, steal a houseboat, and live out at sea. It was a perfect plan … aside from the fact that I don’t know how to drive a boat and can’t swim.

You can see that same style of ill-conceived doomsday prepping on display in Atomfall.

In its latest action-adventure game, Sniper Elite developer Rebellion lays out a solid plan to thrive in a wasteland of nuclear apocalypse games. Rather than aping Fallout or Stalker’s action RPG formula, the more streamlined Atomfall scavenges together some original ideas in its deconstructed quests and an emphasis on bartering. That could have made for a compelling survival story built around open-ended exploration, but it’s those pesky details that will get you killed during a nuclear disaster. With poor execution where it matters most, Atomfall is as lost at sea as I would have been had I ever set sail as a teen.

Storytelling wasteland

At a surface glance, Atomfall might just look and sound like British Fallout. It is, but there’s a little more to it than that. Its story is set in the wake of the Windscale fire, a real nuclear disaster that ravaged the United Kingdom in 1957. Atomfall offers an alternate history in which that event was even more devastating, creating a dead zone in the British countryside filled with soldiers, outlaws, and irradiated monsters. It’s a great premise, but one that Rebellion isn’t able to fully capitalize on due to limited worldbuilding.

Atomfall largely follows the tropes of its genre to a T, often without much explanation. When the story starts, I’m only treated to a short slideshow setting up its premise before taking control of an amnesiac who wakes up in an underground bunker. Who I am and how I got there is never really much of a question; the only thing I’m concerned with is escaping the wasteland. I need to be willing to take any help I can get to accomplish that, allying with a small handful of locals with ulterior motives who all offer their help for a price. There are teases of a good mystery early on when I answer a ringing phone in a bright red telephone box and am greeted by a creepy voice telling me to kill Oberon, whatever that is, but the cryptic breadcrumbs never really pay off through a flat sci-fi story.

Part of the problem is that Atomfall never really presents a coherent world. The quarantine zone is overrun with bandits, but it’s never clear why they’ve decided to take up residence there (a place with no money or valuables to steal) at all. Early on while exploring, I’m attacked by a blue humanoid monster in a bunker. I assume that’s my first glimpse into a wider story, but I barely learn anything about that enemy type after that. I’m similarly in the dark about the killer plants lining streams, the swarms of poisoned bugs, or the zombified soldiers who take dozens of gunshots to take down. It feels like all of these things exist because, well, that’s what you do in a nuclear video game. Of course the military has advanced mechs that look like they belong in Fallout despite the fact that they’re all carrying rusty World War 2 weapons. Duh!

I imagine that some of that is due to Atomfall’s scope. This is not an enormous open-world game filled with NPCs to meet and a glut of lore logs. It’s a refreshingly compact adventure that mostly takes place across four small areas joined together by The Interchange, a science hub that players are tasked with powering back up in order to escape. There are only a few characters to meet who each have one primary quest attached to them. The best thread follows a cult (with visual ties to The Wicker Man) that worships the poisoned soil. It’s one of the few moments where I start to get a sense of what has drawn so many people to the quarantine zone, but I don’t get many other opportunities to learn about them or how they connect to the other factions of the world. They’re just bodies for me to gun down in search of another MacGuffin.

Atomfall does at least deliver some strong visual design that helps bring the underdeveloped world to life. Rather than painting the countryside in burnt browns and greys, it throws players into a surprisingly bright world filled with vibrant greens. It’s not what you’d expect to see in the wake of a nuclear disaster, feeling closer to the world of Alex Garland’s Annihilation. Seeing a pristine telephone box, its paint and wiring perfectly intact, in the middle of an empty field gives everything a surreal edge that excuses some of its missing pieces. Maybe it’s more effective that we never know what exactly happened in the zone, but even cryptic storytelling needs to leave you feeling like there’s more to uncover. Instead, Atomfall never feels like it expands past the confines of what we explicitly see in it.

Following leads

Rather than spending its efforts creating a 40+ hour open-world game that’s dense with distractions, Rebellion’s focus was more used to craft focused gameplay systems that set Atomfall apart. The crux of that comes in its creative approach to questing. There aren’t traditional quests in Atomfall; instead, I begin collecting “leads” once I’m out in the world. Loose pages and conversations with NPCs sometimes give me a story thread I can look into in any order I want. Players who choose to scale the difficulty up won’t even get objective markers telling them where to go next. It’s entirely open-ended, and you can finish the game by only really helping one character if you so choose. I hit credits on my first playthrough in under eight hours, opting not to snub potential allies that I simply didn’t trust (you could easily double that playtime on your first go, but it would require completing quests for characters that are at odds with the ones you’re building relationships with).

It’s a fascinating idea, and one that builds on the immersive sim DNA present in Rebellion’s Sniper Elite series fairly well. The moments where that system comes together feels revelatory. In an early area, I chatted with a military leader who told me about a scientist he had locked up in a local prison. He gave me clearance to the usually locked down prison and sent me to interrogate her. When I got there, she told me about a device hidden in the facility that could manipulate electronics. I decided to help her in exchange for the location, orchestrating a prison break that set her free. That turned the military against me, transforming the once safe zone into a hostile region that I could barely cross through without taking a few bullets.

Much later, I found myself in a research wing of the Interchange, where I got a different clue about the device that I could have followed to find it. Even later, I unlocked a gear stash in a bunker after hunting the region for a key and found a copy of that same device inside. I didn’t need to incite a prison riot to get that key tool, nor did I need to interact with either of the characters I met along the way. In an alternate playthrough, I could have killed them both. I can be as helpful or hurtful as I wish and Atomfall will always have a response to that choice.

While that sequence sounds fantastic when written out, Atomfall isn’t nearly as exciting in its moment to moment gameplay. The bulk of my playthrough had me collecting batteries out in the world to power up the Interchange’s various wings. When I wasn’t doing that, I was hunting down keycards to open locked doors in bunkers. In between all that, I was backtracking across the same few disparate areas (each feels a bit like a Sniper Elite map in scale) to get from one objective to another. I’ve yet to find any way to fast travel either, which meant that a few hours of my playthrough were simply dedicated to schlepping back across regions by foot to talk to an NPC or drop off an item.

Atomfall’s other original idea comes in the form of bartering, but that’s another neat system let down by everything around it. There is no currency in the zone. Instead, players can only get items from merchants by making an equivalent exchange. Each trader has a kind of item that will be of value to them, and ones that will be worth less. It’s a thematically sound concept, as Atomfall’s story is all about survival through mutual exchange. Everyone, including the player, wants something and is willing to make a trade to get it. That extends to the main story, where escape comes with some sort of price no matter who you decide to trust to break you out of the zone.

But trading never really feels like a viable option in context. For one, inventory space is incredibly slim. I can carry a few weapons on me at once, a grenade or two, and some healing items, but that’s about it. I rarely ever have room for something I’m not using. There aren’t a glut of items to pick up either. Atomfall is more in the vein of The Last of Us than Fallout, mostly leaving players to pick up loose crafting items and turn them into essentials like makeshift bombs and bandages. I rarely ever had the right items on hand to complete a trade during my entire playthrough.

The limited inventory space torpedoes other systems too. At one point, I unlock a perk that lets me craft better versions of my weapons. That requires me to have multiple versions of the same weapon on hand to complete a recipe. That’s simply not feasible when I barely have room to carry the junk I’m actually using. I just flat out never used the system at all, nor did I need to. I got through the entire adventure just fine with the weapons I scavenged.

The problem is that Atomfall is built as if it’s an RPG, but there are no actual RPG systems in it. This is a fairly static action-adventure sandbox that just happens to have the kind of meaningful dialogue choices you’d find in Avowed. There’s a tension here between streamlined adventuring and friction-filled survival that never meets in the middle. At the very least, Rebellion at least includes a suite of accessibility features to push it further to each end of the spectrum. Those who want a pure survival experience with no waypoints can get that to an extent.

Cricket, anyone?

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Atomfall is its first-person combat, another feature that feels torn in two directions. The idea here is that players can approach action in a few different ways. They can run into a bunker, guns blazing, knock bandits out with stealth, or even avoid combat altogether. I ended up doing the latter for most of my playthrough, though not because I necessarily wanted to: It was just preferable to struggling with my other options.

Combat is thin and doesn’t feel terribly well balanced. Many of my guns feel weak and imprecise, which makes sense given the 1960s setting. Still, it’s annoying to walk into a room and have your shotgun outmatched by a guy running up to you and throwing a few punches. It feels like Rebellion wants players to utilize melee weapons instead, like cricket bats and stun batons. Those are more fun to toy around with, but each one plays more or less the same by using a light and heavy attack. There’s nothing as intricate here as the close-combat of both Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Dead Island 2.

With the action as clumsy as it is, taking on a room full of people is a recipe for disaster. That would imply that perhaps Atomfall is more balanced for a stealth playthrough, but that option feels even worse. The only tool players really have at their disposal for sneaking is a standard back attack. That never got me very far, because locations are either densely populated with enemies who would catch me during a long takedown or the action takes place out in the open where there’s no room to hide. In one bunker, I opened a door and tried to sneak into a large room full of bandits. They spotted me the second I stepped in despite the fact that I was far away and elevated. Every subsequent attempt yielded the same result triggering a 10-on-1 shootout. Each time I died, a tooltip told me I should try crouching to get around them. Tried that. Thanks.

In trying to make a game that could be tackled in a few different playstyles, Rebellion created one that doesn’t really support any. Just watch how quickly your health bar drops when a robot spots you in an open field with no surfaces to hide behind. It’s a bit of a shock considering that this is the studio behind Sniper Elite, one of the best stealth action franchises still active today. It has cracked immersive sim action that rewards careful movement, but still gives players the means to be lethal when plans go awry. That philosophy falls apart in a move to an open-ended adventure as opposed to one that takes place in carefully constructed shooting galleries.

I get the sense that Atomfall is less a game built for players and more one built for Rebellion itself. It’s an experimental sandbox that lets the studio break free from the franchise it has been focused on for the last decade and see what else it can do with its design chops. I can’t say that it comes together, as its limited scope doesn’t give any of its neat ideas enough room to breathe, but maybe it’s a necessity for survival. In a fast-moving industry where stagnation means death, a creative sprint can be what’s needed to stay ahead of the blast radius. Sometimes you stumble. Sometimes you wind up behind the wheel of a boat that you don’t know how to drive. But when you’re facing down apocalypse, staying still will kill you even quicker. You may as well take a risk and have some fun while doing it.

Atomfall was tested on PS5 Pro.