Atomfall Review

Among the overgrown ruins of nearby homes and other buildings, a lone bright-red phone box sits eerily up ahead—the phone rings. Do you answer it? Atomfall, from developer Rebellion Games of Sniper Elite fame, is their attempt at a brand-new survival experience that looks to mix up the traditional “objective chase” formula. The game does some interesting and cool things, but I found the overall experience bogged down by a lack of clear direction. It doesn’t fully commit to what it wants to be, resulting in strange choices and omissions that left me scratching my head. One thing needs to be made clear: Atomfall is not Fallout.

On October 10, 1957, the United Kingdom suffered its first nuclear accident when a fire broke out in Unit 1 of the Windscale Site on the northwest coast of England, in what is now Sellafield, Cumbria. This catastrophic event serves as the basis for Rebellion’s latest title. The disaster was far worse in this alternate world, leading to the surrounding areas being quarantined for years. The game picks up five years after the event, with you trapped inside the quarantine zone around the Atom Plant, which glows eerily in the distance. Other survivors include roving bands of outlaws, overly zealous military factions, and even more terrifying, unnatural threats like glowing blue feral creatures.

You play as a mysterious wanderer who wakes up in a bunker with no memory of who you are, why you’re there, or what has been happening. Given your first lead and a small knife, you’re quickly hurled into an unforgiving landscape with only one goal — survive and escape. What follows is an interesting and dynamic story as you track down and investigate various leads in your quest to make it out of the quarantine zone alive. One of the defining aspects of the game — which Rebellion has heavily marketed — is that every character you encounter can be killed if you so choose, including generic NPCs, shopkeepers, and even major narrative figures. Atomfall incentivizes multiple playthroughs, as your actions can lead to different endings (a playthrough taking around 15 hours), all while uncovering the truth about what’s going on and who is on the other end of those mysterious phone calls.

Atomfall introduces some pretty neat mechanics, including the aforementioned “leads” system and — my personal favorite — its wide range of accessibility and difficulty options. Instead of a traditional objective-based approach, Atomfall lets you tackle and investigate whatever interests you most. Creeping through abandoned areas, marking the latitude and longitude points on the map, and following up on clues made me feel like a post-apocalyptic investigative journalist. Every scrap of paper I found felt like biting into one of those mystery chocolates, never knowing what was inside. This open-ended and mysterious approach extends to the game’s default setting, which hides from you which leads are tied to the main story progression. This means you could follow a trail of clues expecting a big payoff, only to discover it leads to a dead end with just some resources. Fortunately, if this doesn’t sound fun to you, Atomfall’s robust options allow you to adjust it.

In addition to standard difficulty settings, you can fine-tune the game to suit your preferred playstyle. You can adjust enemy perception & aggression (or even how many enemies appear), loot scarcity, whether ammo is discarded when reloading, and whether you receive hints about main story leads. It’s an impressive list, and kudos to Rebellion for putting so much care into it. If any aspect of Atomfall feels too punishing, the settings menu is well worth a visit.

This same attention to detail extends beyond difficulty tweaks, with the team also prioritizing accessibility. Atomfall offers more than 30 settings to make the game as comfortable and playable as possible for people with disabilities. These include high-visibility overlays for NPCs, adjustable text and HUD options, audio cues for aiming or interacting with objects, and control assistance features such as automatic movement, firing, and traversal. Camera effects like sway and bobbing can also be disabled. With so many options, Atomfall is more accessible than many games, and I have to applaud Rebellion for its commitment.

Instead of featuring large, seamless open-world areas, Rebellion has opted for four smaller “main” zones, each with its own smaller, dungeon-like areas to explore. While loading screens separate these regions, they are still packed with secrets and details to uncover. However, I find it odd that there is no fast-travel system. I initially assumed this was to reinforce the game’s survival aspects, but as I progressed and had to backtrack frequently for keys and other objectives, the lack of fast travel became frustrating. There is a shortcut system known as the Interchange, which connects different regions, but as I played longer, I became less interested in constantly running back and forth.

Atomfall feels like a strange amalgamation of ideas, seemingly unsure whether it wants to be a full-fledged survival game and how many role-playing components it wants to integrate. From a survival standpoint, it lacks core genre mechanics such as weapon degradation, hunger, and thirst meters, or even a day-night cycle. The only character stats you need to track are your health and heart rate, the latter affecting accuracy. While you do need to manage ammo, healing items, and crafting materials, survival is more about dealing with dangerous enemies than managing environmental threats. And make no mistake — you are not a bullet sponge. You’re more like a bullet saltine cracker. Just a few shots or an unfortunate grenade at your feet will end you.

The risk-reward balance in survival games is crucial, as the tension of managing danger is part of the fun. Unfortunately, in Atomfall, I rarely felt that the risks I took were worthwhile. Like in most survival games, you can loot enemies for supplies, but the rewards never felt worth the danger. The same scrap and string I could scavenge from abandoned buildings were often all I found on fallen foes. Ammo was somewhat more common, but I could just as easily find it in boxes and crates. Instead of improving my situation through combat, fights often resulted in either breaking even — recovering the resources I had used — or worse, suffering losses.

Many of my gripes with Atomfall stem from its design choices, but there are additional oddities that consistently frustrated me. Why can’t the game notify me when I’ve already searched something? It tells me if something is empty, but if I left a single item behind due to lack of inventory space, there’s no indication. Speaking of inventory, why can’t I store crafting materials or ammo in storage tubes? I can stash grenades, rifles, and first-aid kits, but not shotgun shells or scrap metal? This restriction seems arbitrary and discourages scavenging. Other small annoyances add up, like the inability to mark or track enemy groups on my compass, or the lack of an ammo counter when quick-swapping weapons. These may be minor issues individually, but together, they wore on me over time.

Even though Atomfall didn’t fully click for me, I believe its unique approach to the survival genre will attract a passionate community. I applaud Rebellion for its extensive accessibility settings and innovative “Lead” system, which I hope they refine in future games. However, for every aspect I enjoyed, there were two or three strange omissions or design choices that held the game back. I hope Rebellion revisits this IP in the future, but next time, I’d like to see Atomfall feel more cohesive and fully realized.