Atomfall is more than just a British Fallout – it's a truly rewarding game in its own right

Atomfall has been spoken about as a 'British Fallout' for a while now in the run-up to its launch, and while it’s clear why people have endearingly described it this way, to say so is also a huge disservice to what the game is.

It’s obviously distinctly British in its setting and cast of voices with all the slang and aesthetics you’d imagine, from tea being a consumable that lowers your heart rate to how villagers confront military guards (and robots) outside their local.

"Steady on George, it’s got guns on it, y’know" feels both accurate and remarkably silly a line to hear, which made me love it more.

But more than that, it’s also a huge love letter to classic British science fiction like Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – whose name is given to Wyndham Village in the game – and Survivors with some Wicker Man thrown in and a bit of eldritch flair akin to something from HP Lovecraft's The Colour from Outer Space.

Atomfall isn’t a sprawling desolate landscape and offers a more focused setting, using lush countrysides – warped and changed in ways you can’t always immediately put your finger on – to play with ideas of what an apocalypse would actually mean for society beyond the visions of huge nuclear blasts and decimation.

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From the humble pub landlords trying to get by under military occupation (most of whom are itching for a fight) to outlaws patrolling for all they can grab and groups following a more cultish path to become more aligned with the earth, there’s some interesting factions to navigate relationships with.

Survival is a huge part of the experience in some interesting ways. For starters, you’ll need to discover crafting recipes as you travel if you want to stay stocked up on health supplies and ammunition – many of which won’t be easy to find, though you might have more luck trading for them in the early hours before you’re a bit more tooled up for exploration.

Trading, though, doesn’t involve currency, unlike in Fallout which if played right can leave you with pockets stuffed full of caps, ready for when you need to buy yourself out of trouble. Atomfall’s barter system is a simple swap system.

This sounds easy to engage with in theory, but what you’re after could tip a vendor’s scale so much in value that offering everything you own still might not be enough – and if you can’t come to an agreement, you can’t lighten the load of your full inventory. That is unless you’re willing to make a trek to a bunker and use the pneumatic tube system, which can store items for you but makes trading a considerably longer and more drawn-out affair.

Each trader has their own unique likes and dislikes. Some find certain ammo precious, while others value food or Molotov cocktails. You’ll have to experiment a little to get it right.

This adds an extra strain on exploring the world around you as you can often find your pockets full, so I found myself regularly stamping the map, marking caches to come back to once I’d traded out what I didn’t need.

While this could have come across as mundane, it really makes you value and understand better what you’re putting into your backpack. Picking up every little thing just isn’t an option, so you’ll find yourself being a bit of a chooser in a time when beggars don’t have that option.

Do I drop a reliable gun now for a new one that could be useful later? Or wait and make a special expedition for it later on? All your call.

Crafting is key to keeping yourself alive, from salves and bandages to poison bombs and grenades, but as you’ll do this in your backpack menu, doing it during any kind of confrontation is usually a form of suicide. And while the combat is satisfying – this game is by the developer behind Sniper Elite, so of course it would be! – every battle is a balancing act that can turn against you with the slightest slip-up.

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At times, I was taking down an outlaw encampment with arrows only to slip up and find myself surrounded – leaving me running for any cover I could find to quickly bandage up and get my bearings again.

Split into a handful of medium-sized maps, you won’t be fast-travelling from point to point, so every journey, no matter how small, is often fraught with danger and risk of death.

Even as you progress and level up, you’re still always one ambush away from death and the feeling of every encounter being able to tip the scales in the wrong direction is thrilling. I was always on edge and waiting for things to go south whenever I discovered a new encampment or bunker to explore.

At first glance, these maps seem small, but as you start filling them with map markers for key spots to come back to and begin the dance of travelling back and forth while evading patrols of enemies, each area begins to feel almost dauntingly large and never felt tedious to retread.

The story focuses on an unexplained event at a nearby nuclear plant. Based loosely on the 1957 Windscale fire, this nuclear disaster has caused all kinds of trouble, which you wake up in with no memory of how you arrived. Luckily, a local scientist gives you a lead to find out more about the event and find the Interchange as a means of escape.

From lost scientists to the military and cults dotted around, there’s plenty of factions to offer you assistance in the journey of uncovering just what happened and how to escape, but who you want to side with is up to you. With no obvious good versus bad, it’s a matter of perspective.

With a mysterious person on the phone offering advice at each step too – often to confuse and sow seeds of doubt – it’s an intriguing journey and one that had me gripped to find out more.

The leads system is another part that enhances the exploration side of the game. Essentially your missions list, the feature never makes it quite clear which lead is key to the main story and which is a side curiosity, and often, how they’re categorised can switch as you push on.

An important note mentioning a traitor could lead to big decisions and a pay-off that’ll help you with a key mission later on. On the other hand, it could end up leading to an interesting narrative nugget in the world but actually having nothing to do with escaping the disaster.

I personally enjoyed every lead feeling like it could be the most important one yet, and even when they didn’t pan out that way, I had fun on the ride – but if you’re the sort of player looking to blast their way through to the ending at speed, it may be tricky trying to remain focused and blocking out the noise of leads coming in left and right.

There’s choices to be made but as you may hope and expect, the ‘right’ answer isn’t always obvious, if there even is one. Each path has its own rewards, whether that be weapons and upgrades, or helps to grease the wheels of exploration a little more. Hearing out different sides of the same story is deeply engaging and exactly what you want out of an RPG of this scale.

Atomfall is a distinctly British take on the sci-fi apocalypse, but it’s so much more than that. The different parts of the game work together to provide the player an open-ended experience that’s both thrilling and rewarding, in a harsh world that’s begging to be explored.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a fan of Fallout or not – Rebellion has crafted something special. In fact, I’m already back exploring, cricket bat in hand.

Platform reviewed on: Xbox Series X

Atomfall is out on March 27 on PC, Xbox Series X/S, PS5, Xbox One, and PS4.