At first glance, you might mistake Atomfall for a Fallout-style game. Perhaps, you might even think it's an *actual* Fallout game set in a post-apocalyptic England rather than the familiar post-apocalyptic America. Atomfall is a first-person experience set in a post-nuclear world (hence the name Atomfall), featuring an alternate history design, much like the renowned Fallout series.
Ryan Greene, the art director at developer Rebellion, fully understands the source of the Fallout comparisons. The development team anticipated these parallels from the moment Atomfall was revealed.
“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 brings Fallout to mind. And those guys are great at what they do. And that's cool.”
However, Atomfall isn’t really like Fallout at all. This distinction 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. He also pointed out that Rebellion isn’t Microsoft-owned Bethesda. The independently owned British studio behind the Sniper Elite franchise has crafted an ambitious game, though it's not on the scale of an Elder Scrolls or Fallout experience.
“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 their gameplay “a long way.”
To understand how the game plays, make sure to check out IGN’s most recent Atomfall hands-on preview, where our Simon Cardy took a radical approach and killed everyone during his playthrough.
It turns out, you can complete the entire game by killing everyone, and the game can handle that scenario. “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 a side quest 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.”
