Atomfall review

Atomfall looks and sometimes plays like a middling survival shooter, but its passions truly lie in exploration and investigation – and it’s much better at both.

• Developer: Rebellion
• Publisher: Rebellion
• Release: March 27th, 2025
• On: Windows
• From: Steam, Game Pass
• Price: £45/$50/€50
• Reviewed on: Intel Core 19-10900K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, Windows 10

The villagers of Wyndham are miserable. Stuck in a military cordon with little to do except look up at the exploded power plant that put them there, escape made even less feasible by the bandits and forest cultists on the other side, even the stiffest upper lips are starting to sag. One such fed-up chappie moans that it’s so bad, he’d rather be back in Swindon.

First off, way to disrespect our towering cultural contributions, philistine. He’d have a much better time if he actually did make a break for those big metal gates to the outside, because while Atomfall is an unexceptional FPS and only a decent survival game, its sheer openness and barrels upon barrels of on-tap intrigue make it worth poking your head in. If, that is, you’re able to go looking for answers unprompted.

The year is 1962, and Atomfall’s alt-history retelling has upgraded the Windscale fire from merely “Britain’s worst nuclear accident” to “Chernobyl if it was an episode of Pertwee-era Doctor Who”. A chunk of Cumbria – split up into five sub-regions, including the village – has been sealed off to keep the sci-fi oddities in, and you’re the poor amnesiac sod that’s just woken up in the middle of it.

The first order of business is escape, Lake District views be damned. While you can potter around, chinwagging with the nicer residents RPG-style, enabling this escape regularly involves fighting off criminals and lost-the-plot Druids, either with an assortment of melee weapons or one of the few working guns that this corner of England can offer. This starts Atomfall off on, honestly, its weaker foot. The shooting is decent, your guns’ rustiness belying their punchiness, but there is a certain character to the scavenged arsenal of close-quarters tools. Sadly, whacking folk with a police truncheon or gardening scythe never evolves beyond sluggish left-click drudgery. Every now and then you might throw in a kick, knocking your attacker off-balance long enough for a few free swings, but there’s little compelling reason to stick with melee brawling once you start scrounging up enough bullets (and start landing enough headshots) to make guns your go-to killing machines.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Rebellion

The stealth approach also spends several hours undercooked, before maturing through skill tree upgrades: unforgiving enemy detection and the loudness of your basic neck-snap takedown make sneaking a frustratingly all-or-nowt endeavour. That’s fitting enough for the atmosphere (post-catastrophic misery, infused with deeply ironic toodle-pippery), but it prevents stealth from being a viable core playstyle until you eat enough skill chemicals to quieten yourself down.

The survival aspect is better, if streamlined to only cover straightforward scavenging/crafting and a stamina-adjacent heartrate bar. They’re just enough of a concern that you’ll need to get thinky about acquiring and rationing crafting materials, or take care to time your melee strikes to avoid hampering heartrate spikes, but it’s not so oppressive that you’ll be too scared to make moves that might cost a precious bandage or rifle round. Atomfall’s stoney ruins and shady science facilities also have just enough spare parts lying around to encourage stopping and searching, which can lead to far more interesting finds than repurposable junk.

Yes, the real pleasure of Atomfall lies not in its fighting, nor in its surviving, but in rifling through its stuff. It’s a mystery investigation game as much as an action one, if not more, to the point it literally uses “Investigations” instead of a conventional mission flow. Discover a note, trade for a key, or simply extract an errant mention through dialogue, and you begin an investigation into whatever matters most foul are being hinted at. So far, so much like standard questing, except Atomfall makes two crucial distinctions: one, you can advance any investigation, in any order, at any time, and two, you’re not always told specifically where to go or what to look for.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Rebellion

This is a masterstroke. Not only are investigations open-ended, able to be started (and, very often, resolved) in multiple ways, but unless you’re playing with navigation aids on, it becomes truly up to you to explore leads and hunt down evidence. I’ve never been one to complain about waypoint markers making us lazy but there’s something much more fulfilling about grabbing MacGuffins when I can track them down with what little observation and deduction skills I have left, rather than because I followed directions from a UI arrow.

Despite lacking modern performance-boosters like DLSS, Atomfall runs smoothly on cheap and premium hardware alike. That includes the Steam Deck, which can produce between 40fps and 60fps on Medium quality. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Rebellion

Much has been said about how Atomfall cribs from Fallout, STALKER, and (if you’re an incorrect person) Far Cry. There are also, maybe unsurprisingly in hindsight, strong notes of Rebellion’s own Sniper Elite series. Not so much in the sniping, but in how you’re dropped in a sandbox with one ultimate objective (kill the Nazi/Ditch Cumbria) and no particularly strict rules on how you go about it. Sniper Elite 5, especially, rewards you for creeping into intricate, well-guarded interiors and finding clues on how you might be able to get through locked doors or engineer certain oberkommando-involved “accidents”. Atomfall is similar, except it’s even more trusting of your intelligence, near-constantly dropping leads for investigations that might need completing in an entirely different region, or that might need a few other steps completed first, or that might intersect with another investigation. Those are the best, especially when new discoveries help you realise that older leads had a whole other significance the whole time.

The abundance of criss-crossing lines of enquiry, many of which link in some way to your primary goal of escaping, means that it never feels like you’re wasting time, or doing busywork for its own sake. Everything is moving you along, often in unexpected ways. One investigation proved a red herring for my hopes of egress, with its main character fated to either die or disappear, yet still managed to make me think differently about a seemingly unrelated person, to the point that our friendly comradeship shattered into lethal distrust.

Even if not all investigations are as directly impactful on the climax, Atomfall is stuffed with examples like this, where an incidental glance or sidestep cascades into an interesting payoff. It’s a game where chancing upon a lost notepad leads to you springing a military prison break, or where stopping at random for a spot of metal-detecting has you stumbling upon the corpse of an NPC you thought you’d saved five hours ago – and, while reporting back to their bereft spouse, you spot the essential skill upgrade book you’ve been looking for on their dresser. For an adventure as freewheeling as this, you always seem to end up exactly where you need to be.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Rebellion

It helps that scampering around the five regions can be gratifying in itself, and not just because three of them are sprawling British countryside. These regions, like the investigations, are heavily interlinked, and you’d be doing yourself a disservice by only using the signposted checkpoints to move between them. Uncovering the plentiful hidden passageways that join them together – the steel threads in a patchwork exclusion zone quilt – is freeroaming exploration at its best. There’s a very particular thrill to discovering a new door or tunnel, both because its crevices may contain yet more starting points for fresh adventuring, and because each bypassed lock feels like an act of righteous defiance against your entrapment. You will escape, one abandoned mineshaft or quarantined bunker at a time. And, seriously, there are bloody loads of these things, stitching together every region at multiple points. I’d love to see the full playable area visualised – it must look like one of those aluminium ant colony casts, without the slaughtered ants.

One side-effect of having so many investigations, across such a density of locations, with such little hand-holding, is that it’s incredibly easy to miss stuff. That’s deemed acceptable, though, if not outright intentional on Rebellion’s part. Beyond marking some investigations with a “Main Story” tag, Atomfall is content to sit back and let you decide which jobs are the most urgent. I first rolled credits after about ten and a half hours, well short of the 25-hour average that’s been bandied round in the news lately, yet I was still satisfied by a journey in which I’d chosen my allies and gathered all the requisite endgame gear entirely on my own initiative.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Rebellion

Also, without wanting to spark a game-length-equals-quality debate, I did appreciate how Atomfall valued my time. It’s wide enough to get lost in for a spell (I’ve since dumped another nine hours into sidequests and alternative endings) yet doesn’t bother padding itself out in some mad pursuit of life-consuming open world bigness. Likewise, it never attempts to convey a scale beyond its means, thus avoiding an Outer Worlds-style problem of feeling disappointingly small by the end. Its size is, in Goldilocks measurements, just right.

It’s a shame that next to the investigating, Atomfall’s shooting, sneaking, and cricket batting don’t deliver the same joys. Still, they’re competent enough not to get in the way, and with a little finesse it’s possible to enjoy extended bouts of that rich, intricate sleuthing without doing a single violence at all. Don’t let those village pub bores get you down: there are far worse places for a forgetful soldier-detective to be.

This review is based on a review build provided by the publisher.