Rebellion is best known for the Sniper Elite franchise, but now they are venturing into their first new IP in over half a decade with the upcoming release of Atomfall. The game is an open area survival first person shooter full of mystery and questions for players to discover throughout their playthrough. This week, we got to spend over two hours playing the game, and Rebellion doesn’t hold back with their core tenets of observe, explore, and survive as you are delving into the deep end and must discover the world yourself, and there was plenty of things that we barely had time to see.

Atomfall takes place in an alternate timeline version of 1962 Northern England following the Windscale nuclear disaster. The entirety of the area has been quarantined, and you must go around unraveling the mysteries of what happened in the quarantine zone. The developers said they were inspired by early sci-fi and speculative fiction when they were designing the game such as early Doctor Who, The Quatermass Experiment, and The Wicker Man. You can definitely feel these inspirations throughout your time exploring the eerie and almost abandoned world of Atomfall.

However, the world of Atomfall isn’t isn’t abandoned. There are a cast of characters from soldiers to cultist to bandits and helpful NPCs (some even inspired by classic English tropes) for you to meet through your journey through the quarantine zone. The developers made sure to emphasize that most characters aren’t fully good or bad and how you interact with them matters. You must observe how a person acts and talks and, thus, how you respond matters as the character may not like how you respond or if you try to pry too much information out of them. There’s also classic phone booths scattered throughout that will occasionally ring and it’s up to you if you want to answer or trust the advice of the mysterious stranger on the other end of the line.

The gameplay of Atomfall is less focused on shooting, as even how you hold your gun has less of an emphasis on aiming, and more about surviving and improvising with your toolset. Because it takes five years after a nuclear event, ammo and weaponry is far more scarce. Thus, you must know when to conserve your ammo when taking on enemies as you don’t know when you’ll get more. However, melee is also an option and you are provided with a range of weapons from knives, to axes, to even your handy cricket bat. You are also equipped with a metal detector that will signal hidden caches throughout the world that you can dig up. Then, when it comes to your skills, you must find manuals to unlock a tree and then use training supplements to actually progress through the tree and unlock the skills. Thus, again, exploration is a must in Atomfall to prepare yourself for whatever you encounter.

Where Atomfall shined brightest during our time with it is how it tackles its story. The developers at Rebellion didn’t want to include a typical quest system that loaded your map with icons. Instead, they decided to implement a leads system. These leads will need to be uncovered by the player and pieced together to solve whatever the storyline is. The developers made sure to let leads be discovered naturally, and thus you can find multiple leads that are building towards the same end. Leads can be tackled however a player wants and the developers ensured there is no pinch point that all players must get through. Thus, the game offers a wide variety to the story and guarantee no two playthroughs will be exactly the same.

One such lead we encountered saw us finding a government site that we needed a keycard to access, later we found a helicopter that had crashed with a memo from the scientist who had the card stating she was heading to the village. Once there, we found out she had been thrown in jail in a certain area from talking to the bartender which led to us following signs to the area and encountering a soldier who helpfully pointed out where the army had set up outposts and one of which had the prison. All of this occurred naturally while exploring and it was just something I happened upon in my demo where others missed it completely.

Overall, Atomfall looks to be something completely different from what many open shooter games are and something radically different from the methodical nature of Rebellion’s Sniper Elite franchise. People eager to check it out won’t have to wait long as the game release on March 27, 2025 for PC, PlayStation and Xbox.