Atomfall preview: Nuclear disaster survival game is its own brand of weird and wonderful
Comparisons to Fallout and other titles abound, but Atomfall carves out its own place.
I will admit, I thought I’d know the deal with Atomfall entering a media preview event that featured a couple hours of gameplay. A survival-action game about a nuclear disaster, and a quarantine zone featuring outlaws, people driven insane, and even some murderous robots?
“Fallout, but make it England” isn’t really accurate here, however. What I found in Atomfall’s strange vision of the area surrounding the Windscale disaster, a real-life nuclear plant fire that released significant amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere in 1957, was more grounded and, at the same time, far stranger than Fallout’s retro-futuristic vision of the apocalypse. Content with playing coy and letting the player explore its many mysteries, Atomfall isn’t a game that lets you be a super-soldier rampaging through the countryside. Instead, resources are scarce, combat is frequently challenging with a heavy focus on melee action, and every new discovery is a little jolt to the system.
