Atomfall – three hours with the British take on Fallout

Rebellion’s new post-apocalyptic survival game is nearly ready for release but does a radioactive Lake District hold the same allure as a bombed out Boston?

Unless Bethesda get someone else to make it, it seems very unlikely that we’ll see a new mainline Fallout game until well into the next decade. That seems very strange given the popularity of the Amazon TV show, but there are always alternatives. The fan made Fallout: London, and other similar projects, have proven very popular and while it’s not necessarily a clone, Rebellion’s new title Atomfall takes very obvious inspiration from the series.

We played the game briefly at Gamescom last year, when we had a long chat with Ben Fisher, Rebellion’s Associate Head of Design. He explained that while the game was inspired by post-apocalypse survival titles like Fallout, Metro Exodus, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. there is also a big influence from 1950s era British sci-fi, such as The Quatermass Experiment and Day of the Triffids.

The game also pays homage to folk horror such as The Wicker Man, which is very obvious in the main artwork and the section of the game we got to play. We’re not sure the actual game quite lives up to that confluence of interesting influences but if you’re desperate for a new hit of Fallout-adjacent action, then there’s certainly plenty of interest in Atomfall.

The game is set in an alternative history 1957, where the Windscale nuclear disaster irradiated most of the Lake District and turned it into a mutant-filled wasteland. In the Gamescom demo we saw the remnants of a military presence, trying to maintain order in the village of Wyndham, but this demo started out in the wilds, in an area where the predominant threat is a cult of druids, whose home base is an abandoned castle.

Your goal is to find a cure for radiation poisoning, which a local medicine woman is supposed to know – although it turns out that the druids have stolen her recipe book and you have to infiltrate the castle to get it back.

Rather than a single, contiguous open world the game is split up into a number of smaller areas, although the one we found ourselves in was still quite large and while we could see where we were aiming for on the map, there’re no waypoints or objective markers. This means you have to study the layout of roads and cliffs fairly carefully before pencilling in your route and hope there’s nothing dangerous in the way, that isn’t on the map – which there frequently is.

Although we did come across a few triffids (which look almost exactly like the original BBC adaptation) and some mutated wasps (which could be fairly easily avoided) almost all the enemies we fought were just human druids, armed with simple melee weapons and bows and arrows. The one exception were some zombie-like creatures that could shoot fireballs from their chest but were inert until we came near them – it seemed because they were attached to weirdly glowing fungi, which can be seen in a number of locations, particularly underground.

We did get to chat again, briefly, with Fisher at the event, where we admitted that there’s still a few things we’re not sure about with the game, including exactly how difficult it is. There’s definitely a certain amount of Dark Souls to it, especially in the fact that the game doesn’t pause when you open the inventory, but while death can come quickly the enemies aren’t too difficult to deal with if you have a decent weapon (cricket bats work very well) and don’t get boxed in.

According to Fisher the game is intended to be ‘challenging’ but there are very granular difficulty settings, including the ability to pause properly, so it’s very different to Dark Souls in that sense. The punishment for death, at least in the demo, is also very mild.

Our main concern though is the game’s tone and just how weird and/or comedic it gets. Rebellion is happy to reference lots of iconic British media as an influence but that didn’t seem to amount to much in what we played.

‘What we wanted to do is make sure there’s a kind of internal consistency throughout it,’ said Fisher. ‘If you look at something like Fallout it’s much more of a picaresque narrative, where each vignette can have wildly different tones.

‘Given we’re telling one coherent story there are esoteric characters, that have an odd perspective on the world, but we didn’t want to push the suspension of disbelief too much. The Prisoner is one of our main reference points, because there is some interesting tonal range but overall it’s quite balanced.’

Anyone that’s seen the final episode of The Prisoner will know that doesn’t rule out much but on a practical level we were disappointed by both the dialogue and the voice-acting, both of which came across as very basic and lacking in personality. Many of the druids kept repeating variations of the phrase ’We don’t know what you intend’, which seems very unnatural and on the nose – in terms of what the AI is thinking.

Perhaps some of it is placeholder dialogue but the demo was very action-orientated, with only the medicine woman, Mother Jago, being a named character. And while she didn’t leave much impression we didn’t have much else to judge the game’s storytelling on.

The actual exploration and survival elements are interesting though, with a very limited stamina bar and a heart rate to keep an eye on. Crafting, particularly for potions, is very important and naturally ammo is in very short supply. You can use a metal detector to find more though, which involves following its directions to dig up hidden loot crates, while making sure you don’t back into a triffid while you’re staring at the ground.

Potions aren’t just for health or curing you of afflictions though, as there also seems to be a lot of buffs available, which you’re encouraged to quaff before entering battle. Also, about halfway through our playtime we realised we had a book in our inventory that allowed us to be a lot more stealthy once we read it (we assume the developers put it there to make the demo easier), which helped greatly and made creeping around the castle and the village outside a lot of fun.

Naturally there’re also skill trees, to learn more abilities, although not nearly as many as in a Bethesda title, with Atomfall never describing itself as a role-playing game. There is no doubt it has a lot in common with Fallout though and will certainly scratch a similar – but not identical – itch for fans. Whether it will do anything better than Bethesda’s games we couldn’t say at the moment (although it did seem largely bug free) but our greatest hope is that it makes full use of its unusual British setting.

Formats: Xbox One*, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S*, PlayStation 5, and PC
Publisher: Rebellion
Developer: Rebellion
Release Date: March 2025

*available on Xbox Game Pass day one

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