Atomfall Review. A low-budget S.T.A.L.K.E.R. counterpart in a British setting

Even at the announcement stage, Atomfall looked like a low-budget clone of Fallout without any standout features, so few people followed its development. If the game hadn't been included in Xbox Game Pass on release day, only a handful would have known about it. Thanks to the subscription, more than 1.5 million people played Atomfall, making it the most successful launch for Rebellion studio in the last 30 years. We couldn't pass by this British mix of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Fallout, deciding to personally evaluate the Sniper Elite creators' attempt to do something unconventional.

Despite the superficial resemblance to the later Fallout games, Atomfall is a completely different game in terms of game design and genre. While Rebellion was inspired by Fallout: New Vegas and BioShock, the result, as we noted, is a strange symbiosis of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Atomic Heart. At the same time, the storytelling and world exploration are clearly borrowed from FromSoftware projects. Players are released into an open world without a clear goal or markers, being encouraged to unravel the plot's intricacies on their own. Additionally, the hint system is unclear and confusing, requiring players to search for quest hints within tons of in-game text.

The game takes place in 1962, five years after the nuclear accident in Windscale (Northern England). The government enclosed the area with a giant wall, inside which remain a town, forest, farmlands, and a huge research laboratory called «Unraveling». In essence, a full-fledged counterpart to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone from S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but with a British flair. And there's no less of that in Atomfall than in Fallout: London. A cup of tea to restore stamina? A Cornish pasty as a panacea for all ills? An underground organization in a pub? All of this is present! Those unfamiliar with British culture might find the dialogues with Monty Python references nonsensical, but fans will appreciate the atmosphere here.

The main character, a nameless patient, awakens from «hibernation» and tries to understand what's happening around him. A randomly encountered scientist gives him a key and sends him to «Unraveling» for answers. There is no quest journal or markers — you'll have to find the laboratory and navigate the factional conflicts on your own.

The writers clearly wanted to create a mysterious story in the spirit of The X-Files and Lost, but they clearly lacked the experience. For example, to instill a sense of paranoia and uncertainty in the player's actions, the hero constantly receives calls from red telephone booths, demanding to «kill Oberon» and «trust no one». Meanwhile, the main plot is a patchwork quilt of ideas from other games. Absolutely all the secrets and mysteries of the local lore are guessed instantly, killing the interest in exploring large locations and gathering bits of information.

Cut off from the outside world, the survivors have divided into several warring factions. Here you have the military, who initially arrived to evacuate the local population but got stuck along with everyone else due to complete isolation, bandit marauders, cultists worshipping mysterious mushrooms, as well as ordinary residents and scientists who have to survive among the hostile groups. The player will have to resolve the internal issues of each faction and simultaneously decide which side to take. The military, for example, have established strict orders in the city and kill anyone who looks at them the wrong way. In Atomfall, there is no clearly right side of the conflict. The game does not divide factions into good and bad. In this sense, it really resembles Fallout: New Vegas, but without the interesting dialogues and intricately twisted quests.

At the same time, Atomfall has quite a few intriguing situations and potentially good quests, but they can easily be missed due to the ambiguous «investigation system». The thing is, quests in the game are given as clues, without a specific goal or interpretation. This means you have to read a small piece of text and figure out from it where to go and what to actually do. For example, you learn interesting information from one character that could potentially become your quest. Upon arriving at the indicated location, you need to search every corner to find another piece of information. From it, you learn about an item that opens a secret room. But where to find both is not directly told to you, only hinted at with references to a forest and a ruined dam. In theory, this approach to quests sounds enticing, but the problem lies in the implementation of this system directly in the game.

The menu has a separate tab with all available clues — without any clear sorting or classification. Just a ton of text dumped in one place. You constantly have to sift through all these pieces of information to find the text needed for a quest. However, the quest itself is not listed as such. You always have to keep it in mind. And if you decide to take a week-long break from Atomfall, you're unlikely to remember what was happening or where to go next.

In Atomfall, there are no narrative frameworks or rails that the story must follow. Quests can be completed in various ways, including violence and diplomacy. For example, at a certain point, you learn about a bakery whose owner is hiding something on the second floor. You can go through an entire quest chain to uncover her secret. Or you can simply kill her and take the key from her body, thereby opening the mysterious door. Atomfall does not try to build moral boundaries around the player and gives complete freedom in solving a particular task.

To unlock new sections in «Unraveling», you'll need special mini-reactors. One of these is with the local vicar. When you come to him, you'll have several options for obtaining the reactor: negotiate, complete a task, steal, blackmail, or simply kill him and take the item. Since there are no quests in the classical sense, you never know which character might still play a role. For example, by killing the vicar, you lose an entire chain of quests. In general, the idea with clues and unlimited freedom is interesting in itself, but the implementation fell short.

Despite the absence of map markers (you can place them yourself) and any guides in the game interface, we had no problems with navigation. All the locations important to the plot will gradually appear on the map, and other additional places can be found independently using the system of longitude and latitude coordinates. The open world is divided into five extensive and interconnected maps, filled to the brim with interesting places and content. Unlike many open-world games, Atomfall has a spirit of discovery. You'll never know what kind of mansion stands in the forest, surrounded by tripwires and traps, unless you try to get inside yourself. Unlike S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, a randomly encountered location is not just scenery but a place with a potential quest, secret, or mystery.

Exploring the open world is interesting only until you realize that it is completely static and sterile. It's not a sandbox where you can spend dozens of hours experimenting with different gameplay mechanics and interacting with the environment. Atomfall doesn't even have a change of time of day or weather. It will always be a bright sunny day outside, which doesn't match the «stereotypical» British setting at all. Perhaps fog and rain couldn't be reproduced on the custom Asura engine, but without the change of day and night, the meaning of stealth mechanics and the perception of story moments as a whole is lost.

Even more frustrating is the enemy respawn system. You can spend several hours clearing a large settlement of fanatic cultists to explore it peacefully and not be distracted by enemies in the future. But as soon as you move to another location (and any building or story location is a separate map with loading), then return, all the killed enemies will have revived and be back in their places. It's a questionable game design decision, especially since the game is essentially a story-driven adventure without a role-playing progression system or experience leveling. We eventually started avoiding encounters and ran past all enemies, saving time and ammunition.

More on the important stuff. At the very beginning, you will be offered to choose the game's difficulty and be recommended the «Survivor» level (meaning hard) with the suggestion that this option will reveal Atomfall's full potential. We agreed, expecting serious enemy resistance and the need to conserve all available resources. But in reality, the game turned out to be so easy in every sense that after just a couple of hours, we stopped avoiding enemy encounters and stopped keeping track of our ammunition.

In early trailers, the developers mentioned that it's better to avoid skirmishes with enemies, as most of the time we'd be fighting with bare hands or melee weapons, and ammunition with firearms would be given in small portions. In reality, everything turned out to be much simpler. Not only is there a lot of ammunition, but there's an overabundance. In the first hour, we forgot about the knife found in the ruins and wielded a rusty rifle and a pistol. The weapon threat system, where enemies are supposed to be scared and engage in dialogue, only worked in the trailers; in reality, it's a standard script, after which any enemy still charges into the attack.

The artificial intelligence of the enemies is not very smart and doesn't even try to resist a heavily armed player. Naturally, due to the lack of ammunition restrictions and the simplicity of battles, there's no need for stealth or survival skills. A single incendiary grenade can easily wipe out an entire patrol of marauders and gather a ton of valuable supplies. Difficulties only arise in the bunkers and scientists' laboratories, where mutants roam, which are essentially just «damage sponges», and it's easier to beat them with a club or throw grenades at them. Even the huge robots don't pose much of a threat due to their obvious attack patterns and not particularly smart behavior.

Melee combat in Atomfall is not only useless on its own but also comes with a lot of limitations. Not only do enemies not always react to hits, but the hero also has stamina in the form of a heart pulse, which makes it impossible to strike continuously. The idea of increasing pulse from excessive movements looks quite good on paper. But the implementation fell short again. Throughout the entire playthrough, we never encountered a situation where a rapid heartbeat interfered with aiming or affected other gameplay mechanics. It's just a regular stamina bar, nothing special.

Shooting in Atomfall is decent, but due to the small number of guns, it quickly becomes monotonous. The game features a couple of pistols, two large-caliber rifles, a regular and a double-barreled shotgun, as well as an automatic rifle. The weapon upgrade system is exactly the same as in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Initially, only rusty guns are available, but if you combine two identical ones and add a couple of parts found in the open world, you can get an upgraded version. However, there's no real point in upgrading, as the improved characteristics don't make any difference. A headshot works instantly with any weapon (except on mutants).

There is no role-playing system as such, and the progression system is based on finding resources that are spent on purchasing meaningless perks. Atomfall has only a few interesting abilities that unlock additional gameplay opportunities, like the same weapon upgrade. Otherwise, the game can be completed without them. For example, there's an entire branch for reducing prices in the barter system, but there are only a couple of traders in the game, and they don't have any useful items. Due to the very limited inventory size, you're unlikely to carry useless junk for trading, and useful items are useful for a reason. Yes, the game has pneumatic tubes that work like the chests in Resident Evil, but they're always located in closed areas and far from traders. Hauling unnecessary junk for sale is simply impractical. Fast travel wasn't added to the game, and the stamina system significantly slows down the transition from one location to another.

Crafting is also not straightforward. As in Bethesda games, you can «vacuum» locations, collecting useless junk that can then be turned into useful items. This is quite a useful feature for the first few hours of gameplay, but there's a catch — the hero doesn't have any recipes at the start. Yes, all the necessary survival recipes will be found after the starting location, and by that time, the hero's pockets are already full of consumables, medkits, and ammunition. We only occasionally crafted grenades and incendiary mixtures just to use the game's otherwise idle functionality.

It's also worth noting one interesting feature that turned out to be the most useful of all available — searching for buried items with a metal detector. In the quarantine zone, there are hidden chests and lunchboxes (hello, Fallout 4!) with loot and ammo. Fortunately, you don't need to walk around the entire map with a metal detector: at a certain point while exploring a location, it emits a sound, after which you must use the indicators to determine the spot and press the action button. Some secret places are located in rather dangerous areas of the map, and you have to figure out how to approach them correctly.

Overall, due to clumsy game design, Atomfall transformed from an atmospheric adventure with survival elements in harsh conditions into a classic shooter with a lot of meaningless walking and shooting at constantly respawning enemies. While the game manages to surprise with its style, atmosphere, and quests in the first few hours, by the fifth and sixth hour, the monotony starts to wear you down. We experienced similar emotions during the playthrough of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, only in Atomfall, the locations are smaller and the overall duration is much shorter.

Significant differences that make Atomfall a more interesting game than S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 are the plot and the unusual approach to storytelling. Despite the lack of clear morality and classic quest tasks, the project offers a lot of freedom in gameplay and doesn't impose restrictions. Atomfall could have been a very decent game if Rebellion had more money and experience in creating complex open-world games with survival elements.

Atomfall is a budget game, so it can't boast revolutionary technologies and graphical innovations. However, everything related to the open world and environment looks decent. The locations are detailed and well-thought-out. The forest areas are rich and lush with vegetation. The landscapes are pleasing to the eye and do not tire with monotony.

As for the models — characters, objects, and weapons — everything is done at a decent level. The same can't be said about the animations: they greatly spoil the perception of the game and stand out from the overall picture. The characters' faces lack any kind of expression, and the standard NPC animations were clearly created manually without the use of motion capture.

Atomfall also has very sparse musical content. There's no ambient music in the open world, which greatly affects the atmosphere. The game does have licensed music, but there's no portable radio to diversify the monotonous background sounds while moving from one location to another. During battles, a classic generic track starts playing, which is not memorable at all.

On the other hand, Atomfall is perfectly optimized. The game provides a stable frame rate without any drops, even on budget builds. We didn't encounter any significant bugs or errors throughout the entire playthrough.

Atomfall is a game with potential that the studio Rebellion was unable to fully realize. It's far from being Fallout, or even Metro with BioShock, which the developers aimed for. Essentially, it's the British version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 with zones, labs, monsters, factions, ruthless military, wandering through large locations, and shooting constantly respawning enemies.

Atomfall has interesting ideas and decent gameplay mechanics that can captivate for a couple of hours, but very quickly the game turns into a routine that you want to get rid of as soon as possible. The story campaign and side quests are well done, but due to the system of clues and investigations, you can easily miss a lot of interesting content. The authors clearly shouldn't have rushed the release; they needed to polish all the existing mechanics so that they work in a unified system. In any case, the game is available on Game Pass, and as entertainment for a couple of evenings, it will do.