Atomfall Compared to Fallout; 25-Hour Playthrough

At first glance, you might mistake Atomfall for a Fallout-style game. Perhaps, even, an actual Fallout game set in a post-apocalyptic England rather than the familiar post-apocalyptic America. Atomfall is a first-person, post-nuclear adventure (aptly named for its theme) with an alternate history design, much like the renowned Fallout series.

Ryan Greene, the art director at developer Rebellion, fully understands the source of these Fallout comparisons. In fact, the development team anticipated that Atomfall would be likened to Fallout from the moment it was unveiled.

"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 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. This was highlighted by IGN last August when we reported that Atomfall is something much more intriguing than merely a British version of Fallout.

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 noted that Rebellion, the independently owned British studio behind the Sniper Elite franchise, is not Microsoft-owned Bethesda. They've created an ambitious game, but 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

An average playthrough of Atomfall, according to Greene, is "probably 25-ish hours." However, completionists can stretch that gameplay "a long way."

To find out how the game plays, be sure to check out IGN’s most recent Atomfall hands-on preview, where our Simon Cardy took a unique approach by killing everyone during his playthrough.

It turns out, you can go through the entire game killing everyone, and it will handle that. "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."

How Will You Play Atomfall?

Keep calm and carry onKill everyone!Kill no-one!Somewhere in-between (let us know in the comments!)

Atomfall 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."