Stiff upper lip
It’s fair to say that us Brits are quite the eccentric bunch. Afternoon teas, crumpets, Morris dancers, Points of View, cricket, Danny Dyer, Eastenders, Danny Dyer in Eastenders, tiddlywinks, the Teletubbies and The ‘British’ Museum are just a small smorgasbord of things we are proud of.
But exporting that eccentricity is never an easy sell, unless you add some survival-lite elements and a classic Government cover up to it. The result? Atomfall.
Travelling around the world created here, I immediately felt at home in the lush forests, village bakeries and stench of oppression of Rural England, even if there was a towering nuclear power plant blown up beside me.
Atomfall instantly grabbed peoples’ attention when it was first revealed. A Fallout-esque adventure set in the north of England sounds like a winner in anyone’s eyes. And whilst the similarities are frequent between Atomfall and Fallout, don’t be expecting an exact carbon copy. Atomfall manages to forge its own path of player freedom. But those of you anticipating walking out of Vault +44 into a nuclear wasteland may also be more at home than you think.
Massive player freedom
Set in a fictional world five years after the real-life Windscale nuclear disaster, you play as an unknown person who’s first memory is of waking up inside the quarantine zone. How you got there and how you will escape are just some of the questions you hope will be answered on your journey.
After a short tutorial, the world of Atomfall is yours to do with as you please. A series of interconnected areas can be explored at your own pace, with an ingenious investigative approach to pushing the narrative on.
For example, during my preview play, I was dropped into Casterfell Woods after a couple of hours of gameplay. In my main playthrough, that was the last main area I visited after starting in Slatten Dale, heading to the village of Wyndham and venturing further afield to Skethermoor. Oh, and of course, the Interchange…
The Interchange holds the deep, dark secret of Atomfall, and is likely to be an area you revisit frequently, without going into spoiler territory. It houses all manner of enemies within as well; from the human factions patrolling areas near entrances, to the robotic monstrosities that can kill you within seconds. There are also plenty of Ferals to be found here. These once human creatures, now glowing blue, feel like the mutants from the STALKER series, and should be treated as such.
Piecing it all together
Atomfall doesn’t bombard you with quests and missions to follow. Instead, it offers leads to follow and investigate, and really reinforces that player freedom mentality in doing so. And you’ll quickly find out that many of the major plot points using this lead system have multiple ways of getting there. One character I was particularly interested in finding had survived a helicopter crash, leaving a recording at the site of where she was planning to go next. However, since I had already been there, I knew she had moved elsewhere. Or rather, been moved, and I would have to utilise my survival skills in order to ‘extract’ her.
Following leads, getting new leads and resolving them is really where Atomfall shines. Those looking for a quick exit and one of the game’s multiple endings may think they have found a quicker way out, only to then get another lead promising more for less, and pursue that instead. Likewise, there will be others intent on uncovering the secret of the Interchange and wanting to reveal it to the world, at whatever cost that entails. Sometimes these leads do boil down to travelling from one person to another only to have to complete an errand for the second person in order to get what you need from the first person. It’s all a bit ‘fetch quest’ at times, but I’d argue the diverse cast of characters and the thrill of uncovering a mystery help dilute the nature of the errands.
Thankfully, these main areas aren’t the largest, because there is no fast travel at all either. There are several large areas attached to these as well that can act a bit like dungeons in a traditional open-world sense. These annoyingly don’t have maps to follow, and some can be as large as the main areas themselves, so having one hidden away as a collectible to find would not have gone amiss.
Exploring can be a dangerous game in Atomfall, as pretty much everyone you meet outside of the village can be hostile. The forests are home to outlaws, Protocol soldiers and druids, the latter of which believe that the radiated soil is talking to them somehow. These factions will often patrol their specific maps in small groups, calling you out if spotted. Retreating from them is never a bad plan.
Clunky combat
You will be armed with melee weapons and the occasional gun, but this isn’t America, and ammo is scarce. Melee combat in first-person is always a clunky affair, and I’m not referring to the sound of a cricket bat hitting someone on the head. Atomfall is no different here. Shooting is far more satisfying as, after all, Atomfall is made by Rebellion who are also in charge of the Sniper Elite series. But it is not a reliable strategy all the time. In the end, a lot of the time it was just far easier for me to run away from any hostiles and lie low until they had passed. The AI doesn’t spend too long looking for you if you are spotted.
There are no slow-motion kills this time around though if you manage to get a headshot from hundreds of metres away.
Survival-lite
The only other thing to be careful of is your heart rate. Atomfall does away with hunger and thirst bars from traditional survival games and opts for a heart rate bar. Any action you perform, even walking, will increase your heart rate. Push it too high, for example by swinging wildly at some feral crows, and the screen will start to blur and you will take extra damage until it drops again. It’s a neat feature that streamlines the survival element and makes it easier for those that perhaps don’t indulge in the genre otherwise, but without making things any easier.
All the other survival hallmarks are present: crafting, limited inventory space and unlockable skills. Your crafting recipes and skills are all very, very limited until you find the necessary books to unlock further options. However, given the freedom that Atomfall allows, it is perfectly viable to avoid combat in its entirety, so having a skill that increases your damage with thrown weapons may not be high on your list of priorities.
Atomfall is an intriguing concept done just about well enough. It won’t be the clunky first-person combat or the fetch quest-esque approach that will be what it’s remembered for, but the surrounding mystery and how you as the player choose to uncover it. It’s perfectly reasonable you may not get every answer you desire when playing, as certain endings can lock you out of that information, depending on where you place your trust.
But without sounding too cliche, Atomfall is perfect Xbox Game Pass material, likely one you will have wrapped up in a week or two, before moving onto something bigger and better.
The Most Important of Links
Explore the Quarantine Zone Early! Atomfall Launches Today, Offering a Glimpse into a Chilling Dystopia – https://www.thexboxhub.com/explore-the-quarantine-zone-early-atomfall-launches-today-offering-a-glimpse-into-a-chilling-dystopia/
Prepare for the apocalypse with the Atomfall Survival Pack – https://www.thexboxhub.com/prepare-for-the-apocalypse-with-the-atomfall-survival-pack/
Play Atomfall on Xbox Game Pass – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/atomfall/9P483QMD1STK/0017
Or Buy The Deluxe Edition – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/atomfall-deluxe-edition/9P3SC2HBDQV5/0010
