After two hours of gameplay, the open-world shooter Atomfall leans more towards Far Cry’s style than S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s.

I was towards the end of my Atomfall demo when it clicked for me – clicked like the gravelly report of a shell entering the breech of my rusty yet devastating shotgun. Guided by the deteriorated state of my weapons, and by James’ Gamescom write-up, I’d been trying to play Rebellion’s alt-Sixties open world FPS like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., hoarding my ammo and avoiding unnecessary bloodshed as I crept around an English woodland full of druids ranting about atomic fungus. I’d made it to the heart of the druid encampment – a National Trust castle of the kind that would typically be 30% wedding venue, 50% giftshop – only to reach a dead end in a banqueting hall. I had a key for a lock I couldn’t find. Perhaps it lay in a tent outside the castle, or in one of the surrounding caves?

I went back outside and contemplated all the guard patrols I’d just artfully threaded on the way to the castle. I remembered the deceptively low-key parting words of my quest-giver, a mightily behatted lady called Mother Jago, who’d sent me to the castle to recover a book with the understanding that it was “nothing worth killing over”. I weighed these possibly plot-shaping sentiments against the 30 minutes left in my hands-on session, then pulled out my shotgun and started blasting. And it was then that I realised I’d been playing Atomfall wrong.

This isn’t S.T.A.L.K.E.R., no matter what that awful James might tell you – it’s a Far Cry that has wandered north of Ubisoft’s usual equatorial settings and into the realm of dark Satanic mills. It’s not, in my experience, a game of grating deprivation and gradual horror where death is often invisible. It’s a game where you burst out of the long grass and clobber loudly dressed goofballs with a cricket bat. It’s a game where you throw aromatic bait at campfires to summon swarms of mutant wasps. It’s a game where enemies often form a heedless Conga line into your bowsights, and you forgive them this because the combat barks are pleasantly daft.

“Stop your whinging,” bellows a painted man in braces, as he smacks me with a pipe. “Bloody hell!” he squeals, as I chuck a fireaxe at his head. None of the lines are hilarious individually, but slap them together during a rapidly evolving gunfight and you get a lovely pantomime that makes a virtue of the AI’s tactical ineptitude. Together with the ability to sic creatures on humans, it coaxes out memories of certain special moments in Far Cry 3, when I’d skirt an outpost only to hear the distinctive carnival ruckus of pirates getting all fucked up by a cassowary.

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. parallels are pretty abundant too, in fairness. Atomfall is set in the Lake District countryside following a real-life nuclear accident, upgraded by Rebellion’s writers into a disastrous paranormal experiment of some kind. The fields and woods are littered with burned-out tanks and helicopters, and the quarantined locals have separated into militant factions. The druids aside, there’s talk of a town’s worth of people Keeping Calm And Carrying On that puts me in mind of We Happy Few.

The spillage from the reactor has also transformed the wildlife into various species of McMonster, while filling the heads of certain humans with predatory, cordyceptic whispering. There’s are definite Annihilation vibes here, plus some elementary B-movie paganism. In one particular underground area, I found altars hung with skulls and a chasm full of luminous blue tree ears with a reactor core gently fizzling at the bottom.

The geography in general is quite uncanny, but perhaps not by intention. There are touches of rural Britannica that remind me of my own time in the Lake District: stone packhorse bridges, a particular species of zebra-striped signpost, the obligatory Very British red phone booths (where you’ll sometimes receive guttural, anomalous phone calls – I suspect it’s the fungus again). I glimpsed a mountain outside the demo play area that could have been Scafell Pike. But all the specificity has been fed to a stealth-action blueprint that needs a particular balance of paths and overlooks and crevices, with tentpole clusters of foes and resources, and evenly-distributed patches of grass to hide in.

This isn’t a damning observation: I’m always fascinated by how games re-interpret settings, and in this case, I have some local familiarity to bring to bear. I’m less fond of the game’s dungeon-style spaces, ranging from caves to cellars, which play out in a very obvious way with tripwires to jump over, discarded letters about sinister goings-on, and swiftly-found crawlspaces providing access to storerooms full of goodies. The predictability here is a little compensated by the need to gather clues about quest destinations, rather than straightforwardly unlocking a waypoint. There are letters and references in dialogue you’ll need to string together, though this didn’t make much impression on me during my demo. Lulled by the landscape’s obvious sneak-O-shoot DNA, I was too busy flanking to ever really look at my map screen.

The handling has a touch of ‘pure’ survival sim to it, but this only goes so far. There’s a pulse mechanic whereby exertion causes your aim to wobble, but this is easily managed by making a habit of not sprinting, and thus promptly forgotten. Certain guns take ages to reload, which dissuaded me from combat at first, but I found ammo and gear to be so abundant in the demo that I maxed out my inventory quickly. Post-castle-infiltration, I was opening fire just to free up some room.

The quickslot weapon-switching and arsenal of craftable consumables also encourage a freeform approach to encounters. You don’t retreat under fire, you switch to your other pistol and carry on blazing. The guns themselves, ranging from SMGs through single shot rifles to revolvers, are easy and gratifying to wield, once you learn to bake in extra time for reloading. In his Gamescom report from last August, James characterised the game’s melee as a shambles, though it’s evidently been tightened up since then; thwacking miscreants felt serviceable enough in the updated build I played, with blunt implements connecting believably.

There are also perks to unlock, nostalgicaly portrayed as Scout achievement badges – quietening your takedowns, for example, or speeding up the rate at which you pull a bowstring taut. (I was part of a local Sea Scouts group myself as a kid – I don’t remember earning any silent death badges, but then again I was mostly there to play crab football.) This doesn’t feel like a particularly robust playstyle-tailoring game, mind: it’s more about sanding down the points of combat, stealth, and exploration you’re not enjoying.

I wouldn’t have named the Lake District as an obvious setting for a Far Cry-style shooter, but now it’s here, I’m down for it. I think it’s less that I’m charmed by the Lake District than that I haven’t played a Far Cry since 2018. I’m actually a bit worried about the aspects of Atomfall that might interfere with the resemblance to Ubisoft’s series. For example, the possibility that there might be some kind of plot consequence for massacring lairy pagans because I’m struggling to find a keyhole. I don’t mind a good Consequence, Atomfall, but I’m mostly here to giggle at the woad-caked men in sleeveless cardigans as they gallop into my bullets.