Apparently we never wrote about Atomfall, an oversight I’m now happy to correct, having played a promising forty minutes of it at Gamescom 2024. In development at Rebellion, the makers of Sniper Elite, it’s an “action-survival game inspired by true events” – specifically the Windscale fire, which in 1957 blanketed much of northern England in radioactive fallout. Atomfall’s alternate history makes Britain’s worst nuclear disaster even more disastrous, plunging the kingdom into a complete post-apocalyptic world and leaving your amnesiac self dodging death with nothing but a cricket bat and whatever you can scavenge from the sheds. I like it! Mostly.
Despite the Blighty setting and, let’s be honest, the proximity of this preview to Fallout: London, Atomfall more immediately evokes the compelling darkness of a STALKER game than the pulpier Fallout. And not just because Windscale was a mini-Chernobyl. While the few non-hostile NPCs I encountered were as cheerful as they were Northern, life is hard around Atomfall. If I was lucky enough to scavenge a gun from a slain outlaw, it was invariably a rusty pile of crap, and I was only slightly more likely to get ammunition than I was to find an open, functioning branch of Pret.
Much like STALKER, the demo’s quarry town of Slatten Dale was a mix of rural beauty and ravaged horror. That said, this isn’t an extreme survival sim, and certainly not the kind of game where you’ll chop down trees for twenty minutes before dying from turbo dehydration. Atomfall lets you craft various tools and weapons from scavenged junk, but the only vitals you’ll need to keep an eye on are your health and heart rate. The latter increases when you sprint, kick, or swing your bat at a bastard’s head, and raising it too high will darken the screen and muffle sounds. But! You’ll never drop dead because you haven’t eaten a berry in a while. This frees up your attention to focus on the real pleasures of Atomfall, which in my experience so far range from cleverly unsettling atmosphere to surprisingly thrilling rusty-shit combat.
Balls hurt: A single rifle bullet can take down a patrolling baddie, as can a well-placed shotgun blast. So while sneaking into bandit camps and snapping a series of necks is the most resource-efficient approach, aiming well can get you out of trouble if you’re discovered. But it cuts both ways: a single clumsy enemy with a bolt-action rifle can whittle your health bar down in an instant, while being cornered by multiple shooters is likely a death sentence. The result is that gunfights become a quick but deliberate mix of ambushes and hit-and-runs—whenever I could, I’d take out a single enemy before immediately scrambling for cover and repositioning myself before his comrades could return fire. Come to think of it, even STALKER is perhaps a little too conventional to be an appropriate comparison; It's more like The Last of Us, where between the ammo shortage and the silent crash that follows, a weapon going off is almost always a big deal in itself.
It's a shame that the melee combat feels weak in comparison. Terrible, in fact: the hits are slow but lack weight, and the wonky hit detection means that some attacks seem to pass harmlessly through the intended victim's chest. You can kick as well as baton, but that doesn't really work either. It doesn't have the strength of a Deathloop power boot, but it's do push enemies just outside of normal melee range, requiring awkward forward movement for follow-up shots to land. Assuming they don't simply choose not to. Atomfall isn't out until 2025, but this should all be ironed out by then, given how much we'll likely have to rely on brawling to avoid wasting those precious bullets.
I also hope that this grim version of the Lake District, which is freely accessible but divided into several areas and dungeons, including the spacious Slatten Dale, can give the impression of a little more going on. I couldn't cover all the available terrain in forty minutes, but I was more likely to cross an empty space than investigate a new point of interest. And while outlaws are a common threat, they rarely seem to keep watch: the vast majority of buildings are empty, and even the most basic resources are a rare find.
Of course, the upside is that finding a rifle bullet or a can of delicious, long-life meat is like tearing open the biggest Christmas present under the tree. And for all the world’s lack of liveliness, it’s rich in atmosphere. The babbling brooks have a serenity betrayed by the crackle of radioactive fish, while the idle highwaymen hum to the chintzy melodies that escape from battered tin radios. Even the traps have character – before fully settling into the stealthy approach, I inadvertently set off a crude alarm made of several empty cans attached to a retractable signpost. When I triggered the mechanism, the scrawled words “PISS OFF” filled my screen, eliciting both a gasp and a laugh. Hey, I said Atomfall didn't have the silliness of Fallout, not that it couldn't be funny.
That personality and high-risk shooting can take Atomfall a long way. I just hope the dodgy close-quarters combat and some of the practical world design don't hold it back in turn. There's definitely a good game here, I think, even if those idiots at Rock Paper Shotgun haven't covered it so far.
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