Atomfall - openworld stalker clone from sniper elite devs - coming March

[Spukrian]

you'll be fighting with cricket bats

Just like in We Happy Few!

 

[Morgoth]

 

[Morgoth]

Coming March 2025.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[pOcHa]

no niggers, a hard-scifi setting then

 

[Zombra]

Hate that amnesia trope a lot, but I don't play Rebellion games for the story.

 

[DemonKing]

Probably usual Rebellion quality jank, but looks like it'll be Gamepass Day 1 so no harm in checking it out on the cheap.

 

[Morgoth]

Atomfall plays like a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with Scouse accents ​

Bleak district
Feature by James Archer Hardware Editor

Published on Aug. 22, 2024

We’ve apparently never written about Atomfall, an oversight I’m now all too happy to correct, having played a promising forty minutes or so at Gamescom 2024. In development at Sniper Elite makers Rebellion, it’s a "survival-action game inspired by real-life events" – specifically the Windscale fire, which in 1957 coated much of northern England in radioactive fallout. Atomfall’s alternative history makes Britain’s worst nuclear disaster even more disastrous, plunging the realm into full-on post-apocalyptica and leaving your good amnesiac self to dodge death with nothing but a cricket bat and whatever you can scrounge out of sheds. I like it! Mostly.

Despite the Blighty setting and, let’s be honest, this preview’s proximity to Fallout: London, Atomfall more immediately evokes the compelling grimness of a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game than the pulpier Fallout. And not just because Windscale was a mini-Chernobyl. While the few non-hostile NPCs I encountered were as chipper as they were Northern, life is hard round Atomfall’s parts. If I was lucky enough to pick a gun off a slain outlaw, it was invariably a rusted piece of shit, and I was only slightly more likely to get ammo for it than I was to find an open, functioning branch of Pret.

Much like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the demo’s quarry town setting of Slatten Dale offered a blend of rural beauty and ravaged horrorscape. That said, this is no hardcore survival sim, and certainly not the kind where you’ll be chopping trees for twenty minutes before perishing to Turbo Dehydration. Atomfall does let you craft various tools and weapons from scavenged scrap, but the only vitals you’ll need to keep an eye on are your health and your heartrate. The latter rises when you sprint, kick, or swing your bat into a blighter’s head, and elevating it too much will darken the screen and muffle sounds. But! You’ll never drop dead because you haven’t eaten any berries for a while. This frees your attention to focus on Atomfall’s actual pleasures, which in my experience so far, range from the expertly unsettling atmosphere to some surprisingly thrilling rusted-piece-of-shit combat.

Bullets hurt: a single rifle round will drop a patrolling baddie, as will a well-placed shotgun blast, so while sneaking through bandit camps and snapping a series of necks is the most resource-efficient approach, aiming true can buy the chance to escape if you’re discovered. But it goes both ways: one wrong’un with a bolt-action can take a huge chunk off your health bar in an instant, while getting caught in the open by multiple shooters is likely a death sentence. The result is that gunfighting becomes a pacey yet deliberate mix of ambushes and hit-and-runs – whenever I could, I’d pick off a single foe before immediately darting back into cover and repositioning before their mates could return fire. Come to think of it, even S.T.A.L.K.E.R. might be a bit too conventionally shooter-y to be an apt comparison; it’s more like The Last of Us, where between the scarcity of ammo and the quiet-shattering fracas that ensues, a gun going off is almost always a big deal in itself.

It's a shame that the melee fighting feels weak by comparison. Terrible, in fact: swings are sluggish yet lack weight, and wonky hit detection means some attacks appear to harmlessly swish through the intended victim’s chest. You can kick as well as bludgeon, but this doesn’t quite click either. It doesn’t have the strength of a mighty Deathloop boot, but it does knock enemies back to just outside regular melee range, requiring an awkward shuffle forward for follow-up strikes to connect. Assuming they don’t simply choose not to. Atomfall isn’t due out until 2025, but all this needs fixing by then, given how much we’ll likely need to rely on brawling to avoid wasting those precious bullets.

I’m also hoping that its grim take on the Lake District – which is free-roamable but split into various zones and dungeons, including the spacious Slatten Dale – can feel like it has a little more going on. I couldn’t cover every piece of available ground in my forty minutes, but I was more likely to be passing through empty space than investigating a new point of interest. And although outlaws were a common threat, they rarely seemed to be guarding much: the vast majority of buildings are barren, with even the most basic resources make for a rare find.

Of course, the upside is that when you do find a single rifle bullet, or tin of delicious long-life meat, it’s like tearing open the wrapping of the biggest Christmas present under the tree. And, for all the world’s lack of liveliness, it is rich in atmosphere. Babbling streams present a serenity betrayed by the crackling radioactive fish, while idling highwaymen hum along to chintzy jingles that limp out of tinny, knackered radios. Even the booby traps have character – before fully settling into the sneaking approach, I carelessly set off a rudimentary alarm comprised of several empty cans tied to a pop-up signpost. As I triggered the mechanism, the scrawled words "PISS OFF" filled my screen, inducing both a gasp and a laugh. Hey, I said Atomfall doesn’t have Fallout’s goofiness, not that it couldn’t be funny.

This personality, and the high-stakes shooting, can take Atomfall a long way. I just hope that the dodgy up-close combat and certain practical elements of the world design don’t hold it back in turn. There’s definitely a good game in here, I reckon, even if those berks at Rock Paper Shotgun haven’t covered it until now.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Lemming42]

Yesss another no-kill game, I'm in.

There's something really profoundly unpleasant and offputting about 1950s Britain, sociopathic social values hidden behind a miserable veneer of pleasantry and politeness, it's a superb setting for a game (even if a post-apocalyptic version with robots). My grandma who was 24 when the war ended described the whole post-war era as "fucking horrible". Should make for a good game.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Morgoth]

Atomfall is a very British take on Stalker, where you explore a post-disaster Cumberland with a cricket bat​

Features
By Phil Savage
published 38 minutes ago
It's a holiday in the Lake District, and the locals aren't very friendly.

It's a sunny day in the Lake District, and I'm bludgeoning a man to death with a cricket bat. Welcome to 1960s Cumberland, where the locals are hostile and the nuclear power station is pouring out ethereal pillars of mysterious energy.
Atomfall is Stalker by way of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. It's an alt-history retelling of the aftermath of the Windscale fire—the largest nuclear accident in the UK's history. Set five years later, the military has occupied a nearby village, robots patrol the streets, and residents—"proper sober folk"—have wandered off into the woods talking about a new purpose in the soil. And that's to say nothing of the roving gangs of outlaws that have made their homes in the valley outside of the village—all face paint and rusty rifles. Mad Max, but with flat caps.

When Windscale—later renamed to Sellafield—actually caught fire in 1957, Harold Macmillan's Conservative government downplayed the incident, heavily redacting reports for fear of damaging the public's confidence in nuclear power. For Atomfall, Rebellion is taking that conceit and running with it. What else was the government covering up? Exploring the hills I find a bunker, abandoned except for the feral ghoul-like creature that instantly attacks upon my entry. So there's a little bit of Fallout here too.

These little mysteries are laced through my time with the demo, and they're the main thing that have me excited for the game's release next year. It opens on a ringing phone box. I answer, and a distorted voice informs me that "Oberon must die". When I talk to someone, or find a particularly interesting note, I'm not given a quest, but rather a "lead"—a breadcrumb trail leading to the secrets of this setting. This is the good stuff—scavenging through a valley, poking around abandoned bunkers and finding clues that point to somewhere on the map. Teasing out mysteries that lead to conspiracies and unexplained phenomena and weird sci-fi nonsense.
It's the actual moment-to-moment play that I'm less convinced by—at least based on the few fights I got myself into. My first attempts were clunky and panicked, wildly swinging with a bat, taking plenty of damage in return. Later, I learned the power of the kick—causing enemies to briefly stagger, and giving me a free shot or two. The kick was upgradeable too—you can upgrade skills thanks to some light RPG customisation, so eventually I had a battle plan that generally did the trick in smaller fights against one or two enemies. Unfortunately for me, most outlaws travel in packs.

There are guns, but this isn't the Zone from Stalker's Chornobyl. Over the course of the demo I find a bolt-action rifle, a double-barrel shotgun and a revolver—all slow firing, all basically falling apart. Ammo is scarce too. When dealing with a handful of outlaws, I might have enough bullets to take out a couple, but any more and I'll be putting myself in more risk for the next big fight. The outlaws sometimes have guns too, so if I don't prioritise the right targets, I'm better off just turning around and running away.
In all it's functional, but scrappy—a little bit janky and generally unrefined. Admittedly I don't know the progression curve here. With the military stationed nearby, presumably more powerful weapons will appear later in the game. There's also a lot of time left for the team to nail the overall feel of combat, but for the demo at least I ended up resorting to stealth where I could. Even then, patrols could be unpredictable. I attempted to sneak up on a few outlaws, but often they'd just turn around for seemingly no reason, opening fire on the guy who's just crouched in the middle of the road behind them.

There's a crafting system too, but I don't get the sense Atomfall is going heavily down the survival route. My recipe list here is basic: I can craft new bandages for recovering after a particularly brutal fight, and molotov cocktails for helping to avoid a future brutal fight. There are a handful of materials I can scavenge from loot caches and outlaw corpses, but—at least based on what I've seen—the onus is on making tools that help in combat rather than working through the standard survival crafting tree.

Despite my lingering uncertainty around combat, the Atomfall demo was one of the highlights of my time at Gamescom. And sure, some of that was because I spent a few years living in the Lake District—I am being very catered to here. But on a broader level, it's an interesting direction for a Stalker-esque FPS to take. It's bright and vibrant, a surface level idyll that promises something darker and more mysterious beneath the surface. And I'm fully prepared to haphazardly battle my way through hordes of deranged locals, cricket bat in hand, in order to get at it.

 

[Zlaja]

Does your health regen automatically? I did notice the player having some first-aid kits in his inventory, but he didn't seem to need to use those.

It seems like you can stunlock the shit out of enemies with melee attacks. Even with the knife and not just heavy weapons.

Unfortunately, they just had to shoehorn some mundane crafting system into the game. So sick and tired of this shit. Every damn game in many genres has you picking up boring loot like "scrap", "wire", "tube", and that is so boring. Ugh!

 

[BrainMuncher]

Why do developers do this

 

[Zombra]

Why do developers do this

Probably to prevent you from instantly replenishing ammo or other resources in the middle of combat.

 

[deuxhero]

Why do developers do this

I think it originated in MMOs, where they were trying to slow the player down for economy/keep just barely fun reasons and devs just copied it without understanding why it was there.

 

[Modron]

Why do developers do this

Consoles. Controllers only have a limited amount of buttons, this doubles the amount of actions they can bind to them.

 

[Stavrophore]

Female enemies, unless it can be modded out - hard pass.

 

[Morgoth]