Atomfall Is My Favorite Kind of Survival Game - Gamescom 2024

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Whenever I hear of Rebellion, I immediately think of the Sniper Elite series. While the team has made other games, like Strange Brigade, their bread and butter has been Sniper Elite and the spin-off Zombie Army games. So, I was intrigued when I heard Rebellion was creating a new game that has nothing to do with those titles and sometimes goes in the opposite direction. At Gamescom, I got a chance to play the game, and I was blown away by it.

Atomfall is a first-person hardcore survival game where you must search for answers five years after a nuclear disaster hits Northern England. It's an extremely fascinating concept inspired by real-life events (the Windscale nuclear tragedy did actually happen in 1957), and I love Rebellions take on it. The world they crafted is so intriguing due to how the landscape and people have changed due to this event. Settlements have popped up, raiders are scattered throughout, and buildings range from cottages to medieval castles. It's awesome to explore, but the real joy is the gameplay.

This is essentially a game about investigation, but you have to figure out what to investigate as you play. As you run around, you’ll find numerous clues that give you leads, and it’s up to you to discern and figure out where the leads go. Some will lead to caches of items, some give new details about the world, and others will further the story in some way. Everything is dictated by you, without any hand-holding, and I love it. I feel like I was in complete control of how I wanted to tackle my overarching goal of discovering what happened in this town.

Atomfall's first-person gameplay is just as unrestricted but more hardcore. The guns you pick up have longer reload times and scarce ammo, and melee weapons can only do so much. You’ll have to be crafty and pick your battles wisely to survive, and in my demo, I died many times. Each time I tried something different, and I was the most successful when I took time to assess the situation.

There’s a lot of simulation going on regardless of what you choose to do though. Stealth felt very accurate, and I really had to think about where I would go next, while actual combat felt more realistic. It wasn’t like shooting bullet sponges; one shot to the head was an instant kill. On top of that, what the enemy is doing or going to do can be interacted with as well. For example, I was being followed by three enemies in a cabin, and I had them follow me out a door. I lined up my gun and shot one in the head. When I tried to shoot the other, I missed, but there was a huge explosion of flames inside the hut. It turns out one of them was prepping a Molotov, and I shot the bottle, causing it to explode. These kinds of events can happen in different ways throughout the game, and I just love all the little details Rebellion put in to make the world feel more realistic.

This will be a tough one to run on the Steam Deck, though. It’s an intense and gorgeous game, and while the controller support is solid, I have a feeling it will need a lot of power to run well. However, I am hopeful. This is an amazing experience and easily one of my favorites at Gamescom, and playing this on the go would just be such an unreal experience. Either way, this will be a day one purchase for me.

Atomfall can be wishlisted on Steam now ahead of its March 2025 release.

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