Atomfall Review – Bunker Thrill

Atomfall is not Fallout. The comparison has been a popular one, but the developers wanted to make it clear that this new IP from the creators of Sniper Elite is \”its own thing for sure,\” and they\’re right. It is. But there are times when the similarities jump off the screen. Both focus on a post-apocalyptic world full of mutants, warring factions, and–most relatable of all–they both feature a sprawling locked bunker at the heart of their stories. But where the inciting incident in most Fallout games is escaping that bunker, Atomfall asks you to get inside its mysterious facility, The Interchange. It\’s in that simply stated objective that Atomfall\’s open-ended world design elevates the game to be something different and interesting in its own right, even as things like stealth and combat drag it down at times.

Just as Atomfall\’s major brushstrokes are derivative of Fallout and other post-apocalyptic fiction, its story starts with a similar penchant for the cliche. You awaken as an amnesiac in a 1950s-set British countryside. A nearby phone booth rings, and the voice on the other side demands you destroy someone or something called \”Oberon.\” That same voice will call back nearly each time you approach a phone booth in the wild. The cryptic messages don\’t make a bit of sense, but it does swiftly push you toward your objective: Find and get inside The Interchange, a locked-down facility of some sort that seems to have been the site of a science experiment gone wrong. In there, Oberon can perish, if you so choose.

The region\’s people have been left to put the pieces back together following this event, and it\’s resulted in the forming of several opposing groups, such as the military force that claims authority, roaming bandits who use the chaos as an invitation to resort to lawlessness, and a cult of pagans who believe the catastrophe was good, actually. These territorial factions are often isolated to their own regions, which are experienced as a series of open-world maps that can be explored without limitations as soon as you start the game.

\"The — The trail ahead is yours to blaze in Atomfall.

It\’s this element that quickly shines as Atomfall\’s best aspect and remains as such. Many people you meet have stories to share, rumors to spread, and quests to gently push you onto. Excitingly, the game doesn\’t spell this out at its intended difficulty–though, on lower difficulties, it offers a more traditional quest log– and I found this to be a refreshingly hands-off approach. Instead of spelling things out, you merely pick up \”leads\” found by reading notes, speaking to NPCs, listening to audio logs, or just simply going off in a direction and seeing what you find there.

For example, a lead might suggest a vehicle depot was reported to exist at certain coordinates in a specific region. You can then place a marker on your map and follow your compass to the rumored landmark–the game won\’t do it for you. Maybe you\’ll arrive to find it\’s guarded by enemies. Maybe it\’s vacated but locked, so you need to search for a way to open it. What you\’re walking into is never clear, so it\’s always exciting. Early on, your investigations may turn up a few leads, such as where to find nearby traders with rotating inventory, but by the end of the game, I had dozens of leads sorted into categories. The game doesn\’t even tell you which of these are main-story quests and which might just lead you to something like a weapons cache or a few skill points. This lack of answers makes every breadcrumb feel like it\’s worth following.

Because the game doesn\’t restrict where you\’ll go or when you\’ll go there, it wisely sets up several figurative dominoes to fall, no matter the arrangement of your specific adventure. It\’s extremely unlikely you\’d see the world in the same order I or anyone else saw it, so the adaptable world drops enough hints scattered across the map for your leads menu to always grow longer, regardless of the direction you run.

This all culminates in a final act that branches off into many different directions based on who you align yourself with in the story. Even the act of escaping the region demands you pick a side, as several factions plan to escape, while others seek to stay there for their own purposes. This gives good reason to manage multiple saves and experiment with different outcomes if you\’re really enjoying the branching story. In my playthrough, I saw four of its major endings by reloading a save made right before a final choice, but the smaller details are reflected in a New Vegas-like cutscene, too, so reverting even further in the story would have ripple effects of its own.

It\’s rare that a game leaves you to your own devices in this way, and for that reason, across Atomfall\’s 15-hour story, exploring the world never got old. Each discovery felt earned. Most fascinating of them all was when I revisited a hub of survivors and military overseers in a place called Wyndham Village. The first time through, I\’d spoken to some folks, picked up a few leads, then found a transitional doorway to another new map. That was exciting in itself, so I left and went away for many hours. When I finally came back to the village, I noticed that several buildings could be entered and housed several more elaborate leads of their own, including missions that tasked me with saving a woman\’s husband from illness, exposing a secret defector in the midst, and even solving a murder in a nearby church. I could\’ve happened upon any or all of these in my first hour and they\’d have been interesting then, too, but to return to a locale and reveal I\’d basically overlooked several major questlines was an experience few open-world games offer.

This sense of discovery and self-guided story kept me engaged in the face of some of Atomfall\’s weaker parts. Though each map is as intricate as those in the developer\’s Sniper Elite games, sneaking through them is sometimes a chore because of how eagle-eyed enemies can be. Oddly, they also seem to be hard of hearing, so it created a dynamic in which trying to engage with an area stealthily meant circumventing enemies who heard too little and saw too much. I could often run near them and not disturb them, but if I were many meters away without a broken line of sight, they\’d spot me in a way that felt unrealistic and in a manner most other stealth games have conditioned me not to worry about.

Combat is rough sometimes, too. Though melee works well and offers a lot of fun variety in the weapons you can use, like a survival knife, a stun baton, or even a cricket bat, gunplay is cumbersome, just like using first-person shooting (other than with snipers) in Sniper Elite can be. It just doesn\’t feel good to aim with a controller in this game, and it felt familiar, given I just played the team\’s newest Sniper Elite game a few weeks ago. In general, Atomfall feels like a repurposed Sniper Elite in some ways, with lots of assets reused from the WWII series and each map expressing similar design principles, but I didn\’t find these things to be stale like I did in my Sniper Elite: Resistance review, in which I\’d lamented how samey that series has begun to feel. The underlying shared DNA is visible, but the mission design keeps it more engaging and helps it stand out from other Rebellion games. I only wish the team could\’ve distanced itself further from its other games by fixing a problem that\’s hindered those others for a while.

Atomfall might sound like an RPG, but it has many survival-genre leanings, too. The same default difficulty that utilizes the game\’s terrific leads system also makes combat pretty tough because characters hit hard and aim well, and your voiceless amnesiac isn\’t so durable. This is managed with an abundance of crafting recipes like Molotovs and bandages on the go, but I found this system routinely to be at odds with itself. I never found a backpack-capacity upgrade and assume one doesn\’t exist, which felt strange when I\’d be so full of crafting supplies that I could no longer pick up items while also having a full backpack to the point that I couldn\’t use those materials to make more items. Essentially, the resource economy was imbalanced; I had too many materials and too little space in which to stash their end results. I didn\’t always have everything I needed, but I routinely didn\’t have the space for much more anyway.

Like in Sniper Elite, I did sometimes find its unlockable skills bland, such as one that reduces weapon sway (in a game with little weapon sway in the first place) and another that made food items provide more healing, even though I rarely had the luxury of giving backpack space to a Cornish pasty or a loaf of bread. I\’m not sure why, but Rebellion never offers an ability to allow you to crouch-walk faster–the first thing I unlock in any game that has it–despite all the crouch-walking that goes on in its games.

The nice thing about skills this time is that most branches must be found or purchased from traders before you unlock them with skill points, further rewarding exploration. Since I didn\’t find them all, it\’s possible my favorite skill in video games is still out there somewhere in the British countryside, but I outright ignored many of the skills I discovered because of their lack of helpfulness.

Atomfall isn\’t Fallout. Sometimes, that\’s because Fallout is understandably a much bigger, better game. But Atomfall also structures its story and world so unlike typical open-world games, Fallout or otherwise, that the distinction isn\’t merely meant as a slight on Rebellion\’s latest effort. Its fresh, mystery-laden open-world design overcomes a bundle of world-building cliches and a few gameplay hindrances to feel novel and worthwhile the entire time. Often, a new video game IP takes until its sequel to truly establish its identity. The theoretical Atomfall 2 feels like it could be a much greater game someday, so long as it\’s built on this game\’s intriguing quest framework. Here and now, Atomfall is a good game that sometimes gets in its own way, but it\’s the process of finding your unique path through its story that will stick with you after the dust settles.