Atomfall review – a survival sandbox built on the best of British sci-fi

In the multifaceted landscape of RPGs, nuclear disasters are a regular occurrence. From gas masks to Geiger counters, the real-world inspirations behind these irradiated digital wastelands are all too identifiable. Rebellion’s Atomfall takes a slightly different tack. Instead of tapping into Cold War anxieties of a nuclear holocaust or the harrowing effects of Chornobyl, we arrive in north-west England in the wake of the Windscale accident, and all is not as it seems.

Principally, Atomfall is a reminder that you should never judge a book by its cover. What appears as an off-brand Bethesda RPG is actually a delightfully pulpy detective romp through the English countryside; its blend of careful exploration and chasing leads falls more in line with detective games than Fallout or Skyrim. To my mind, it bears the closest resemblance to Tim Follin’s Contradiction, a murder-mystery FMV set in the English countryside that plays with the same tropes of paganism and small-town secrecy.

This may disappoint those who are looking for an off-brand Bethesda RPG, but let’s be honest, there are plenty of those to go around. In Atomfall, I’m not a lone wanderer hacking and whacking and smacking my way through an irradiated wasteland to save my loved ones. I’m an exceedingly nosy loot goblin gorging on canned meat and reading everyone’s private correspondence and I’m all the happier for it. It’s also just a wonderful environment to explore. I rarely look at Atomfall’s map; the quaint walking trails and lush greenery are all crafted around points of interest that leap out of Cumbria’s sun-dappled treelines.

Atomfall’s depth of discovery scales with the player’s willingness to explore, and its main questline is so straightforward as to make it obvious that exploration is kind of the point. Rebellion’s decision to split its quarantine zone into multiple regions circumvents open-world fatigue in favor of densely packed, curated sandboxes you can traverse in minutes. The omission of a fast travel system encourages total immersion, and the Interchange at the heart of its story serves as a crossroads hub that keeps commute times bearable. You could roll credits in as little as eight hours if you really wanted, but my 20-hour save file still contains a couple of locked doors and lingering questions.

No matter how much time players are willing to invest, Atomfall’s free-form structure can occasionally turn big revelations into an anticlimax. Rebellion scatters enough breadcrumbs for players to follow its main path to the end, yet precocious explorers are liable to stumble upon the whole proverbial bread loaf. As one such explorer, I inevitably end up poring over furtive and ambiguous notes for clues to mysteries I’d already solved hours ago. Admittedly, this is a problem endemic in story-driven sandbox games, and it’s one that I don’t expect Rebellion to solve in its first foray into the genre.

That said, Atomfall’s world doesn’t give up all its secrets quite so easily. There are plenty of twists and turns in its main questline, though this comes with the caveat that none are truly unexpected. Atomfall’s story is built on the pillars of speculative fiction, including government conspiracies, folk horror, and foreign espionage. It leans on classic tropes that hark back to the Golden Age of science fiction, particularly John Wyndham’s “cozy catastrophes.” The Day of the Triffids; The Chrysalids; Trouble with Lichen; Wyndham’s work is a road less travelled in videogames, but Atomfall hardly breaks stride in its homage.

However, this literary legacy looms so large that it leaves scant room for wider social commentary. The class division between the salt-of-the-earth northerners and jackbooted southerners can be felt through the animosity of ambient dialogue, but it’s never addressed wholesale. I’ve already drawn comparisons between Rebellion’s Cumbria and the real thing in my Atomfall preview, but perhaps cultural criticism is much too serious a venture in a dystopia that includes a TARDIS easter egg. Regardless, the vibrant array of Liverpudlian, Geordie, Yorkshire, and indeed Cumbrian accents of Atomfall’s populace is a home away from home for this northern gal, but the feeling’s muted by their repetitive dialogue barks. If I have to hear an outlaw whistle ‘The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round’ one more time…

Story aside, Atomfall is that rare breed of survival game that doesn’t lean on simulated hunger or thirst for a veneer of realism, mechanics which often strike me as less of a challenge and more of a chore. The survival aspect comes from your fragility, particularly in those early hours when you have limited tools to defend yourself. To be clear, this is no DayZ. You can survive a shot to the head at point-blank range, but charging headlong into a platoon of rifle-toting soldiers is a guaranteed way to get killed. However, what I do appreciate about Atomfall is the heel turn it takes from survival to action once you do amass those tools. I’m not skulking through tall grass to avoid bandits in Atomfall’s denouement; I’m firing buckshot into giant robots, sniping mutants, and lobbing grenades at weird plants that want to kill me.

As you might expect from the developer of Sniper Elite, Atomfall’s gunplay is solid. Its firearms all have a weighty kick appropriate for their type, from the bucking recoil of a farmer’s shotgun to the surgical precision of a military-issue sniper rifle. The revolver even comes with a flourish at the end of a shootout, bringing a delightful touch of Wild West melodrama to the idylls of Cumbria. Conversely, its melee combat is subject to the same issues as other first-person RPGs. What’s billed as scrappy brawls on paper translates to swinging wildly at NPCs who inexplicably absorb the impact, the camera obscured by their angry faces. It’s serviceable, but not particularly satisfying.

Atomfall also inherits Sniper Elite’s stealth system, which doesn’t quite translate at scale. I’m a huge fan of immersive stealth games – Dishonored, Thief, and Alien Isolation all have a special place in my heart – and skulking across the peaks and valleys of the Cumbrian landscape is a welcome prospect. However, enemies tend to spot me half a mile away, and the endless song-and-dance of retreating and returning soon grows old. I have no idea why there isn’t a lean function, but Atomfall could absolutely have benefited from one. That said, I do appreciate that suspicious enemies can still spot you in tall grass if they venture too close to your position. Rebellion isn’t going for realism, but it constitutes more of a challenge than sitting in the comfort of a glorified invisibility cloak until my pursuers sod off.

As genre contemporaries gradually co-opt immersive sim elements to deepen the complexity of their respective sandboxes, Atomfall is comparatively restrictive. Consider this in the wider context of GSC’s Stalker 2, whose open world is built on the principles of emergent gameplay. Opposing factions in Atomfall might occasionally clash, but opportunities to manipulate the environment in your favor are few and far between. Aside from the odd alternative path, there’s often only one way to solve a problem. Take Datlow Hall’s conservatory, locked tight, the key in the pocket of an absent groundskeeper. My only course of action is to track him down, when really, my first instinct is to take a cricket bat to the window.

Likewise, you can murder every single NPC if you really want to, but even this freedom has a lack of purpose. Aside from stealing the odd key item, there’s nothing materially to be gained in killing everyone you meet, other than needlessly cutting off leads early. It’s the kind of marketing gimmick that’s easy to signpost as ‘freedom,’ but few RPGs actually manage to inscribe it with any meaning. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is one exception, but even its NPCs can be resurrected when killed. Instead, an NPC’s death in Atomfall was most impactful when it came at the hands of someone other than myself, and spoke more to the complexities of its dramatis personae than the artificial freedom of wanton murder ever could.

It is also technically possible to align yourself with Atomfall’s factions, but the hoops required to jump through them aren’t immediately apparent. Pledging fealty to the plummy Captain Sims in Wyndham Village is pretty straightforward, but there’s no sense of faction allegiance typical of other RPGs. Instead, these factions constitute the major branches of Atomfall’s story, and following them dictates a different ending. Nevertheless, the protagonist’s place in the world remains uncertain.

In post-apocalyptic settings, we are often motivated by family (found or otherwise) or an unlikely destiny as the universe’s chosen one. Even Stalker 2 drops a plot device in its protagonist’s laundry basket. In Atomfall, we are a tabula rasa; an amnesiac vessel with no motivations aside from what the player prescribes. This isn’t necessarily bad, especially when Atomfall’s dialogue options give you enough scope to roleplay as a ruthless pragmatist, a soft touch, and everything in between. It does, however, mean the stakes hang upon the mysteries in its plot.

Rebellion is transparent that Atomfall began life as a tech demo to test the capabilities of its in-house engine. It has also clearly taken the attitude that such a venture into uncharted territory requires some caution. The studio’s unwavering focus on nailing the fundamentals of Atomfall’s core mechanics has earned it a solid survival RPG. Indeed, Atomfall’s greatest sin is that it plays a little too safe. When placed in the wider landscape of open-world games, it bears a closer resemblance to those that came out a decade ago. Nevertheless, Atomfall proves that the Asura Engine has more to offer than endless iterations of Sniper Elite, and that the studio itself has the vision to match.