Summary
- Atomfall offers a unique FPS/RPG survival experience in an alternate 1960s England.
- The trading system is easy to navigate and streamlined, respecting players’ time and effort.
- Players must balance items with merchants for resources or key upgrades, with the barter mechanic weaving narrative and gameplay together.
Rebellion Developments’ Atomfall has just been released. After gaining popularity with its long-running Sniper Elite franchise, the studio switched gears in some big ways compared to Sniper Elite for its latest title. An FPS/RPG survival hybrid focused around a narrative mystery, Atomfall drops fans into a gorgeous yet dangerous quarantine zone in an alternate 1960s northern England. The plot is based on the real-life Winscale Nuclear Power Plant incident, and players are tasked with exploring the zone while uncovering the circumstances of the unnamed protagonist’s arrival in it, and what really happened behind the scenes of the disaster.
Atomfall‘s world is simultaneously strange and familiar, being a picturesque British countryside inhabited by both human and unnatural forces. It contains a number of standard elements within its genre mashup, including a selection of NPC merchants. But due to the nature of the story setup, Atomfall‘s trading system is designed and incorporated in a convenient and relevant manner without being bogged down by some of the frustrations and clutter that can sometimes crop up in them.
Atomfall is available on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
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Atomfall’s Bargaining System Offers a Great Deal
Atomfall’s Trading System Circumvents the Expected Standards
Many titles have either a collection of merchants who offer an overabundance of useless or eventually trivial goods, or lock the most desirable gear and upgrades behind an arbitrarily large amount of gold equivalent thereof, and often both of these together. However, Atomfall‘s barter system instead opts for a much more streamlined approach that respects players’ time and effort, and feeds into its other aspects in an intelligent and satisfying way.
How Atomfall’s Barter Mechanics Integrate Organically Into its Gameplay and Story
After emerging from an underground bunker, Atomfall‘s amnesiac protagonist finds themselves thrust directionless into the hostile zone. Most players will likely encounter the first merchant in the opening few minutes, where the game provides a brief tutorial on how its trade system works. Since the zone’s population no longer has a use for traditional money, tangible goods and supplies are the only things of value in it. The barter system relies on players offering their items to traders to balance a scale against those they wish to purchase.
It’s certainly not the first and only one to utilize such a system in lieu of in-game currency, as, for example, games like Pathologic have a similar system in place. But through it, Atomfall avoids the need to grind for money as well as preventing players from finding ways to exploit the economy and potentially break the intended difficulty curve and other designs. Fans must both metaphorically and literally weigh each item they have on hand against merchants’ inventories until a fair deal is struck.
This aligns well with the narrative and works seamlessly in tandem with its other mechanics and features. Atomfall‘s Leads system encourages experimentation, with multiple ways to initiate and complete missions. Some traders will have important quest items as well as rare skill upgrades not easily available elsewhere, if at all. Depending on player choice and what they’re willing to sacrifice, these can be obtained by bartering instead of other potentially more difficult or violent means.
Additionally, Atomfall has a fairly limited inventory, and even once expanded, players who scrounge even to a surface degree will likely soon find themselves unable to carry or use everything they’ve collected. The barter system then lets them trade anything they might not need for more immediately beneficial equipment, along with key pieces of information or valuable new abilities.
By asking players to literally balance the scales of what resources they’re willing to part with in order to obtain those they want and/or need, Atomfall‘s bartering mechanic feels incredibly natural, maintains a great sense of immersion, and strikes its own balance between storytelling and informed design.
Survival
Action
Adventure
- Released
-
March 27, 2025
- ESRB
-
Teen // Blood, Language, Violence
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