Atomfall allowed me to smash a guy’s head with a cricket bat while he was urinating, and honestly, I’m obsessed.

In my opinion, the best kind of games are the ones that leave you with plenty of stories to tell. Our old editor-in-chief Tom Bramwell coined the phrase ‘anecdote factory’ when he reviewed Far Cry 3, and this is the perfect expression to describe my time with Atomfall. I was given 90 minutes with Rebellion’s upcoming radioactive RPG at a recent hands-on event and I probably came away from it with about 90 different stories to tell, each one just as unexpected and entertaining as the last.

A good example of this (and one that’s highlighted in the much more detailed video below) happened about ten minutes into my session. After hiding from a pair of angry Protocol soldiers I decided to sneak up on them and take them out, only to round a corner and catch one of them doing an unexpected wee against a wall. I was laughing out loud as I ran at him and took him down with a couple of swings of my very English melee weapon, a cricket bat.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, Atomfall is an action RPG set in the picturesque English county of Cumbria with all the action taking place in a quarantine zone that’s been set up in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster that’s loosely based on the real-world Windscale fire of 1957. This setting gives us the benefit of a fresh take on the apocalypse. Gone are the dusty and often barren grey-yellow-brown environments that we see in most post apocalyptic productions.

Instead, Rebellion has set its story among the woods, hills and lakesides of the English countryside. There are bright colours everywhere, from the deep rich greens of Casterfell Woods and the bold reds of the classic British phonebox, through to the luminous blues and purples of the flora and fauna that have mutated after the disaster. Even the Windscale powerplant itself looks more like a sight you’d see in Alex Garland’s Annihilation film rather than a Fallout game, thanks to the subtle pinky purple haze that quite literally radiates from its burning reactors.

That’s not to say Atomfall is nothing like Fallout, though. It certainly has some obvious similarities to Bethesda’s series, what with it being set after a nuclear disaster and all. There are ghoul type creatures in here, and crazy factions of NPCs that consist of everything from cultish lunatics to heavy handed soldiers, and there are plenty of eccentric characters to meet as well. Thanks to the beautiful landscapes and architecture of old school England though, Atomfall feels less like a clone and more like its own thing.

One of the most important ingredients that a good RPG can have is freedom, and during my hands-on, I was dropped into a save file that was a couple of hours into the game and told that I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted. The area itself, Casterfell Woods, looks to be one of many small, sandbox maps that are connected together by loading screens. But despite not having one huge open world, that didn’t make the visuals any less impressive. The rustic scenery with its old wonky steps and tumble down walls was gorgeous and the shallow river that trickled beneath my feet as I emerged from a tunnel into the sunlight was gorgeous. So gorgeous, in fact, that as I drank in the visuals, I accidentally bumbled straight into the view of a group of angry Druids who immediately became hostile.

It’s important to know here that Atomfall is built using the same custom Asura engine as Rebellion’s Sniper Elite games, so as soon as I was spotted, my Karl Fairburn muscle memory kicked in and I dove into some nearby long grass. Alas, this also revealed what could be Atomfall’s biggest weakness: the enemy AI. Just like in Sniper Elite, alert enemies on the hunt will conga line past your hiding spots before they either get bored or wander off. It’s been the same way in pretty much every Sniper Elite game I’ve ever played and it hinted at some aging systems beneath all the pretty graphics.

Then again, I still managed to biff the stealth eventually, and it was here that I got my first taste of Atomfall’s melee combat. It felt a bit sluggish and clunky, but it was still an improvement over that of Fallout’s hand-to-hand fighting. The rusty guns I used later on felt really punchy, though, especially the shotgun – but, oh my, they took a long time to reload, especially the bolt action rifle, so don’t go rushing into any firefights or you’re likely to be overwhelmed while you’re struggling to push a bullet into the chamber

As I mentioned before, I was told I could go anywhere I wanted in my preview, and there were a couple of points of interest to the north of the Casterfell Woods map that I was told would lead me to some good glimpses of Atomfall’s action. But obviously, because I’m me, I went completely the other way instead, and I’m super glad I did because from that point onwards, I felt like I was on my own private adventure. It wasn’t long until I bumped into something that changed the direction of my entire playthrough: a crashed helicopter which contained a distress recording from a Dr Garrow who had gone to seek refuge in a nearby village.

It’s hard to say if this was a peculiarity of the demo or not, but I soon discovered that Atomfall doesn’t really hold your hand when it comes to tracking down leads like Dr Garrow’s. I knew I had to go and find the doctor in a village called Wyndham thanks to the title of a note that came with the recording, but apart from that there were no map markers that I could see that would lead me to their exact location. Or, in fact, their approximate location either.

At first, I found this lack of direction jarring, but not having a map marker to follow quickly began to feel so refreshing and freeing compared to just following waypoints like you do in Fallout and other open world games these days. Instead of just mindlessly following virtual breadcrumbs, I started to feel like I was having my own organic adventure and doing some detective work, which really helped to solidify the reality of Atomfall’s world.

As I searched for the village I found hidden comic books, dug up caches of loot thanks to my trusty metal detector, got scared by a big, brutalistic tower that activated a blaring alarm when I got close, and I even battered some bloodthirsty leeches with my cricket bat when they attacked me as I paddled in a nearby lake. It was a proper adventure in the English countryside that made me remember my glorious childhood days in the Oxfordshire village of Garsington, where my friends and I would wander around fields playing army or hide in old cattle sheds from imaginary zombies.

And that was only the first fifteen minutes of my play time. I haven’t even touched on the horrific accident I caused in Wyndham Village’s bakery, or what happened when I poked my head into the very Fallout-bunker-looking Interchange, or the way you can pour yourself a lovely little cuppa whenever you find a little teapot lying around. But I do in my video, so if you want to find out even more about the game, and watch me interact with some of its wonderful characters like the stern Captain Sims or Prudence Rook, the eccentric owner of Datlow Hall whose butler Jenks has gone missing, then do check out the video above!

I was only in Atomfall’s world for an hour and a half, but I felt like I saw more in those ninety minutes than I would do in many other games. There’s humour, heart and personality by the bucketload, and a fantastically realised world to explore that manages to perfectly capture the peculiarities of intricacies of English village life, seamlessly mixing it with a mysterious sci-fi story that constantly surprises and delights. Sure, the AI is wanting in places, and the combat does feel a bit stiff, but those are really my only complaints and I’m willing to forgive those considering everything else the game offered me. If, like me, you thought Avowed was a bit stuffy and straight laced, Atomfall is the antidote to that – there’s comedy, chaos, detective work and rewarding exploration. I’m so excited to get my hands on the full version of Atomfall after my hands on and I honestly think you should be, too.