Atomfall Review – Fun in a Post-Fallout World

Atomfall on PS5

The thing that immediately grabbed me about Atomfall was its absolute respect for player choice. Your first minutes inside the bizarre, yet fascinating quarantine zone give you the liberty to either help bandage up a wounded scientist or ignore his injuries completely. The best thing about this moment wasn’t the options, but the fact that the scientist was functionally an essential NPC quest-giver. Right from the get-go my Morrowind senses were tingling, and the game didn’t disappoint when I got my first ending 15 hours later.

Yes, you read that right, it took 15 hours to complete a playthrough of Atomfall, not 100. This doesn’t have the scope and scale of a Fallout title or even The Outer Worlds, but it more than makes up for it in the freedom it allows. I cannot properly express what a delight it is to play a game as compact, dense, and full of meaningful choices as Atomfall in 2025. Just like the classic CRPGs of yesteryear, killing quest-essential NPCs is not just possible here, but viable. Every single NPC in the game can be killed, and unlike more sanitized RPGs like Avowed, they actually react to what you do in the world.

The unfortunate citizens trapped within the quarantine zone mill about, grumble, and run far away at the sound of gunshots. Protocol patrol guards have stages of alertness and will open fire when provoked too much. Every character in the game has a separate value of tolerance to your actions, with infected thralls and unsightly radiated horrors the most hostile of all. The way NPCs behave truly animates Atomfall’s world and helps make the radiated quarantine zone feel that much more lively.

That said, NPCs don’t each have a specified schedule correlating to a day/night cycle or anything (not that there is a day/night cycle here). But what it does with its NPCs fills out the world nicely. Especially impressive is the NPC AI when it comes to combat. The enemy AI is pretty smart. They hide behind barricades and run away briefly when overwhelmed, only to shoot you in the head once they feel the pressure is off a bit. Their pathing is also clean with few instances of them going in a bizarre location or getting stuck on weird terrain. But the best thing about enemy AI is how you can customize it.

Atomfall’s difficulty options and mutators are vast allowing for deep gameplay customization. Players can set enemy encounter rate, enemy perception, aggression, NPC accuracy, and much more.  There’s even a host of modifiers to the bartering system and loot scarcity.  Where a majority of games only let you adjust enemy heath and damage with their difficulty settings and call it a day, Atomfall gives players an entire toolbox of modifiers to experiment with.

Of course, no amount of customization can save a game that feels unfun to control. In this aspect, Atomfall impresses. This is the dev team responsible for Sniper Elite after all, so the gunplay feels precise and visceral. The attention paid to the gun sounds and animation made shooting a far more exciting time than the melee options. Every reload feels especially satisfying, with each weapon having its unique set of realistic animations.

Melee, however, isn’t as glorious. One glaring issue is the omission of any dodge or block against enemy attacks. This becomes especially frustrating when facing off against the fast and relentless Feral pack enemies. Without any defensive options, you’re left either backing up to get some space between you and your opponent, or just running and finding some cover.

The stealth mechanics, while prevalent throughout the game, are unfortunately underwhelming as well. There aren’t enough tools at your disposal for a proper stealth game here. Sure, you can distract enemies with… Molotov cocktails? Grenades? Giving the player stones or…something other than valuable explosives to distract enemies would’ve been nice, but nope. Thankfully, the smart AI saves these stealth sections from feeling totally horrible, but the lack of stealth mechanics is still felt.

Crafting is another small pain point. The inability to store your crafting materials in the dispatch tube (Atomfall’s unlimited base storage) is an inconvenience, especially when your small inventory space fills up quickly—a situation that happens pretty often. I love Atomfall’s storage system, but not including the abundance of crafting materials in it is an oversight. Additionally, there’s no option to craft multiple items at once, further slowing down the process of managing resources.

As far as armor goes, well, there isn’t any. There’s also no cosmetic customization whatsoever. Not having a character to dress up isn’t a bother to me in a first-person game like this, but it’s worth mentioning all the same. Thankfully, you do upgrade and feel that RPG-level progression in the form of skills. I quite like the gameplay/story integration with the skill system here. You basically ‘buy’ abilities through skill points, which are accumulated through Training Stimulants. These stimulants are experimental brain steroids and are only found in research areas, bunkers, or protected zones with lots of enemies.

This leveling progression ties into bartering as well, since NPCs sometimes sell Training Manuals, which unlock new abilities to spend stimulants on. There’s no currency in Atomfall. Every transaction is done through trade. This makes resource management that much more important and fun since there’s no universal exchange currency.

But back to what made my Morrowind sensors go off regarding Atomfall. The way quests are designed naturally encourages organic exploration and experimentation. I played with the exploration settings on ‘challenging’, which turned waypoint markers, flagging leads, and navigational hints off. This often resulted in me investigating zones up close rather than just sprinting to a compass marker. And Atomfall makes this kind of encouraged exploration a treat with its quality atmospheric storytelling.

Whether you’re exploring the creepy and occult-laden Casterfell Woods or crawling through dense sewer networks, you’ll always find an array of doodads, notes, and audio logs that inform the lore and goings-on of the area. Every new bit of info you come across gets added to the Investigation tab, which functions as your quest log. But instead of just directing the player exactly where to go next, it leaves some amount of investigative work for the player to do.

Along these lines, the game has no fast travel system. I found this perfectly fine considering the interconnected nature of The Interchange hub and the option to have unlimited sprint. It also helps that the world itself is fun to traverse. Each of the overworld zones is distinct with its factions and style. The level design is varied too, helped by keeping the open world compact and devoid of empty bloat. There’s very little open space just for the sake of it. Everything has a purpose and has something worth exploring or doing. And the Interchange is the star of the overworld show here. The hub and spoke design of this inner-earth facility is exceptional. A core part of Atomfall’s gameplay loop is unlocking new routes and nodes within the Interchange, and let me tell you, it’s a dopamine hit every single time you restore power to a new area.

The quest structure of Atomfall is similar to the branching layout of The Interchange. There are multiple ways to complete quests and even more ways to accomplish the core endgame ‘objectives’. There are no less than six endings, all of which depend on who you choose to trust and side with. The game does a brilliant job of planting little seeds of doubt for each of these choices throughout your journey. And your choices truly feel like they matter a majority of the time. There’s a satisfying amount of feedback the game gives to your decisions. In town, loudspeakers discuss your recent actions at the nearby prison camp, and whether or not you let key individuals escape. There’s an especially awesome moment near the end of the game where the backdrop of the environment alters because of the choices you made in the atom plant.

This branching quest design and consequence storytelling paint Atomfall in an almost infallible light, but the game does have its story blemishes. The presentation of the intro and endings could be better. The two endings I got left me hanging with very little conclusive glue to seal the experience. I don’t mind a ‘journey, not destination’ type of game, but with Atomfall, the consequences of all those choices really should feel satisfying, and it kinda falls flat at the end. And while the branching quest design is unshakably impressive, some of the writing and characters are just serviceably good.

Despite this, Atomfall is a testament to intricate, compact, RPG design. Proof that ‘bigger’ isn’t always the answer to immersive RPG design. It also shows how wonderful games can be when they respect player freedom. With a solid gameplay loop, enchanting locales, and some delicious quest design, Atomfall is a delightful success of the classic ‘Fallout’ RPG formula.