Post-apocalyptic adventurer Atomfall has been described as an English Fallout video game. Both due to the setting and that comparison, I was excited to try the game, and so it was great to see it head to Xbox Game Pass. When the game first came out I played it for around forty five minutes, got to the village area and then left never to return to that particular playthrough. About a month back I retried it and this time it all clicked. I enjoyed this enough that despite not owning it, I purchased the first DLC for the game; 'Wicked Isle'. I will include that DLC within this review rather than doing a separate review for it.
The game takes place within an alternate timeline in which the very real fire in 1957 at the Windscale nuclear power plant (Britain's worst nuclear accident), resulted in a quarantine zone being set up around the plant. No one was allowed in or out of the quarantine zone, so everyone living in the area now find themselves cut off from the rest of the country, both due to being sealed in, but also due to the disaster causing a strange electromagnetic field that prevents messages getting in or out of the area. The army were called in, but too found themselves trapped within the quarantine zone, and now brutally enforce the areas they control, calling themselves 'Protocol'. Outside their area of influence, bandit groups arose, as well as a strange druid like cult who worship the land.
Five years after the disaster and quarantine was enacted, your player character awakens in a bunker within the zone with no memory of how they came to be there. An injured scientist in a hazmat suit trades your assistance for a special key card, they tell you that a secret facility known as the 'Interchange' is the key to escaping.
Atomfall is a first person adventure game that has light elements of the survival genre to it. You don't need to manage food, water and sleep, but you are able to craft various items such as health, bombs, and temporary stat increases. There is also a skill tree that requires B.A.R.D (British Atomic Research Division) upgrades to advance through. Skills you can unlock aren't particularly exciting, but they are useful. Think traditional stuff like increased skills with melee and ranged weapons, and the ability to craft items faster. Combat is one of the weaker areas of the game, and for much of my time I avoided it. I don't think it was the intention, but I ran rather than fought a lot of enemies until later in the game when I was better armed. This led to me speed running through certain areas, such as the cultists base in Casterfell Woods, meaning I likely missed parts of the game, even if it made sense for my character. Weapons are limited and basic, and ammo is in short supply, but enemies can be dealt with. Human enemies can be dispatched easily enough, there are also ghoul like infected humans that come in various types. Going back on the Bioshock influence, there are giant robots who can be battled to take their power cores. I didn't once engage in combat with the robots as I didn't really see the point. Then there are the animals, very basic looking rats and eels (and crows in the DLC) who attack you in packs in a bit of a lame way.
It isn't all gunplay, you get a hacking device that allows you to turn off gun turrets and restore power to doors, and a metal detector which can be used to uncover buried items. Enemy A.I isn't that great, the enemies tend to swarm you rather than using any other type of tactics, but with combat being not essential this wasn't an issue.
Is this really an English Fallout? Yes and no. It shares elements of that series with others such as Bioshock, and even this years Avowed. Rather than open world, the game takes place within six large areas (seven if you also include the DLC island). Central is Wyndham village, my favourite place due to being a safe area controlled by Protocol. Skethermore is also Protocol controlled, while Slatten Dale is bandit controlled. Then there is Casterfell Woods where the cultists roam, and including the island from the DLC, you have Midsummer Island that contains both cultists and bandits (and takes a more supernatural bend rather than sci-fi to its story). That is all without mentioning the Interchange. There is no fast travel option available in Atomfall, so this requires you to be intelligent in completing missions and side quests, as it can take a good while to travel from one side of the game world to the other. The Interchange is essentially a second way of travelling around the game, this vast underground facility allows you to pop up in any of the games areas (excluding Midsummer Island). A key part of the game is removing the lockdown from the facility, feeding into the end game task of visiting Oberon. With the lack of fast travel I caused more than a few headaches for myself, arriving at my destination only to realise I had left a key item behind back in the storage container system at the Interchange. It did add to the immersion not fast travelling.
The world building is fantastic, and is one of the stronger elements of Atomfall, it feels like a living breathing world that tells a lot of story just with how items have been arranged, such as crashed copters and roadblocks. As amazing as the world building is, unfortunately the main story really sucks. Your goal is to simply escape the zone, and pretty much all the quests revolve around helping various people who reckon they can help you escape should you assist them. You don't need to complete these various tasks at all, the free form mission structure means you could just side with one character and follow their path to the end of the game. Wanting to get the most out of the game, I played all the quests up to the end points, but I couldn't shake the feeling it was a bit pointless in terms of story, only important to me for getting to see more of the fantastic world. Your player character is a huge missed opportunity, it takes the old school approach of a silent protagonist who seems to exist purely as a proxy for the player to be in the game world. Anyone expecting any sort of grand reveal of who this player character actually is, or how they came to be in the quarantine zone will be disappointed, I know I was. It's a shame with a world as well built as this that the protagonist is such a dull nothing. I brought the DLC as I heard it was more of the same. It naturally integrates its new area without feeling like it doesn't belong in the pre-existing world. It added an extra five hours onto my playthrough, so when the end credits rolled I was at twenty two hours. I admit, I had imagined the game would be a good sixty to seventy hours, but with a wafer thin story, and a sometimes samey feel to what you do, I appreciated the shorter runtime.
Another strange thing were the power cores. These are set-up as if they are the game's version of Bioshock's 'Adam', yet despite much being made of securing these rare power cores, there are far, far more of them than you would ever need. It felt like a wasted opportunity, I wish they had been required more, or even used as a means to get through your skill tree.
I loved Atomfall, I thought the way the player is giving control of how they get through the game to be wonderful, and the British setting was fantastic. I wish the story had been more involved, it is so basic here that it almost feels placeholder, like the developers forgot to put the actual story into the game. The lore and world building is really good, making me able to look past the sometimes janky combat, but the main plot was so barebones as to make me feel that I probably won't return for a second playthrough as there wasn't a single engaging story beat. Some of the side quests were fun and added to the world, but far too many of the main quest lines involved fetch quests that had a similar feel. Despite that, I thought Atomfall was a very good game, perhaps just missing out on being an essential play.
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