Atomfall eschewed a lot of my expectations when I finally played it. I was surprised at how similar it was to immersive sims. I was surprised by how little it aped Fallout. But mostly, I was surprised that the shooting felt terrible.
This is a game from Rebellion Developments, of Sniper Elite fame. You know, the game where shooting a Nazi’s crown jewels is the greatest achievement. A game about stealth and precision, sure, but fundamentally a game about shooting. And Sniper Elite’s shooting has always felt great.
Atomfall’s shooting is the opposite. Guns are clunky. They take too long to reload. Accuracy is always low. A bullet to the chest doesn’t even kill an unarmoured cultist. They’re loud and bring a cadre of enemies to your position whenever you pull the trigger. What’s going on?
Atomfall Doesn’t Want You To Shoot Your Way Out Of Trouble
Atomfall is a game about scarcity, about using every tool at your disposal in order to figure out exactly what is happening in the Lake District. And it’s a game with guns that doesn’t want you to use them.
Atomfall’s guns are clunky because you’re not meant to use them often. They take too long to reload and alert enemies to your position so you don’t approach quests with an all-guns blazing approach. This isn’t Fallout 4, where you can don a fancy suit of power armour and grab an alien ray gun to take out a building filled to bursting with deadly super mutants as if you were pest control clearing woodworm. This is a game where care and precision are required for even a small skirmish.
You can prepare carefully and still use a gun. You can use a gun as a last resort. But Atomfall is keen to show you that shooting your way through problems isn’t the only solution. Rebellion has put so much thought into its stealth gameplay that it doesn’t want you to overlook that path. It has myriad routes to any location or narrative thread so you can take any approach. This is that immersive simness shining through.
Atomfall is hardly an Arkane game, but its amnesiac protagonist shares some DNA with Corvo Attano. Both can use guns as tools, but it’s also more fun for both to eschew those bog standard video game weapons and do things a bit differently. There’s a reason that the quickest, quietest, and most lethal way to kill an enemy in Atomfall is with a sneak attack: like Assassin’s Creed rewarding stealth with cinematic hidden blade assassinations, Atomfall is rewarding your careful actions. It’s like giving your dog a treat when she gives you a high five. Atomfall is training you to play the way it wants.
Why Does Atomfall Even Have Guns?
But then, if Atomfall doesn’t want you to use guns, why even implement them in the first place? Firstly, they’re useful. Need a killshot in a desperate moment when you’re out of breath? Unload a magazine into that pagan. Plus, it would hardly feel fair for the Protocol militia to be so heavily armed and you relatively ill-equipped. That’s before you think about the gameplay loop of looting bodies and using that equipment to progress: why would soldiers not drop their guns?
So, Rebellion made guns tricky to use effectively. It made them clunky and loud. Powerful, too, if you manage to hit someone square between the eyes, but mostly awkward weapons that don’t feel rewarding.
I like it when games have this friction. I’m at an age where the standard Call of Duty power fantasy feels boring. I want a game to gate fast travel from me. I want a game to destroy the civilian population if I don’t pay attention to my companion’s eyes. I want coordinates instead of map markers. Okay fine, I want Dragon’s Dogma 2. All of this feeds immersion, roleplaying, and elevates the gaming experience from pushing buttons on a controller to embodying a character in a new world.
Atomfall plays its guns very cleverly. They’re the perfect last resort. They’re lethal in a one-on-one scenario, but they could also be your undoing. Where so often guns are the easy way out, Atomfall makes them dangerous. As dangerous to your wellbeing as they are to your enemy’s.
Games should be more annoying in order to be more interesting. Atomfall shepherds you towards stealth, or at least away from guns, with deliberate care. I wish more games were confident enough to do the same.
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What’s Going On With Atomfall’s Accents?
I thought I’d love Atomfall’s northern accents. What went wrong?