Atomfall: The Definitive Review
AtomBALL, more like. As in I’m having one. Look - it’s just really good, ok?
I have spent the last five months playing three games: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Sniper Elite: Resistance and Avowed. Imagine my surprise, then, that on encountering Atomfall that it appeared to be a very pleasing blend of all three. This experience had a dreamlike quality, as if Atomfall had coalesced from fragments of experience and unfulfilled desires from my deepest unconscious, producing a gloriously tight 8/10 banger. Realistically speaking, I don’t think I could have hoped for better. The game is really nice when it comes to satiating my personal gaming peccadillos. Acquisition is great, and curiosity is commonly rewarded, the game systems ripe for comedic exploitation.1 Exploration itself is pretty delightful - I’ll always be a sucker for rugged European landscapes and woodland and, as I’ve stated many times, I am very much a bunkers-and-tunnels fetishist. Despite a considered and perhaps necessary conciseness, they’re both fantastic here. Atomfall’s greatest success comes in how it balances superb tunnel-scouring with pastoral wandering. It does this by heartily indulging in the romance of both, with a key underground locus for the narrative being gradually revealed thanks to forays far and wide in the upstairs terrain. These two environments interlock almost poetically, revealing a dab hand or two at work in the game’s structure and guidance, or at least a wise and studious adherence to its inspirations. All in all, it’s a charmingly confident and well-expressed slab of ambition for a studio renowned for a one-note hardy perennial. In fact it’s such a departure from the Sniper Elite mould that I’m fucking thrilled Rebellion has pulled off a successful ImSim-lite.
Once you get your hands on it, it’s amusing to look back at how Atomfall was described in the pre-release discourse. Fallout UK, STALKshire, Far Catterick etc. That late-stage hands-on burst brought the game into much tighter focus and certainly worked as a means of re-framing expectations - at least for me. Yet in all the post-release coverage, I haven’t seen the game’s most apparent inspiration be mentioned at all. Not even once. If you take the PR blurbs at face value, Atomfall is born of Fallout New Vegas and Metro 2033, with a sprinkle of Bioshock. Sure, I can see elements of all three here, but the most resonant for me is Deathloop. That mix of rocky landscapes and subterranean militarised underground. The four discrete maps, the investigation narrative with its specific ‘leads’ terminology. The Interchange and how it links to the four overworlds, just like the infrastructure of Blackreef that Colt uses. The Metroid toing-and-froing as a means of learning the maps, the explanation of skill upgrades as part of the world lore.2 It’s blindingly obvious to me that Atomfall is built on Deathloop’s skeleton and I’d be very surprised if all this was genuinely accidental. And don’t get me wrong - I think this is fucking brilliant. I’d love to see a whole lot more games follow any of Arkane’s leads and thinking again, my praise for Avowed as a streamlined, focused, achievable and sustainable videogame is perhaps because it too is following the beautifully contained, manageable structure of Deathloop. I don’t really care if that’s true in practice - the theory is enough to remind me how magnificent a game Deathloop really is and mentioning it again is what really counts. But then, we can think of Deathloop and Avowed as games for older, experienced, connoisseur audiences and in that respect, I increasingly suspect Atomfall is no different.3 Much has been spoiled about Atomfall’s easter-egg sight gags and references, and many of those betray the intended viewership. I don’t think there are many Gen-Z gamers that would see three skeletons in a bathtub, wearing quite specific hats, and immediately know which Sunday-evening sitcom was being referenced. Likewise, it’s easy to point at Atomfall’s remix of obvious-for-the-genre systome tropes and decry it as lazy or derivative, when I think they’re actually an illustration of reserved tastefulness.
I saw a nice opinion piece on Atomfall’s combat, theorising that firearms are a last resort option, rather than the mainstay of any skirmish. It made the argument that the design doesn’t want you to shoot things, but rather work out ways to circumvent combat or engage in it without losing resources. I’ve certainly found a certain degree of arms supremacy in melee weapons, running a kind of cricket bat uber alles approach. The bat is definitely a superweapon thanks to its interruption and stagger-inducing qualities. A lot of the time, you don’t really want to fight anyone that has a gun in a head-on fashion, and you can generally avoid these people, whereas the ‘zombies’ and ‘very blue zombies’ launch themselves right at you. The cricket bat’s ascendency is assured as you set about whacking the shit of these bullet-sponge baddies instead of shooting them. Likewise, it’s much easier and far less costly to leap on a prop and swing the bat at swarms of infected rats than it is to tackle them with any other method. It’s nice to think that considering Sniper Elite’s rifle centralities, Atomfall choses to make them a less-than-optimal option. I’ve also loved the emergent combat, which feels more involved and organic than skirmishes in Sniper Elite. The enemy classing is extremely straight but well-implemented, and thankfully easy to cheese on the default combat difficulty. I had great delight exploiting ladders and cover to corral enemies that are actually quite tricky if caught out by them in the open. And of course I do resort to shooting if some fucker is chipping me from distance, although if you have the necessary outbuildings and obstacles, it’s great fun to try and sneak yourself an outflanking manoeuvre and batter them with your hardy slab of finest willow. I’m yet to tackle the better-armed Protocol dudes or the stompy robots, and will likely save that experience until the game forces me into it. I do like the sense that I’ll most likely get a choice in the matter, given the game’s sensibilities thus far.
Taste and sensibility; a fine couplet for a quietly ambitious game like Atomfall. There’s a sense that it shares a creative, authorial sensibility with Rebellion’s other great concern, 2000ad. That’s not just via an Atomfall story appearing in Judge Dredd Megazine, but in the stirring of familiar tropes - both narrative and systemic - into a pleasing brew. Despite a lot of that familiarity, Atomfall rarely feels stale. The fact the game is a certified, million-player success has me absolutely delighted. For an independent UK dev-publisher to pull off such a feat is a moment to savour given the conditions of the industry, its markets and the world as a whole. However, Atomfall is slightly too conservative for my tastes, as I’d much prefer a far more lurid 1970s setting with attendant 1970s sci-fi horror tropes. Especially seeing as that decade starts with The Andromeda Strain4 and ends with Alien, and includes superb stop offs like The Demon Seed, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the dizzyingly great Phase IV. Of course, Atomfall is expressly British but even still, I find the edgier side of it far less kookily weird or cosmically disturbing as a Tom Baker Dr Who arc. Its codes of military oppression and scientific amorality don’t quite match the bleak, grimly harsh realities of Blakes’ 7’s finer moments. Despite referencing The Prisoner by token, it fails to capture the insular madness, the abstracted technology or the defiance of the will at the heart of McGoohan’s singularly amazing show. It’s a bit more Gerry Anderson perhaps, more UFO and Space 1999 in its softness and bedrock of conventionality. It’s 2000ad at its safer, directly translational middle. Atomfall doesn’t succumb to the lure of a twisting, delightfully funny Alan Moore Future Shock or a furious Pat-Millsian burst of violent intensity and imagination.5 In fact, Deathloop runs a lot closer to those spheres. Atomfall is perhaps conventional out of a self-imposed conservatism. A means of risk minimisation for startling new company direction, so I can’t be too harsh on how veiled its allusions to Quatermass or Wyndham really are. A bit more Ballard for the sequel, please?
[21]
I had a hoot when scouting a Protocol camp and accidentally slipping down a cliff into a trespass area. With a clump of plants to hide in, I was able to murder six or so Protocol soldiers by shooting, hiding and then waiting out alarm cycles. With all the soldiers in range dealt with, I did the looting and scooted off with two brand new and very useful firearms and a load of ammo.
Minor spoilers, but there's an incredibly strong correlation between the upgrade mechanisms of Prey and Atomfall, in the sense that what powers the enemies also allows the learning of new skills and upgrades. I was deeply upset that it steered (coincidentally) quite close to Still Wakes the Deep with its origin story, but hey - you can’t have everything.
It's worth noting that Atomfall offers a wonderfully atomised approach to difficulty customisation, which I insist is from Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. I actually tweaked very little - just the enemy detection sensitivity to edge up the stealth advantage.
Absolutely banging bunker porn, btw.
Pat Mill’s self-published revisioning of 2000ad, Spacewarp, was released in 2022 and is fucking bonkers. A highlight for me was a Bad Company of sorts where bacteria had enlarged to human scale, with a band of characters fighting it out for survival. What astonished me most was that the fire of his raw imagination was still burning so brightly that he could pen an entire anthology of great ideas, 40+ years after coming up with Nemesis The Warlock and Slaine. I mean holy fuck, what if Rebellion could get him to do videogame concepting?!?!?!?!