When I loaded up Atomfall, I started with no weapons or equipment at all. That’s not altogether surprising - it’s a survival game, after all. It’s up to me to go out and collect supplies and weapons. The problem, though, is that everything I needed to get was behind swathes of enemies - enemies that I later had an incredible time fighting against, but that were utterly irredeemably annoying to fight when I had nothing. I died over and over again - and it often didn’t feel like it was my fault. But once I got my hands on some weapons? I felt powerful. This, I think, is emblematic of how Atomfall is brilliant once it gets going.

The Discovery Channel

In terms of setting and charm, Atomfall has both in spades. Recreating the British countryside, specifically the Lake District (a place I’ve been to multiple times, which makes exploring it a bit surreal at times), is a genius move on developer Rebellion’s part because it all feels so hostile. There’s something about the almost picturesque location that lulled me into a sense of security, only for me to walk into a tripwire seconds later and have my legs blown off. The game also has one of my favorite tropes in all of video games - corpses with information on them that helped me find valuable items, and it’s always entertaining to find out the state of things here.

Exploration is utterly amazing. In my time with Atomfall, it was absolutely my favorite part of the entire experience. There’s no real quest tracking system - I was given ‘leads’ that act as general reminders of where I needed to go, but there’s no massive marker on the screen telling me where to go. A few times while exploring, I found a note on a corpse that had the map coordinates of a hidden cache, and rather than suddenly getting a quest marker on my map, I had to actually work out what the coordinates were referring to. The sheer feeling of success once I found the cache was only rivaled by my joy at discovering it was being guarded by six enemies I could blast away in quick succession.

There’s also a metal detector (which, by the way, is completely missable for some reason) which helped me to find other hidden caches that were buried deep underground. I didn’t really use it that much, but I do think it’s an entertaining way of consistently providing supplies while still doing something interesting with the core gameplay loop. 

Druid Destruction

Enemies, however, can be rough. Standard outlaws and druids were fine to deal with on paper as long as I had ammunition and a gun that could be used. But up close? Just not even worth the time. At least one of a roaming gang of enemies will always have a gun and seemingly unlimited ammo for said gun, so running up to them and stabbing them a few times with a knife is out of the question. 

You are, quite literally, bringing a knife to a gun fight.

There’s also the pervasive problem of swarming - I would often scout out an area, specifically in order to make sure I had enough equipment to take down everybody there, only for a dozen more enemies to just show up out of seemingly nowhere. It’s so very easy to get overwhelmed in Atomfall, and it doesn’t always feel fair.

Other enemies are far more interesting. There are rats, bugs, bees, and fish, all of which do chip damage and also cause infection. Status effects build up slowly but surely, so it’s best not to stick around areas like these unless you’re absolutely certain it’s possible to deal with the nest they’re coming from.

Giant robots swarm the countryside, ostensibly to purge lingering radiation, but they also put up a hell of a fight against me. Taking down one of these took up every single piece of equipment in my inventory, and I still died afterward due to the fact that there were other enemies still shooting at me. It’s not worth fighting these things, but they are an absolute marvel to look at. Soldiers back up these enemies, which are more easily manageable, at least in isolation. Once they started to group together, however, I started to avoid them - after all, they all had guns and ammo, and I had very little of either. 

My favorite enemy encounters, though, were with rarer enemies - the Ferals. These are enemies affected by the radiation, who move quicker and who hit harder than other enemies. Two hits is all it takes to be killed by these things, and they’re brilliant tests. Was I willing to potentially die from these blue mutants, or was I so desperate to see what was waiting for me behind the door? Could the reward possibly outweigh the risk? There was only really one way to find out.

Boom Boom Bang

As an aside, the guns in this game feel absolutely incredible to fire. Every shot feels consequential, and a successful headshot is worth a thousand pounds. But melee weapons? They’re a different bag entirely. Whenever I hit an enemy with a melee weapon, they didn’t feel like they were connecting with enemies at all. Evidence to the contrary felt almost like a contradiction, and once I was given the option to use a bow further into the game, I did. The only real benefit to melee weapons was that they were silent, so now that I have a ranged weapon that does the same thing, why would I bother using a knife or a cricket bat in combat anymore?

I think a large degree of the problem here can be laid directly at the fault of the skill tree, which doesn’t feel very thought out. There are around twenty-four different things that can be purchased using skill points, all of which do things that help make the game easier. The problem, though, is that it feels like several of these things should have just been in the game as a default. Take the ability that increases melee weapon damage, for example - it feels like, as a direct result of including this skill, melee weapon damage has been decreased across the board, making them completely useless unless I invested in that particular skill. Or how about the skill that allowed me to defuse traps? It’s hard to see what the point of that one is when I was just able to poke a trap with a melee weapon and run in the opposite direction to avoid the consequences, before going back and completely cleaning up whatever it was hiding.

Atomfall is a really fun time that suffers from several flaws. They’re not quite enough to hurt the experience too much, but they’re noticeable. If what you want is a new survival experience, and you’re willing to put up with them, though, then I think you’ll be very satisfied, especially with the upcoming DLC.

Full Disclosure: A copy of this game was provided by PR for the purposes of this review. Reviewed on PC..