Atomfall Review – Tea and Terror

Atomfall Review

I am a deep-down Anglophile and I’ve loved rambling through the English countryside whenever I’ve visited. I enjoy post-apocalyptic horror, too, and that weird mix of folklore and the supernatural that’s a theme in British sci-fi fantasy. Given the overlapping venn diagram of Rebellion’s Atomfall and my personal interests, I should be head-over-heels in love with the game. I’m not, and the reasons are pretty clear. Although Atomfall has a thoroughly realized setting, its gameplay is less convincing.

A Premise with Promise

Atomfall takes place five years after the real-life Windscale nuclear disaster, and posits a verdant Lake District region of England cut off from the rest of the countryside and filled with mystery, mutants and eccentric and often violent people. You are an amnesiac survivor and must discover the secrets of the disaster and its aftermath. While I think there should be an indefinite moratorium on amnesiac main characters, it does give the player an organic reason to unravel the story.

As you explore, you come across NPCs that have leads — the game’s term for quests — that will point you in sometimes specific — but equally often vague — directions or give you tasks. Actually, often the directions are often pretty opaque. Tracked leads show up on your compass but they might be right in front of you or somewhere on top of a hill in the general direction you’re facing. Some players will love this free-form, minimally directed mechanic. Others might chafe against aimless meandering. In my time with the game I felt both at various times. Happily, this can be mitigated somewhat in the settings menu.

Over time, the list of leads can become unmanageable. Since they can often be completed in any order, it leads to a bit of choice paralysis and narrative confusion. Despite some awkward and inconsistent pacing, many of the NPCs themselves are interesting, droll, quirky and mysterious. While I wished that the game’s throughline was more directed, the leads themselves were often engaging. Their dialogue added to the ambiguity of the world.

Things Fall Apart

Atomfall is not a walking simulator, so combat and other typical RPG mechanics play a big role. The game includes some survival elements but they’re not too granular or punishing, and its crafting system is equally straightforward. Unfortunately, the player’s inventory is limited — still not fun in 2025 — and even requires some manual space arranging a la RPGs from twenty years ago. Again, not fun then and not fun now. It’s always a bit of a mystery where games arbitrarily draw the line between realism and fantasy.

Combat is the one aspect of Atomfall that I almost never enjoyed, in fact actively disliked. While ranged combat with bows or rifles is the most satisfying and efficient way of eliminating enemies, it’s often not practical. Melee combat, whether with a cricket bat, a policeman’s club or an axe, felt imprecise, floaty and unfinished. I hoped that upgrading weapons would make my character a more capable combatant. While upgrades helped weapons deal more damage, they didn’t fix bad animations or add a feeling of weight and solid contact.

Paired to ineffective melee combat are several issues with inconsistent enemy AI and the ability of enemies to spot you in cover or from seemingly absurd distances. The game wants to use audio to give you hints as to nearby foes but it’s always impossible to tell from the sound where they are. Additionally, overlapping enemy voices obscure whatever auditory clues they might be giving. All these frustrations come together in a perfect storm that made me want to avoid combat altogether or simply snipe enemies from distance if possible. Headshots were consistently the solution.

Travel Show

As much as I was disappointed by Atomfall’s combat, I loved the look of the world in equal positive measure. It’s verdant, colorful and lushly overgrown. As a sucker for the English rural countryside, Atomfall’s environments drew me in. It was also refreshing to play a post-apocalyptic game that wasn’t an entirely irradiated wasteland filled with monsters. Although, the world certainly had its share of the supernatural.

Atomfall’s voice acting was a mixed bag. It was often excellent when it came to the main NPCs, but repetitive and less convincing with the rank-and-file enemies and wandering folk. Like the voice acting, character design quality in general was all over the map, not nearly as polished or impressive as the world itself.

Atomfall has some obvious influences, including Rebellion’s own Sniper Elite franchise. There’s lot of Fallout New Vegas, some Stalker, Metro and BioShock, too. Despite that soup of genre DNA, Atomfall never felt particularly derivative. It has a strong identity thanks to the setting and story.

Give and Take

A few weeks ago I went hands-on with a few, curated hours of Atomfall. I felt then the same as I feel now after playing the full game. The world is beautiful and thoroughly convincing, the characters are interesting but the combat lacks polish and finesse. I probably missed a lot of secrets or mishandled some leads, but given the game’s mechanics I’m not enthusiastic about filling in the gaps. Atomfall is one of those rare games that excited and disappointed me in equal measure.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***