Atomfall Is Less a Fallout Clone and More an Engaging Open World Detective Game

By Elijah Gonzalez | March 21, 2025 | 10:00am

Video Games Reviews atomfall

Atomfall Is Less a Fallout Clone and More an Engaging Open World Detective Game

After its initial trailer, Atomfall almost immediately got reductively labeled as “British Fallout,” and even as someone critical of these kinds of kneejerk labels, it’s easy to see why. Set in what seemed like a post-apocalyptic landscape full of atomic-powered retrofuturistic technology, the main thing that set the trailer apart from its American counterparts was the green rolling hills of its English backdrop.

Having played through Rebellion Developments’ (Sniper Elite) latest, there are unsurprisingly many surface-level comparisons to be made with Bethesda’s output, specifically Fallout 4. However, what I didn’t foresee is that it borrows just as much, if not more, from open-ended detective games like Outer Wilds, offering the player little explicit guidance as they piece together evidence of a government conspiracy. While it has quite a few annoyances, like a frustrating inventory system, so-so gunplay, and a relatively bland cast of characters, it largely makes up for this by letting you explore a cleverly constructed mid-sized open world in an era where big, repetitive backdrops are the norm.

Your journey begins in a bunker, as a bleeding scientist offers cryptic advice and a keycard before setting you loose on the Northern English countryside. Bucolic shires and clear blue streams are intermixed with cobblestone streets and bright red phone booths. It would be quaint if it weren’t for all the jack-booted soldiers, deadly robots, cultists, and the general sense of impending doom. Set in an alternative history five years after the real-world 1957 Windscale atomic reactor fire (the worst nuclear disaster the UK ever experienced), the area around the destroyed plant has been placed under government quarantine for some unspecified reason. As you piece together what happened here and why no one can get out, you end up in the middle of a power struggle between those trying to find a classified facility called the Interchange that seems key to learning what happened here and how to fix it.

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Atomfall Review

But where Atomfall is most interesting is less in its explicit storytelling than how you go about finding answers. Instead of being barraged with map icons and sidekicks spelling out exactly what you need to do if you stand still for three seconds, here the screen is blissfully uncluttered by UI indicators. While you have a trusty journal that automatically documents important leads and a map that fills in when you discover new landmarks, there aren’t glowing markers that direct you toward the next objective. Instead, you need to read in-world signs, ask for directions, and use the compass at the top of the screen to find your way, intuiting from your surroundings where to go next.

It all works because the world isn’t overwhelmingly vast but just large and dense enough to make this feel like an interconnected place brimming with cool finds. You may stumble upon a murder mystery, locate a bunker that begins a treasure hunt for an essential piece of technology, or help orchestrate a prison break. And when you finally uncover the central hub, the resulting web of shortcuts it unlocks makes it clear just how cleverly laid out this world is, entirely justifying the game’s lack of fast travel.

This space is structured so that there are always multiple threads leading to essential locales, allowing you to naturally make your way toward important sights without these discoveries ever feeling too obscure. At the same time, the lack of explicit guidance makes each minor find take on added significance, creating a link between you and the space as you piece together the secrets of this place like a master sleuth.

As you investigate this world, it also becomes clear that this take on Northern England has a strong sense of visual identity: when you leave the bunker at the start of the game, you’re immediately greeted by the vibrant greens of an overgrown valley, sight lines leading towards the destroyed Windscale reactor lit by a supernatural blue glow. It’s a view indicative of the strong art direction throughout, as nature is undercut by human ugliness and a mysterious presence which is the reason for this quarantine. Hulking robots help British soldiers carry out a brutal military occupation against the local populace while cartoon Clockwork Orange miscreants pillage and cultists straight out of Wicker Man skulk through the woods. And most frightening of all are the Ferals and Thralls, humans transformed into glowing blue creatures that indicate something very wrong has happened here. While the story doesn’t go particularly far past pure pulpiness, the visual identity adds just one more incentive to explore this space. And thankfully, these sights shine thanks to the very solid technical execution: on PC, I could run at a smooth 60 FPS in 4K while encountering an astonishingly small number of bugs for this kind of open world game. It all lets you appreciate every detail of this nasty setting.

And the unforgiving nature of this backdrop is also reflected in the gameplay because things are positively brutal, especially up front. Enemies can drop you in an instant, ammo is hard to come by at first, and you can’t run particularly long before getting winded. Many areas are shrouded in toxic smogs that require specific craftable tonics or you’ll quickly die from radiation sickness. This sense of fragility and resource scarcity makes it so that you can’t rely on a guns-blazing approach, which fits nicely with the game’s focus on engaging with this space and finding smart solutions to problems, like making deals with factions to get a free run of their territory.

That said, there are times when a more subtle approach isn’t possible, something exacerbated by the lackluster stealth mechanics that make it very difficult to pick off foes one by one. While the gunplay here isn’t awful, and it’s always satisfying to cleanly drop a foe with a headshot, I never looked forward to the areas where it felt borderline mandatory to cut a bloody path. While you can find Training Stimulants through exploring, which let you unlock new skills, even in the end-game when I was using fully repaired military-grade weapons and had a good number of combat upgrades, the familiar enemy types and general stiffness made these battles clunky detours from exploration. Melee combat is too simple, with no option to dodge or block, and these post-World War II weapons mostly run together, lacking the variety I was expecting from a world with pulpy flourishes like blue zombies and flamethrower-wielding machine men.

However, one of my biggest complaints is a classic when it comes to open world/Bethesda-style games: inventory management. Atomfall’s single most frustrating design decision is that your inventory space is tiny: you can only hold four guns at a time and 16 other items. On top of this, there is a cap on how much raw resources you can carry, which are used to craft important things like healing items, makeshift grenades, and power-up potions. One of the great appeals of this style of game is picking up 50 cheese wheels and every other spare piece of junk you can find, but here, you’re more than likely to hit a point where it simply no longer makes sense to pick up most of what you discover; it’s immensely disappointing to come across a buried treasure only to realize you don’t have the space for it in your puny backpack.

While you eventually discover a linked storage system that uses pneumatic tubes to store and retrieve your equipment, these stations can be hard to find and have a maximum item limit that is similarly too small. While the goal here is likely to make it so that you have finite supplies when out in the world, I wish they came up with some contrivance to make it so you can instantly send items one way to a limitless storage container. Combined with the lack of fast travel, it sets up many tedious return trips to your stash.

The final element holding back the game from its full potential is that, as previously alluded to, the writing isn’t particularly memorable. These characters are thinly veiled quest markers pushing you towards different endings, and while the branching here is impressive thanks to a good number of distinct routes that lead to many interesting corners of the world, the conversations that direct you there are usually terse, brief, and forgettable. While there are a few highlights, like the inexplicable calls you receive from a mystery person at disconnected phone booths, the storytelling isn’t affecting or pulpy enough to leave much impact.

Still, while Atomfall’s flaws likely mean it won’t set the world on fire, it’s a smartly constructed open world game that encourages a genuine sense of exploration. It uses environmental design and a robust lead tracking system to subtly guide without ever being overly intrusive, allowing for memorable natural discoveries. While its world may be smaller than those found in many modern AAA games, it makes use of every square foot while also side-stepping the bloat that plagues many of its peers. It’s not spotless, but overall, Atomfall is a fresh breath of Cumberland air.

Atomfall was developed and published by Rebellion Developments. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

Elijah Gonzalez is the assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.