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 set in a post-apocalyptic England, rather than the usual 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 the comparisons to Fallout. In fact, the development team anticipated these parallels from the moment Atomfall was revealed.

“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 brings up Fallout. And those guys are great at what they do. And that's cool.”

However, Atomfall isn’t really like Fallout at all. IGN highlighted this difference last August, emphasizing that Atomfall offers something much more intriguing than just 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 pointed out that Rebellion, the independently owned British studio behind the Sniper Elite franchise, isn’t Microsoft-owned Bethesda. Atomfall is an ambitious game compared to Rebellion's other titles, 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

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An average Atomfall playthrough, according to Greene, lasts “probably 25-ish hours.” However, completionists can extend their gameplay "a long way."

To get a feel for how the game plays, check out IGN’s latest Atomfall hands-on preview, where our Simon Cardy took a dramatic approach by killing everyone during his playthrough.

It turns out, you can indeed go through the entire game with a lethal approach, 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 have a main quest or side quests 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” it's 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.”