Atomfall Compared to Fallout, 25-Hour Playthrough Revealed

At first glance, you might mistake Atomfall for a Fallout-style game. Perhaps, you might even think it's an *actual* Fallout game, but set in a post-apocalyptic England rather than the familiar post-apocalyptic America. Atomfall is first-person, post-nuclear (as its name suggests), and features an alt-history design, much like the iconic Fallout series.

Ryan Greene, the art director at developer Rebellion, fully understands where these comparisons stem from. 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 shared with IGN.

“And one of our owners, Jason Kingsley, he's a big Fallout fan, so inevitably there was going to be some parallels. Any kind of survival in the apocalypse, immediately Fallout comes to mind. Those guys are great at what they do, and that's cool,” he added.

However, Atomfall isn’t truly like Fallout at all. This was highlighted by IGN last August when we reported that Atomfall offers something much more intriguing than a British version of Fallout.

Indeed, Greene cautioned that the Fallout comparison could be “misleading.”

“Once you play it for a bit, you're like, oh, this is its own thing for sure,” Greene noted. He also emphasized that Rebellion isn’t Microsoft-owned Bethesda. The independently owned British studio behind the Sniper Elite franchise has crafted an ambitious game, albeit different in scope from an Elder Scrolls or Fallout-sized 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 playthrough of Atomfall, according to Greene, is “probably 25-ish hours.” Yet, completionists can extend that duration “a long way.”

To get a sense of how the game plays, be sure to check out IGN’s latest Atomfall hands-on preview. In this preview, our Simon Cardy took an extreme approach, choosing to kill everyone during his playthrough.

It turns out, players have the freedom to go through the entire game eliminating everyone, and the game will adapt. “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.”

Atomfall doesn’t adhere to the traditional RPG format with a main quest and side quests. 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,” he added.

On the other hand, you can also play through Atomfall without killing anyone. Greene is “fairly certain” this is possible. “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.”