In terms of premise, Atomfall uses a relatively trite one: you’re knee-deep in trouble—find a way to get out by any means necessary. It executes that well enough, as most of the interactions, dialogue, and investigation you’ll engage in are meaningful. Narratively speaking, few interactions feel inconsequential to your objective of escaping: in most cases, you’ll get some tidbit of information that then is up to you to make the best use of.

The level of hand-holding is minimal, and you’ll have to make sense of all the info placed in your Investigation Diary to know what to do next. Overall, the characters, story and lore of Atomfall lack in depth. The more I delved into the story, the more I had a sense of half-bakedness creeping up in the back of my mind. The story piques your interest but doesn’t ever hook you strongly, and lore-dumps you way too much towards the end.

You’ll explore the Windscale Exclusion Zone on foot, without the aid of any vehicle and without fast travel. It’s customary for this genre to exclude fast travel in favor of more organic map shortcuts, which are present in Atomfall, although not immediately. A handy map will loosely mark any point of interest you either find or get to know about through dialogues and info items, but that’s the extent of the help you’ll get regarding exploration.

Taking time to comb every place is rewarding, since a lot of crafting resources, ammo, weapons and even skill points are hidden just about anywhere. Skill points are a lootable “serum” item, and so are skills themselves, always unlocked through specialized, hard-to-find manuals. Looting is one of the more rewarding aspects, with more distant and remote locations having better loot, but being also far more dangerous.

One of the most detrimental aspects of the exploration is the idiotic inventory system. In its perverse logic, a piece of cloth will occupy the same one-slot space as a whole military medkit, the only exception being long weapons with their own dedicated slots. In most Immersive Sims, a weight-based system or slot-based system with more realistic proportions is usually in place; in Atomfall, it just feels like they ripped a generic inventory preset from an Unreal Marketplace demo.

Combat in Atomfall plays out with melee or ranged weapons, and an array of throwables such as grenades. Atomfall wants to be realistic and deadly in its combat, and on the latter part, it succeeds, at least on the harder difficulties: only a couple of hits will be enough to demolish you, and you’ll always be put against overwhelming odds. Despite being marketed as a struggle for survival with scarce ammo and resources to be used efficiently, the real experience is very different.

You’ll effectively be, at all times, a walking armory overflowing with ammo and explosives. If you’re remotely decent at FPS, landing a single headshot will dispatch most enemies, even with the rustiest crap gun you salvaged from a ditch. Conversely, enemies will generally have terrible aim unless they’re either a few meters from you or are trained elite soldiers, a minority around the Zone. The final tally of any fight will mostly be positive for you, which is something that completely removes the need of picking your fights wisely.

The stealth approach was created with the intention of saving you ammo and extensive fights against numerous foes, but it just doesn’t work. Enemies can see you from dubious angles and can actually perceive when they’re being aimed at for a stealthy headshot. Even if stealth worked, the enemy AI is primitive and idiotic: uncountable times I saw foes detecting a dead ally, flatly exclaim “oh no, a deader!” and then resume their patrol seconds later.

Progression and exploration are very much intertwined in Atomfall. You won’t level up by completing quests or killing enemies like in most RPGs; rather, you’ll have to find and use Serum vials scattered all over the map and, in some cases, received as rewards for doing favors for NPCs.

Even if some are useful, such as Disarm Tripwires, most of them are just passive increases to damage, health, resistances or stealth proficiency, so nothing will actually change gameplay-wise after acquiring them. There’s no other form of progression, save for the gear you carry with you, which is largely inconsequential anyway; one melee weapon rules them all, while any ranged weapon will do since they all have roughly the same ballistics. You can snipe with a pistol if you can line up shots well enough, so why do you even need a rifle?

You can craft stuff like improvised grenades, tonics that give temporary buffs, and healing consumables. For most of these gizmos, you’ll first have to find a recipe, learn it, and then have enough materials—stored separately from your items—to actually make them at any time during your travels. These consumables and throwables are quite useful, especially tonics giving you damage resistance to get through hazardous areas.

Atomfall sets itself apart from Rebellion’s usual catalog by dropping you straight into an unknown, hostile world. If that sounds familiar, it should but what makes it stand out is how it handles player choice. When dealing with the Quarantine Zone, your options boil down to the classic "Embrace it, nuke it, or ♥♥♥♥ it." Yet, no matter what you'd pick, the goal remains the same: escape.

Rebellion markets the game as a ''Survival-action'' and I don't usually suspect the dev tags. At first where I thought it would be something more akin to We Happy Few it turned out to be a sandbox action-adventure and while it's great at that most of the ingame systems are rather shallow (nevertheless still fun). The internet had the game wear its Fallout and STALKER inspirations proudly, but its real charm lies in clue hunting and open-ended problem-solving. It's more Chernobylite but even more open-ended where you piece together the story bit by bit and tackle obstacles your own way. If you love unraveling mysteries at your own pace, this is your jam. Better yet, you can finish the game however you want. That may mean doing almost everything or skipping a large portion of the game.

It still is a compact experience. My playthrough took 11 hours (with nearly everything done, minus one questline), and that's with some save-scumming (which is what we all do, right?) You could probably see all of it in under 20 hours. The in-game timer barely clocked 8 hours, though. There’s a speedrun achievement for finishing in under 5 hours, which is already plenty as you can already finish the whole thing under a hour without the much need of a guide. I suspect everything's doable in one playthrough (minus the speedrun, obviously) if you can manage your saves.

The main objective is straightforward: power up the Interchange. You need 4+2 atomic batteries (four for the sectors, two for the finale). At first, that sounds like a tough quest, but it’s not—big bad enemy robots drop them frequently, and once you get a trusty weapon and exploit their weak points (which is disappointingly easy), fights last barely a minute. You can kill traders and loot their batteries if you’re feeling like a good ol' sob. While I appreciate the agency, it somehow makes things feel reductive. Trading is an option and I do love trading and all, but why bother when violence gets the job done faster? Traders mostly reside in isolated places and I didn't face any real repercussions after killing them.

You get four handcrafted maps full of landmarks to explore (have not tried but I suspect you can sequence break). World design is excellent, offering multiple approaches. Questlines usually have more than two solutions (through NPCs or fighting your way in/out or trying to see if there's another area which you could utilize). It lets you mess around and I adore that.
The Interchange however is the highlight, evoking STALKER’s labs with its eerie, curious nature. It has some wings to explore and those were some of the intense moments of the game even if they are mostly optional. You never feel like you’re wasting any time even when you know that the questline you’re currently doing won’t be the one you’ll thrive for in the end.

Inventory space is tight, very tight to the point where you can't even stack items. But in a game this small, it surprisingly works. It forces you to prioritize (to spend them fast above anything else), though you’ll rarely run out of crafting materials if you explore adequately. This is a central core mechanic to STALKER already but in a huge map where you must organize things for over 50 hours is one thing and to do that in Atomfall is completely another. Luckily things are lighter here and not as tedious. There is no fast travel but it's a closed-world which you can sprint in about a few minutes. You tremble, your heart beats like a hammer (not a Metric reference🤞) but you won't stop sprinting! Unlike many of the open-world hugeass games you can sprint as much as you'd like. It's good as I can guarantee you this game is a backtracker's wet dream (isn't really tougher than any avg. survival horror).

Enemies do respawn (except some infected enemies like Thralls in the Interchange I believe), but most threats are trivial once you’re armed. The real danger? Those bullet-sponge Thrall bastards slowly lumbering toward you, everything else is cannon fodder. Unfortunately, the lack of enemy variety doesn't really help it. There are two types of infected, two types of big robots, three factions (Druids/Outlaws/Protocol Soldiers). There are swarm enemies (bugs, bats, rats) which would occasionally show up and don't present any real threat.
ps: You can't side with the Outlaws. They are your typical baddies.

The lack of fast travel combined with respawning enemies though.. It results in something quite unfortunate. That is wanting to skip the enemies if not the entirety of the whole level as you wouldn't want to waste resources (which is far more evident with the enemies like Druids who are easy to kill but doesn't drop bullets and melee is more inconvenient) and/or let them distract you from your objective. I get them wanting the map to be more vivid while also posing a threat but it still ends up being a problem. Respawning enemy patrols are fine but enemy camps should have not been respawned. On top of that, I must reiterate how easy is it to fight. You just sit on your ass and snipe everyone including those damns robots which can melt you in miliseconds if you stick to their asses but can't do ♥♥♥♥ if you stand still only a few meters away. All of a sudden the game becomes a worse Sniper Elite.

While I loved connecting the dots, the story left me cold. It’s more about the situation than emotional and moral stakes. You get snippets of lore from notes, but the characters’ motivations feel thin. There are six endings, but the finale is chaotic—mostly, once again, a mad sprint through areas you’ve already seen. It's kinda anticlimactic. The characters you’ll be in cahoots with are very stereotypical but that’s what you get with soldiers, scientists, and delusional people, eh?

Combat is serviceable. Early guns feel appropriately weak but never unfair (meaning your bullets don't travel to the fkn moon). Melee is fun but gets overwhelming as you move close to the endgame. You have your kick to stagger enemies and it does put a distance but to close that distance you'd need to play more aggressively which doesn't always work (unless you spam in cycles). Stealth is barebones and that's really it. Yup, this is one of those games where enemies have eyes on their back.

Puzzles could’ve been better, but as an action-adventure game (at the face value), it checks the right boxes. The sandbox elements give you freedom, but the RPG (there are no skill checks etc.) and survival mechanics (don't expect to feel the tension of mitigating hunger, thirst, sleep etc.) are certainly shallow, possibly hurting replay value. I don't insist on replayability but seeing Atomfall is ''done and gone'' suits better anyway.

On the plus side, it’s well-optimized, capturing rural England’s atmosphere nicely. Voice acting is neat, and the customizable difficulty is a standout feature. You can tweak combat, exploration, and survival separately, even being able to adjusting enemy behavior (aggression, accuracy, etc.). Survival settings affect loot scarcity and trading from what I was able to gather, exploration is probably the most important one as it lets you disable navigational hints, waymarks, hell, the whole compass.

Atomfall never digs deep, but it’s a solid experiment which deserves its flowers. At €50, given today’s AA pricing, it’s forgivable enough. If you’re craving a compact, choice-driven adventure with a retro-apocalyptic vibe, it’s worth a look.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
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Nicely done. Typical British way of looking at and doing things but regardless NICELY DONE. My son purchased this for me and at first I did not wish to continue the game so I gave him his money back but then it dawned on me what I was playing and how to play it and from that point forward I truly enjoyed it. Not real fast paced unless you want it to be which some would not like but with me being 75 yrs old I could play any way I wished. Much decision making and much thinking in this game which is what I need to keep my old brain working. I recommend this game for anyone of any age

Addition, I am impressed with the so few number of bugs I read about for such a new game and I never experienced any of them. But this is what I would expect from a true British game. Thank you for your work