Atomfall PC review — Terrific world design held back by terrible combat

I’m not all that into modern open-world games. I do however really love the open zone approach. Instead of one, large empty world filled with procedurally generated wilderness, these games are made up of several handcrafted zones. Add immersive sim elements and I’m completely sold. Atomfall does all of this, all wrapped up in a tightly paced tennish-hour campaign and lots of choice baked in. Unfortunately, awful combat and related choices hold the game back from greatness, but I still mostly had a great time with it.

The plotting in Atomfall is succinct. Your character wakes up in a bunker within a quarantine zone, a voice on a nearby telephone commanding him to kill Oberon. Another character in the bunker gives you a keycard and sends you on your way. One of the best things about the game is that it doesn’t give you a quest marker like almost every other similar game. Every time you learn plot-related information, you get a new lead that gives you an idea of what you need to do. Despite this, it’s usually extremely clear where to go, which is a very pleasing accomplishment.

You have a map that’ll get points of interest added to it as you learn about them from NPCs or notes, or you can just find them yourself by exploring. Atomfall is divided into four open zones and plenty of large interiors. You play the game by learning new pieces of information bit-by-bit and by meeting other characters. The game has six possible endings, each of which requires you to ally yourself with a specific character. One of these is very clearly the best possible outcome, though, and the rest range from pretty bad to an existential threat against the entire planet.

Suffice to say, I very much loved exploring here. The zones are all detailed and full of interesting things to find, the plot is decent, and the characters are all wonderfully brought to life. Atomfall has a large crafting focus, so you’ll find crafting ingredients all over, as well as specific craft recipes. You’ll also find skill books and items that give you skill points, although these are somewhat rare to the point that you’ll go most of the game with very few skills. Certain skills are fairly useful, but you honestly don’t need any of them, save for maybe the one that reduces how much stamina running uses up.

I say “stamina,” but it’s actually your character’s heart rate that’s being governed technically. Running, jumping, and attacking all raise your heart rate. If it gets too high, you have to wait for it to lower or you’ll be tuckered out. There aren’t any vehicles and there’s no fast travel, so you’ll be running everywhere on foot. You’ll find hostile enemies from three factions all over. You can choose to sneak by these or confront them directly, but avoidance is honestly the best choice and that’s due to the aforementioned terrible combat.

Atomfall is very melee-focused, as most enemies will attack you with melee weapons and ammo is somewhat scarce. Unfortunately, the melee combat is some of the worst I’ve seen in years. Weapons have a normal and heavy attack variant, along with a kick that staggers foes, but that’s it. You can’t dodge and you can’t block. Oftentimes you might not be able to get out of range of enemy attacks in time, especially for the common enemy jump followed by a downward strike, a highly effective move that your character can’t do. As a melee fighter, your character just feels kind of useless.

On top of that, the melee weapons are kind of screwed up. I almost immediately obtained a spike bat in my playthrough. This weapon kills most human enemies in just two hits, so I used it for a very long while. Of course, depending on the attack, enemies can kill you in two hits as well on the default difficulty. Guns fare better, but you honestly will usually not have enough ammo to deal with the majority of enemies, as your ammo capacity is quite limited, as is the amount of crafting ingredients you can carry. With that said, you can pretty much drown yourself in healing items, so you truly don’t need to be too careful (although the craftable bandages don’t really heal you much.)

As for stealth, you can crouch and try to sneak up on enemies, but they’ll usually see you. Takedowns don’t give you invulnerability frames and make noise by default. Simply put, unless an enemy is by themselves, takedowns aren’t often practical. Overall, stealth is mostly useless unless there’s tall grass nearby (it’s not 2010 anymore, Rebellion!) But in a terrific choice, most enemies won’t attack you on site. They’ll spot you and tell you to back off. If you do, they usually won’t engage. Sometimes they will, though, as this mechanic is a bit spotty. The worst enemies are the robots, which are often hard to sneak past (or staring directly at your objective without moving) and tend to kill you immediately.

Now, I have to say that I very much enjoyed Atomfall despite how much I hated anything related to the combat. These sorts of games are rare and I’ll always relish the ability to go into a game that has no handholding in its quest and world design like this one. Different quests have outcomes you can choose, of course. Some of these can make entire factions hostile to you (or vice versa,) which I appreciated. Everything in the game is tied together via a research facility called The Interchange, opening up new connections to the different areas as you power it up. There are plenty of ways to get to each zone from others, which I loved.

I got three of the six endings and my playtime on Steam is at about 15 hours, although my in-game timer showed that I played for a little under 11. Meaning that, if you play it straight through and don’t constantly reload to use as few supplies as you can like yours truly, you can finish this game quite quickly. I don’t mind this, though. I enjoyed how focused and succinct it is. Despite my hatred for the fighting (and enemies constantly respawning in a game with such limited resources was an awful choice,) I did really have an overall great time with this one. Better combat would have massively improved on that, but at least we got a game that’s happy to let you explore without the usual handholding.