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Atomfall is a detective game. Yes, the post-apolyctic first-person shooter from the Sniper Elite studio feels more like Paradise Killer than Fallout. Rather than ping-ponging between objective markers around a map, Atomfall’s story is structured around a series of clues that are organically picked up and tracked as you explore its world. Its quests are nonlinear and you’re gently guided to points of interest. From there, it’s on you to reference your quest log and put the story of its world together.
Atomfall’s world might look derivative given how prevalent the post-apocalyptic genre is, but its setting and tone do a lot to differentiate it from its peers. The game takes place five years after the Windscale fire of 1957, a real-world event that happened in the UK and is considered one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. However, Atomfall envisions a world that never properly recovered from that disastrous event. Violent factions have popped up all over England, irradiated monsters roam the wilds, and–of course–there might be a few government conspiracies at play.
While this may sound like Fallout England, Atomfall’s tone is quite different. The dark, sarcastic humor of the wasteland is mostly replaced with a more grounded take on the genre. Creative Director Ben Fisher really wanted to capture the look and feel of British speculative fiction and science-fiction from the 1950s and 1960s, like Doctor Who and John Wyndham novels. The result feels like a uniquely British take on the post-apocalyptic setting.
This grounded tone makes a lot of sense when paired with its gameplay. Unlike Fallout, Atomfall is not an RPG. You are as frail as most of your enemies, and if a particular encounter is giving you grief, you can’t level up your character and come back later. Different weapons and gear could give you an edge in a firefight, but almost every shootout feels deadly. Fisher mentioned Stalker and Metro as inspirations for Atomfall, and while it isn’t as dense or complicated as GSC Game World’s first-person shooter, the similarities are easy to spot. Ammunition is hard to come by, items like bandages and health packs are invaluable, and it doesn’t take much to put you in the ground.
Unlike Stalker, though, Atomfall has a bigger emphasis on melee combat. Given how scarce bullets are, most encounters can be settled with an axe, knife, bat, or one of the game’s many close-quarters weapons. The melee combat isn’t as robust as something like Avowed or Dying Light, but there is a bit of heft to the weapons, giving the melee combat a tactile feel. Plunging an axe into an enemy feels deadly and is accompanied by some crunchy sound effects.
Although Sniper Elite might seem like the polar opposite of Atomfall, it does retain Sniper Elite’s open approach to exploration and combat. As Fisher puts it, “[In the Sniper Elite games] you’ve got a clear objective, and then you uncover ways to achieve that objective over time, and then you’ve got a sense of freedom in that space.” For Atomfall, the team wanted to “take that template and make the entire game structure one giant Sniper Elite mission.”
While it’s hard to say if Atomfall will live up to this lofty ambition, the narrative structure could support something like this. It does have an overall objective, but how you achieve that goal seems relatively open-ended. The game will loosely guide you around one of its handful of semi-open-world maps, but it’s up to you to put the mysteries of its world together, and it seems like there are multiple ways to uncover those mysteries, whether it’s befriending a hostile faction or turning over every stone in an important dungeon. Unfortunately, I only got to see the first area in my play session, so I can’t say how far-reaching or involved these narrative threads are, but if Rebellion pulls it off, it could make for an interesting approach to storytelling.
It’s also hard to say if the combat will feel as open-ended as the Sniper Elite games. While you are given some agency when it comes to the weapons you use and approach you take for any given encounter, it doesn’t quite have that sandbox feel that the Sniper Elite games are known for. This could change as you unlock more skills and find new weapons, but the more grounded approach to combat and the lack of climbing mechanics feels at odds with Sniper Elite’s open approach to combat. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing given Atomfall’s tone and genre, but fans of Rebellion’s recent games might not find as many toys in Atomfall’s sandbox.
My biggest criticism I can level at Atomfall–at least based on the 90 minutes I played–is that the enemy AI is fairly easy to exploit. Quite early on I figured out that if I kicked a human enemy and then used a heavy attack with my trusty axe, it was an instant kill. Since most enemies just rush you down, I would wait at the end of a hallway and let them come to me. It gets a little more complicated when there are ranged combatants, but as long as I broke their line of sight, they couldn’t do much. Part of what makes survival games so compelling are their cunning use of NPC AI, and based on what I played, Atomfall doesn’t quite hit the watermark set by games like Stalker and The Last of Us. It’s possible that tweaking the difficulty and playstyle settings could alleviate this issue, but I didn’t have time to dig into those options during my limited playtime.
Atomfall seems like a big swing for Rebellion. While it borrows bits and pieces from its previous games, it feels like a genuine attempt for the team to step outside of its comfort zone and deliver something different. The narrative structure in particular has me eager to explore that world and piece together its narrative. I’m very curious to see how the narrative holds up as the scope of the world expands and more threads are introduced, but if done well, it could make for a memorable story.
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Kurt Indovina
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