At first glance, you might mistake Atomfall for a game in the Fallout series. Perhaps, even, an actual Fallout game set in a post-apocalyptic England rather than America. Atomfall is first-person, post-nuclear (as the name suggests), and features an alternate history design, much like Fallout.
Ryan Greene, the art director at developer Rebellion, understands the comparisons to Fallout. The development team anticipated these comparisons from the moment Atomfall was announced.
"Once you play the game, you realize it's not Fallout, but yes, we knew," Greene told IGN. He added, "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."
However, Atomfall isn't really like Fallout at all. IGN highlighted this difference last August, noting that Atomfall is a more unique game than a British version of Fallout. Greene himself 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. He emphasized that Rebellion, the independently owned British studio behind the Sniper Elite franchise, isn't Microsoft-owned Bethesda. While Atomfall is ambitious compared to Rebellion's other games, it doesn't aim to be on the scale of 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 playthrough of Atomfall, Greene mentioned, lasts "probably 25-ish hours." However, completionists can extend their playtime significantly.
For a detailed look at how the game plays, check out IGN's recent Atomfall hands-on preview, where Simon Cardy explored a more violent approach, killing everyone during his playthrough.
It turns out, you can indeed go through the entire game killing everyone, and the game will adapt to this 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."
Atomfall doesn't feature a main quest or side quests in the traditional RPG sense. Instead, Greene described it as "a spider web of connected story." He 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. Greene is "fairly certain" this is possible. "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."
