Atomfall Devs Expected Fallout Comparisons, 25-Hour Playthrough

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 America. Atomfall is a first-person, post-nuclear game with an alternate history design, much like the iconic Fallout series.

Ryan Greene, the art director at developer Rebellion, fully understands the comparisons to Fallout. In fact, the development team anticipated these comparisons from the moment Atomfall was announced. "Once you play the game, you realize it's not Fallout, but yes, we knew," Greene told IGN. He added that one of Rebellion's owners, Jason Kingsley, is a big Fallout fan, which naturally led to some similarities in the theme of surviving in an apocalyptic world. "And those guys are great at what they do. And that's cool," Greene acknowledged, showing respect for the Fallout team.

However, Atomfall isn’t really like Fallout at all. IGN highlighted this distinction in August last year, noting that Atomfall offers something much more intriguing than a British version of Fallout. Greene himself warned that the Fallout comparison is "misleading." He emphasized, "Once you play it for a bit, you're like, oh, this is its own thing for sure." Rebellion, the independently owned British studio behind the Sniper Elite franchise, is not Microsoft-owned Bethesda. Atomfall is an ambitious project for Rebellion, but it's not on the scale of an Elder Scrolls or Fallout game. "The reality is, here’s this very successful franchise and we're version 1.0," Greene said. "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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Greene mentioned that an average playthrough of Atomfall would take about "25-ish hours." However, completionists can extend their gameplay significantly. To get a sense of how the game plays, check out IGN’s most recent hands-on preview of Atomfall, where Simon Cardy explored the game's darker side by killing everyone during his playthrough.

It turns out, players have the freedom to kill everyone in the game if they choose to. "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 follow the traditional RPG format with main and side quests. Instead, Greene described it as "a spider web of connected story." He explained, "So even if you sever one thread, you can usually find another thread that leads you back to the overall mystery."

Interestingly, you can also play through Atomfall without killing anyone. Greene is "fairly certain" this is possible, stating, "I've made it about nine hours in, probably close to halfway running at a pretty fast dev play speed and killed no one. I'm fairly certain you can do it and there's no gating of having to kill anyone ever."