First person shooters have come a long way, but when we look back at the 35-year history of what became the dominant genre in all of video games, we've seen a sort of peak and then a return to the roots of what made FPS games fun. Now, the genre on Steam and consoles is split between trying to modernize the gameplay and push graphics, while other games are bringing it back to the roots via the "boomer-shooter" subgenre.
And then you have Atomfall. This effort from Rebellion who are best known (at least recently) for the Sniper Elite games, takes a sort of "double-A" approach. With a price tag of $50 US and a good 15 to 20 hours of gameplay waiting for players, this title falls into where Rebellion has been sitting with the Sniper Elite series, but the approach this time is dropping the player into a quarantined area in an alternate-history 1960s England. Violence is around every corner in this space, but your character is given the tools and information that can break a stalemate that will have far-reaching consequences for the game world.
If any of this sounds familiar, it's because Atomfall doesn't fall terribly far from the tree. It crosses up solid, if not incredibly innovative FPS mechanics with some of the history and danger of STALKER and Fallout to make for an interesting take, even if none of this feels exactly new. Now, I'm not alleging any use of AI in the concept or development of this game, but when I started planning this review and started detailing out the premise and basic gameplay loops for Atomfall, it does seem like it's something ChatGPT could've spit out. I say that because everything that this game cribs from is fairly recent, and the remixing of a real-life nuclear power accident (namely, the Windscale fire) with a sci-fi plot seemingly old as time (morally-deficient scientists! big crazy discovery! hide it from the world! develop it to create power overwhelming!) just seems like something that AI is really good at doing right now.
In Atomfall, you - stop me if you heard this one - wake up in this quarantined "zone" with no memory of how you got there, and are given one objective: leave alive. Quickly you'll learn that while there are some weirdly mutated plants, other small fauna, and some automated robot-type constructs to face, the big threat is the people that got trapped in the zone when the quarantine started years prior. As you explore several fairly expansive areas separated by loading screens, you'll clash with at least some of the denizens that have split off into groups. There's the town of Wyndham Village and the military types that are trying to hold power over them with an iron grip, and you'll also run into lawless bandits, the "druids" who are basically a primitive cult, and the occasional scientist who worked for B.A.R.D., the British Atomic Research Division, and at the Windscale power plant before the big event that caused the quarantine.
Much of the plot and exploration centers around a place called the Interchange, an underground area that houses many of the game's secrets but until this point has been cut off from the rest of the people in the quarantined area. At the start of the game, however, you're given a keycard that has been hacked to allow access, and with this you will be able to travel to any of the game's major areas (eventually - the Interchange takes a while to "develop" to do this) and work to find a way to break the stalemate and create a future for the quarantine zone and the people inside it.
Atomfall feels like a survival-lite shooter with its limited inventory for weapons and gear, but it doesn't impose needs for food, water, or sleep. Food is used simply to regenerate health, and bandages and medkits are important as your character will only regenerate health up to a rather low point that leaves you only one or two hits away from death. There are dangerous areas that will require you to ready up some kind of resistances, but once you have the tools and progress to handle these, they're mostly trivial.
You do have the opportunity to barter with some NPCs for items as well as learn crafting recipes for various consumable items and can also craft improved versions of guns out of worse-quality versions, but you could also complete the game without doing much trading or crafting at all. Additionally the game supplies an RPG-like skill tree to fill in as you go, but the game has no level-up systems - instead, players must find and loot special "training stimulant" meds which immediately add skill points. Luckily, the game sprinkles these throughout the world fairly liberally, and if you're into finding secrets, you'll find no shortage of goodies including these training stimulants.
What does make Atomfall feel like a survival game is a persistent scarcity of ammo. While your capacity to carry ammo is generally fine most of the time, there's often just not much to collect from slain enemies or from what's lying around, even if you are looking for secrets, and this is probably at its worst in the mid-game. Players can use stealth and/or melee weapons to handle what seemed like many situations, but I found that judicious use of ammo, switching to any ammo type you fill up on, and hitting headshots and weak spots can make the game perfectly doable entirely with guns on the game's medium difficulty. To that point, I did very little melee or stealth so I can't really say with confidence how that feels or how fun it is - especially towards the endgame.
There was one small innovation I haven't seen in other games, and that's the use of a heart rate system that's shown on the game's interface in place of a traditional stamina bar. As you run, jump, vault over walls, climb, fire guns and swing melee weapons, your heart rate rises, and once it gets over 160 or so, you start getting slower and more sluggish with these actions, and you need to calm your movements to get the heart rate back to a manageable level. You can even use skill points to improve your fitness so that your heart rate is less of a problem, but can still be a concern in extreme action sequences. It's a great way to turn an age old staple of video games back to something with a little more realism, and doesn't stop you from being able to do things like swing a weapon or run for cover - you're just temporarily worse at them.
The structure of Atomfall is such that your character tracks "leads" in their journal, and players can toggle tracking of one at a time on the HUD. The game's main quest remains as an objective in the list along with everything else, and as you meet more characters and fight your way through the game's dangerous and mysterious old laboratories, bunkers, caves and other dark areas, you'll also pick up and complete side objectives too - but the game simply lists out everything active when your journal is open, and while the game certainly does block off access to many places at the start, it is still largely a free-roaming open world to explore.
After describing all of this, I feel it more difficult to recommend Atomfall than when I started writing this review. Overall my conclusion is that Rebellion made a game which is "fine" - functionally competent from start to finish - but with a choice of endings that are all weak and unsatisfying. The best example I can give you of how Atomfall fails to be remarkable is to say that my favorite innovation across the entire game - after all of the effort Rebellion put into it - was its intelligent and well-reasoned replacement for a traditional stamina system. Yeah, a heart rate is the thing that feels the most original in this game.
Beyond feeling largely derivative, Atomfall also doesn't scratch any particular itch for gamers. The world is competently crafted, stealth winds up being vaguely useful but never seems to be a focus, the light RPG elements are nice-to-haves but fail to change anything fundamental about how we play, and the action is generally exciting and well-designed but really just comes across as "acceptable". Atomfall feels like a great example of a decent but forgettable game: the overall experience is better than average and I didn't find any glaring flaws that ruined my time with it, but with the $50 price tag, this game can only garner the most vague and unenthusiastic of recommendations.
6/10
Atomfall is available on PC via Steam or Epic and on Xbox Series consoles and PlayStation 5. A review copy of the game was provided by Valve Software via Steam. The normal price for the game is US $49.99 and a Deluxe version can be had for $69.99 that includes few helpful goodies as well as a pass to receive the story DLC which will be released some time after the base game. Finally, a "Quarantine Edition" of the game includes the Deluxe version as well as the soundtrack, graphic novel, and poster - all digital versions - and a T-shirt