At first glance, you might mistake Atomfall for a Fallout-style game. Perhaps, even, an actual Fallout game set in a post-apocalyptic England rather than a post-apocalyptic America. Atomfall is first-person, it's post-nuclear (as its name suggests), and it features an alternate history design, much like the iconic Fallout series.
Ryan Greene, the art director at developer Rebellion, fully understands the comparisons to Fallout. Not only that, but the development team anticipated that Atomfall would be likened to Fallout from the moment it was announced.
“Once you play the game, you realize it's not Fallout, but yes, we knew,” Greene told IGN.
“And one of our owners, Jason Kingsley, he's a big Fallout fan, so inevitably there was going to be some parallels in that any kind of survival in the apocalypse, immediately Fallout's going to come up as a thing. And those guys are great at what they do. And that's cool.”
But Atomfall isn’t really like Fallout at all. This was highlighted by IGN last August when we reported that Atomfall is something much more intriguing than a British version of Fallout.
Indeed, Greene warned that the Fallout comparison is “misleading.”
“Once you play it for a bit, you're like, oh, this is its own thing for sure,” Greene said. And, Greene pointed out, Rebellion isn’t Microsoft-owned Bethesda. The independently owned British studio behind the Sniper Elite franchise has created an ambitious game, relative to its other titles, but it's not on the scale of an Elder Scrolls or Fallout.
“The reality is, here’s this very successful franchise and we're version 1.0,” Greene continued. “To be compared to those guys… thank you very much… Yes, we appreciate it because that’s a skillful team that's making that stuff.”
Atomfall Screenshots
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An average Atomfall playthrough, Greene said, is “probably 25-ish hours.” However, completionists can extend that duration significantly.
To get a sense of how the game plays, be sure to check out IGN’s latest Atomfall hands-on preview, where our Simon Cardy took a rather aggressive approach, killing everyone during his playthrough.
It turns out, you can go through the entire game killing everyone, and the game will adapt to that choice. “You can kill anyone or everyone if you choose,” Greene confirmed. “That's fine. We have multiple finishes to the game, so some of those would shut down if you were supposed to work with them throughout, but you'll find multiple other routes to finish the game and achieve a result.”
AnswerSee ResultsAtomfall doesn’t have a main quest or side quests in the traditional RPG sense. Instead, “it's a spider web of connected story,” Greene explained.
“So even if you sever one thread, you can usually find another thread that leads you back to the overall mystery.”
Conversely, you can play through Atomfall without killing anyone. At least, Greene is “fairly certain” you can. “I've made it about nine hours in, probably close to halfway running at a pretty fast dev play speed and killed no one,” he said. “I'm fairly certain you can do it and there's no gating of having to kill anyone ever.”
