Atomfall

Rebellion Developments is probably known best for their Sniper Elite series. The company has been around since the early 1990s, though, so they have had time to produce all manner of stuff, like the 2010 Aliens vs Predator, the single one of their games I had played before. I was recently made aware that the man on the Youtube channel Modern History TV is Rebellion's CEO, Jason Kingsley ᴄʙᴇ. It's curious that Rebellion don't seem to have attempted a medieval game series.

Git outta here, mate

This year's Atomfall is not a medieval adventure either. Rather, it's a British take on the genre of first person shooters whose setting's theme stems from a nuclear disaster or an adjacent event. The game is somewhat limited in its realization; its biggest flaws being the simplicity of some of its mechanics and writing not being quite plausible at times. Despite that, Atomfall served me a near immersive sim experience that was enjoyable to play through.

Atomfall takes place in an alternate history Lake District, Cumbria, inspired by the 1957 Windscale fire -- apparently quite serious a nuclear accident I didn't recall ever having heard of. In the game, some sort of incident has created a contaminated zone centered on the Windscale Plant. The zone causes electrical interference, preventing radio signals from getting in and out, as well as helicopters and planes from flying within it. The zone has been quarantined; no one can get out. Military units trapped inside have reorganized as the Protocol and are trying -- rather desperately -- to keep order in the zone. Other factions include bandits and druids.

One of the problems in the game's writing is how your character is a complete blank slate, not having anything to do with the story. You wake up in a bunker without a single memory of who you are and how you got there -- and you will never learn any of that, either. A mortally wounded scientist hands you a hacked keycard to get into the "Interchange" and off you go. Your motivation to do anything is questionable, albeit getting out of the zone would probably become desirable in real life.

Outside the bunker, you can answer a call in a telephone box for a mysterious voice to give you a task to kill "Oberon". The voice will call again as you pass a telephone box any time you've made progress in the game. I never found out who or what the voice was -- maybe one of the game's many endings would answer that. I bothered only doing one ending as I wasn't being a complete completionist due to playing on Game Pass.

Surprisingly player-centered

Atomfall may be lacking in depth on some immersive sim systems but with NPCs it's surprisingly competent. It's not easy to design a game whose quest structure doesn't break when the player does what they want. Living NPCs are a huge challenge for immersive sims. How to keep them plausible? What if the player kills someone essential? Many games of the subgenre artificially limit such actions -- but not this one.

The open-ended quest design is one of Atomfall's strengths. You collect leads of people and points of interest, and it's up to you to follow them. Many characters of different levels of shadiness offer you a way out, should you choose to work with them. There's also an achievement for never picking up the phone. I chose the route of the person in the church's basement. How to get there was the only thing I had to look up -- I had missed one nook in the Interchange's medical wing where the key was.

One annoying flaw in the game's dialogue trees is how you have to remember to prioritize the obvious special options because they might disappear should pick something else first. Realistically you'd expect to be able to talk about something important to a person even if you talked about something generic first. Fortunately, you can save anywhere so having to reload due to a mistake is not that big of a deal.

It's also weird how being a stranger makes you somehow less suspicious in the eyes of the Protocol -- you'd think it'd be the opposite. You're free to go in out of the village without getting scrutinized like the villagers. A cool thing is how human enemies are not instantly hostile as long as you're not trespassing, instead reacting rather realistically to a stranger approaching them. They will warn you to back off and having a gun out seems to affect the level of their wariness. You can threaten people yourself too by pointing at them with your own gun. Usually things end up in violence if they're in your way but it is immersive how bandits without ranged weapons in this game first react verbally to someone holding a gun instead of immediately trying to rush you.

Survival horror feel on gameplay

For a 2025 game, most of Atomfall's gameplay sure feels clunky. Part of it may be intentional, Rebellion having gone for a rough, almost a survival horror game feel. Movement speed is slow, you have to wait for stamina to recover after exertion, mantling is limited to preset places, and there's no sliding. Inventory space is not plentiful, although unexpectedly you do have 4 whole dedicated slots for bigger weapons while pistols take generic item slots. The game has only 4 hotkeys to bind weapons onto, however. Pistols are pretty good so you might want to simply keep one of the big slots free for carrying a random weapon for mere trading purposes.

Guns found are generally in a rusty piece-of-shit condition. Eventually you do find better-kept ones and you can also combine two of the same weapon of same quality into one of better quality -- provided you find the skill book for that first. Weapons use generic 'weapon type' ammo, which is not very immersive. I would have liked more specific types of ammunition.

For fun, one should keep track of how long it takes to max out on carried SMG ammo without ever using any -- it will be a while. The carrying capacity for them is low too considering how fast SMGs generally eat through ammunition. I think SMGs are mostly found on soldiers in the village and the prison area. So unless you want to do one man versus an army combat, you won't ever be getting a lot of SMG ammo. And from what I tried, the SMGs are not worth it anyway. Just use a full auto rifle: the bullpup one is good.

I thought the game's revolver was magically self-ejecting empty casings. There are apparently real life revolvers with some sort of capability to do that but the game's rusty piece sure didn't look like complicate enough for that. After paying more attention, I saw that the empty casings were actually still in the gun when you start reloading and then ejecting themselves, leaving the unfired ones in the cylinder -- which is even more magical. Alien: Isolation had the correct way of doing revolvers in terms of immersion: if there is a mix in there, all the cartridges and casings will be dropped out before reloading.

Throwable explosives are amazingly effective even without the two perks that improve them. Atomfall's factions patrol the maps in groups of up to 5 -- a cool feature that reminded me of the first Crysis. A single explosive can easily take out a whole patrol at once.

Needed more depth on character progression

Atomfall's skill perks are somewhat of a letdown. I suppose they're generally nice to have but they're definitely not game-changers in their effects. Skill points are gained from found training stimulants, which tend to be concentrated at certain locations. It took me a good while to find any at first. Only the first column of each skill category is unlocked initially as well; the rest you'll have to find first.

Atomfall uses Rebellion's own engine. It's not the shiniest thing out there but definitely enough for me. On streams, the game's anti-aliasing looked bad but on my PC it wasn't a problem at all for some reason. Ambient occlusion, however, is on the level of Far Cry 3: character models get a massively emphasized black outline around them when they're in front of a surface. It bothered me so much that I turned the setting off. Eventually I did turn it back on because the environments do look at lot better with the depth AO adds.

Just yesterday, Atomfall got an expansion DLC called Wicked Isle. I guess I'll have to actually buy the game down the road for that. I wouldn't mind replaying the whole game and picking another ending -- maybe all of them in turn. Rebellion announced the game has been their most successful launch -- for what it's worth with things being measured with "players reached" instead of copies sold for these Day 1 subscription service releases. But I do hope Rebellion continues making games of this style with either a sequel or something else.