The villagers of Wyndham are depressing. Caught in a navy cordon with little to do besides lookup on the exploded energy plant that put them there, escape made even much less possible by the bandits and forest cultists on the opposite facet, even the stiffest higher lips are beginning to sag. One such fed-up chappie moans that it’s so dangerous, he’d quite be again in Swindon.
First off, option to disrespect our towering cultural contributions, philistine. He’d have a significantly better time if he truly did make a break for these huge steel gates to the surface, as a result of whereas Atomfall is an unexceptional FPS and solely a good survival sport, its sheer openness and barrels upon barrels of on-tap intrigue make it value poking your head in. If, that’s, you’re capable of go in search of solutions unprompted.
The yr is 1962, and Atomfall’s alt-history retelling has upgraded the Windscale fireplace from merely “Britain’s worst nuclear accident” to “Chernobyl if it was an episode of Pertwee-era Physician Who”. A bit of Cumbria – break up up into 5 sub-regions, together with the village – has been sealed off to maintain the sci-fi oddities in, and also you’re the poor amnesiac sod that’s simply woken up in the course of it.
The primary order of enterprise is escape, Lake District views be damned. When you can potter round, chinwagging with the nicer residents RPG-style, enabling this escape commonly entails combating off criminals and lost-the-plot Druids, both with an assortment of melee weapons or one of many few working weapons that this nook of England can supply. This begins Atomfall off on, actually, its weaker foot. The capturing is respectable, your weapons’ rustiness belying their punchiness, however there’s a sure character to the scavenged arsenal of close-quarters instruments. Sadly, whacking people with a police truncheon or gardening scythe by no means evolves past sluggish left-click drudgery. Now and again you may throw in a kick, knocking your attacker off-balance lengthy sufficient for a couple of free swings, however there’s little compelling motive to stay with melee brawling when you begin scrounging up sufficient bullets (and begin touchdown sufficient headshots) to make weapons your go-to killing machines.
The stealth strategy additionally spends a number of hours undercooked, earlier than maturing via talent tree upgrades: unforgiving enemy detection and the loudness of your primary neck-snap takedown make sneaking a frustratingly all-or-nowt endeavour. That’s becoming sufficient for the environment (post-catastrophic distress, infused with deeply ironic toodle-pippery), however it prevents stealth from being a viable core playstyle till you eat sufficient talent chemical substances to quieten your self down.
The survival facet is best, if streamlined to solely cowl easy scavenging/crafting and a stamina-adjacent heartrate bar. They’re simply sufficient of a priority that you will have to get thinky about buying and rationing crafting supplies, or take care to time your melee strikes to keep away from hampering heartrate spikes, however it’s not so oppressive that you simply’ll be too scared to make strikes which may value a treasured bandage or rifle spherical. Atomfall’s stoney ruins and shady science services even have simply sufficient spare elements mendacity round to encourage stopping and looking, which may result in way more attention-grabbing finds than repurposable junk.
Sure, the actual pleasure of Atomfall lies not in its combating, nor in its surviving, however in rifling via its stuff. It’s a thriller investigation sport as a lot as an motion one, if no more, to the purpose it actually makes use of “Investigations” as an alternative of a traditional mission move. Uncover a be aware, commerce for a key, or just extract an errant point out via dialogue, and you start an investigation into no matter issues most foul are being hinted at. To this point, a lot like normal questing, besides Atomfall makes two essential distinctions: one, you possibly can advance any investigation, in any order, at any time, and two, you’re not at all times advised particularly the place to go or what to search for.
This can be a masterstroke. Not solely are investigations open-ended, capable of be began (and, fairly often, resolved) in a number of methods, however until you’re enjoying with navigation aids on, it turns into actually as much as you to discover leads and seek out proof. I’ve by no means been one to complain about waypoint markers making us lazy however there’s one thing rather more fulfilling about grabbing MacGuffins once I can monitor them down with what little commentary and deduction abilities I’ve left, quite than as a result of I adopted instructions from a UI arrow.
A lot has been mentioned about how Atomfall cribs from Fallout, STALKER, and (in case you’re an incorrect particular person) Far Cry. There are additionally, perhaps unsurprisingly in hindsight, sturdy notes of Riot’s personal Sniper Elite sequence. Not a lot within the sniping, however in the way you’re dropped in a sandbox with one final goal (kill the Nazi/Ditch Cumbria) and no notably strict guidelines on the way you go about it. Sniper Elite 5, particularly, rewards you for creeping into intricate, well-guarded interiors and discovering clues on the way you may be capable of get via locked doorways or engineer sure oberkommando-involved “accidents”. Atomfall is comparable, besides it’s much more trusting of your intelligence, near-constantly dropping leads for investigations which may want finishing in a wholly totally different area, or which may want a couple of different steps accomplished first, or which may intersect with one other investigation. These are the most effective, particularly when new discoveries assist you to realise that older leads had an entire different significance the entire time.
The abundance of criss-crossing traces of enquiry, a lot of which hyperlink not directly to your major objective of escaping, implies that it by no means feels such as you’re losing time, or doing busywork for its personal sake. All the pieces is shifting you alongside, usually in surprising methods. One investigation proved a pink herring for my hopes of egress, with its predominant character fated to both die or disappear, but nonetheless managed to make me assume in a different way a few seemingly unrelated particular person, to the purpose that our pleasant comradeship shattered into deadly mistrust.
Even when not all investigations are as instantly impactful on the climax, Atomfall is filled with examples like this, the place an incidental look or sidestep cascades into an attention-grabbing payoff. It’s a sport the place chancing upon a misplaced notepad results in you springing a navy jail break, or the place stopping at random for a spot of metal-detecting has you stumbling upon the corpse of an NPC you thought you’d saved 5 hours in the past – and, whereas reporting again to their bereft partner, you see the important talent improve guide you’ve been in search of on their dresser. For an journey as freewheeling as this, you at all times appear to finish up precisely the place it’s good to be.
It helps that scampering across the 5 areas may be gratifying in itself, and never simply because three of them are sprawling British countryside. These areas, just like the investigations, are closely interlinked, and also you’d be doing your self a disservice by solely utilizing the signposted checkpoints to maneuver between them. Uncovering the plentiful hidden passageways that be a part of them collectively – the metal threads in a patchwork exclusion zone quilt – is freeroaming exploration at its greatest. There’s a really specific thrill to discovering a brand new door or tunnel, each as a result of its crevices could comprise but extra beginning factors for contemporary adventuring, and since every bypassed lock seems like an act of righteous defiance towards your entrapment. You will escape, one deserted mineshaft or quarantined bunker at a time. And, severely, there are bloody a great deal of these items, stitching collectively each area at a number of factors. I’d like to see the complete playable space visualised – it should seem like a type of aluminium ant colony casts, with out the slaughtered ants.
One side-effect of getting so many investigations, throughout such a density of places, with such little hand-holding, is that it’s extremely simple to overlook stuff. That’s deemed acceptable, although, if not outright intentional on Riot’s half. Past marking some investigations with a “Fundamental Story” tag, Atomfall is content material to sit down again and allow you to determine which jobs are probably the most pressing. I first rolled credit after about ten and a half hours, nicely in need of the 25-hour common that’s been bandied spherical within the information currently, but I used to be nonetheless glad by a journey through which I’d chosen my allies and gathered all of the requisite endgame gear solely by myself initiative.
Additionally, with out desirous to spark a game-length-equals-quality debate, I did respect how Atomfall valued my time. It’s broad sufficient to get misplaced in for a spell (I’ve since dumped one other 9 hours into sidequests and different endings) but doesn’t hassle padding itself out in some mad pursuit of life-consuming open world bigness. Likewise, it by no means makes an attempt to convey a scale past its means, thus avoiding an Outer Worlds-style drawback of feeling disappointingly small by the top. Its dimension is, in Goldilocks measurements, good.
It is a disgrace that subsequent to the investigating, Atomfall’s capturing, sneaking, and cricket batting don’t ship the identical joys. Nonetheless, they’re competent sufficient to not get in the way in which, and with a bit of finesse it’s attainable to get pleasure from prolonged bouts of that wealthy, intricate sleuthing with out doing a single violence in any respect. Don’t let these village pub bores get you down: there are far worse locations for a forgetful soldier-detective to be.
This evaluate is predicated on a evaluate construct offered by the writer.
