The developer calls Atomfall a survival-action game. There is a hint of RPG in the mix, though not enough to call it one. I've seen comparisons to Metro, Fallout, and STALKER, but none of those fit. The closest might be Metro, but I still wouldn't compare them. I'll try to address the most important things.

As others said, the story is nothing you haven't seen before. It's ok. There's six endings, I got one so far. The ending was lackluster, and I've heard the others are as well. A couple positives are there are dialogue choices, and you actually have the freedom to kill every single NPC you meet.

The setting is alternate 1960s Northern England. You will start out in Slatten Dale, and eventually find four more areas all of which are trapped in the quarantine zone nobody can escape due to an incident you will uncover.

This is where the game shines most. There is no fast travel, so you'll need to be ok with a lot of running and potential backtracking, but the maps aren't huge. They're big enough to enjoy exploring, small enough to sprint across in a few minutes. Two of the maps also act as kind of a shortcut between the others, and one of them is almost like a big puzzle box that has you unlocking pieces of it over time.

One of the first things I found was a waterfall that actually had something behind it, which I like. But beyond that, each map is dotted with things to discover. Bunkers, labs, sewers, cellars. There's also a few large indoor areas, such as a castle and a prison. Plenty of locked doors and things to try and open or get around. I found it all to be enjoyable.

This game doesn't have a normal quest system. Instead it gives you leads. You get leads by talking to NPCs, reading, and playing audio logs. Hypothetical: there's a quest called "Saboteurs", and below it you will accumulate different leads to follow. Leads can be a tip like "he was last seen heading here." From there, it's up to you follow it. And what you find could be the end to the quest, or it could be another lead.

Also there's no quest markers, though you will get landmark locations marked on your map from some of your leads. It's never really difficult to figure out where your objective is, but having to do these things on your own without following a big yellow marker made it feel more engaging and satisfying. You can also find and use a metal detector, which was a nice little addition.

It's a mixed bag. The melee isn't good in my opinion and it felt like my last resort (though to be fair I only tried a couple melee weapons). The shooting on the other hand, I found enjoyable. The guns you usually find are old rusty junk, there's weapon sway, and enemies can move a lot, so accuracy isn't the best. I found it satisfying, some may find it frustrating. Especially with ammo being relatively scarce. You won't find ammo crates sitting around, instead you may find as little as 1-3 bullets at a time, and you can't carry a ton of ammunition either. Human enemies can die in one headshot, but you can die fairly quickly as well.

Weapon variety... there's not a ton, but there was enough. Based on the list I found, there's 13 melee weapons, 7 throwables, and 14 ranged weapons of which 13 are guns. Do note however that there is NO weapon customization. There's only tiers of quality (rusted, stock, pristine).

The "stamina" bar is in this case your heart rate. As you run or melee, your heart rate goes up which impacts your vision, movement, aim and so on.

Stealth... to be perfectly honest I can't tell if it's working as intended or not. If you are crouched in tall grass, you won't be seen unless they walk right up on you. However if you are crouched outside of tall grass and they so much as glance in your direction, you are immediately spotted with zero warning. I also can't figure out how noise works. I have a rifle that sounds fairly quiet, yet sometimes using it alerts enemies. In another instance however, I shotgunned a guy and his buddy a few feet away didn't notice. It's not the best.

Inventory is limited. You have four large weapon slots, 12 slots for small weapons/ throwables/ consumables, and crafting supplies and ammo have their own space. You can learn a skill that increases the amount of crafting materials and ammunition you can carry, but it's still fairly limited. There is no way to increase inventory or weapon slots though. Again, I liked this, some won't.

What I didn't like was the storage system. You will gain access to pneumatic tubes around the map (almost never in a convenient spot) that act as a global storage system. You can store a max of 100 items. You have to scroll through these items in a single column, with no way to filter or organize them. Whoever designed the storage system has never played a video game in their life.

If you play carefully, you will go from having very little to a surplus of most things. At one point I ended up throwing some stuff away from storage to make room for something else.

There's no XP system. You learn skills by finding skill books that unlock the skills in the menu, and training stimulants that you find act as skill points to learn them. In other words, learning skills is almost always directly tied to exploration and/or story progression, and sometimes trade (crafting recipes too). There's nothing too crazy you can learn, but they're almost all useful with a few exceptions. Resistance skills felt useless, because they do the same thing as some consumables. And there weren't that many scenarios where I needed resistance, so I had plenty of said consumables in storage.

Most enemies are human, of which there are three factions: protocol, outlaws, and druids. There's generally not much variety among them beyond what kind of weapon they use, and maybe a couple more armored kinds.

For non-humans there's swarm enemies: rats, bats, birds and bugs that you have to wildly swing at until they're all dead, and they're frankly annoying. Ferals are Atomfall's ghouls and there's a few kinds. A basic melee feral and a spitting feral are most common. In a couple areas there's also thralls which are in hazmat suits and extremely tanky. There's big hostile plants that I almost always just avoided dealing with. And lastly are automated turrets and the B.A.R.D. robots.

I won't say much about enemy AI. It gets the job done I guess, but they aren't what I would call smart.

I'm 17 hours in. I could keep going, but I reached a point where I could get an ending so I saved at a point I can reload and continue from, and then finished the game. I'd say I have a few hours left for this play through, and I think it's fun enough for at least one more. I have 20/36 achievements. There's two story DLC coming (first one is called Wicked Isle), but I have no idea what those'll be.

It's a smaller game. It has some neat ideas. In some ways it fell short, in others it was a lot of fun. Overall I'm enjoying it. If you aren't completely put off by what's here, I'd recommend it on a sale for sure.

First, a warning that this game will not run without some fixes done by you. I made a guide, as much for myself as for anyone else, that compiles a short list of the fixes that worked for me. They are quick and simple to do yourself! I hope they help.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3282115143

Honestly, this is a hard game for me to evaluate, and I don't normally write reviews, but I will try my best. Despite its shortcomings however, I really enjoyed my first playthrough sitting at 20 hours.

I really did enjoy the story a lot. Both the main quest and the side quests were fun, and it kept me hooked all the way through. Some parts were predictable, others caught me off guard. The writing was dated at times, but I didn't mind that. The game doesn't outstay its welcome which is nice. I especially really enjoyed the first 5 chapters a lot.

Unfortunately, the ending was far too rushed. Chapter 6 didn't feel very long, and chapter 7 was over in a flash. After that you get a brief cutscene, some epilogue text on the screen explaining what became of everyone, and then the credits roll. I wish chapters 6 and 7 were longer (and maybe even had another chapter in between them) and that a bit more effort went into the ending. It left me feeling like they had plans for the game they didn't get to see through, and I would rate the story higher if not for those issues.

This is very much a mixed bag. For starters, you can't create your own character. You pick from 7 premade characters. These premade characters have no impact on the story. The main things setting them apart are their appearance, and their starting attributes and fighting styles. Their gender also has an impact on which follower you can romance (there are three romance options), and the epilogue of said follower if you romance them.

As for the followers, there are 12 you can get and they are all certainly unique. Again though, a very mixed bag in terms of quality and how much time each one gets storywise. Personally, I liked 7 of them. Two I didn't get because of the choices I made. One became kind of irritating. One I was pretty indifferent towards. And one is a merchant, who after quickly joining you can never be talked to and only accessed through the menu. Also note that there are two followers that only join you for one chapter each, which makes me believe even more that they had bigger plans for this game at some point.

As for NPCs, they were consistently enjoyable. None of them from my memory stuck out as being bad.

The game has an alignment system: Way of the Open Palm and Way of the Closed Fist. While they can fall into "good" and "evil" there are some situations where it didn't seem that straightforward to me. That being said, don't expect to be heavily weighing your decisions, there's usually not much in the way of gray area. Depending on your decisions in quests and other little side things, points will go towards one of those two alignments, and that does have some impact on the game. And you can decide the outcome of a number of quests.

There were also two quests I couldn't do because I didn't follow the Way of the Closed fist. I also had items that only one or the other could equip. There are a couple followers locked behind your choices as well. As mentioned above there are three basic endings, and three romance options as well. It's also worth noting that there are special dialogue options for Charm, Intuition, and Intimidation.

There are 27 fighting styles (28 counting the Rhino Demon transformation style pre-order bonus, which I think you can find floating around out there as a mod), and while each one alone is extremely basic, you can equip as many as 10 at once and swap between them in combat. I did enjoy this aspect, as it helped keep things feeling fresh and there's several styles I still have not tried. There's also a block and a dodge roll.

While the combat was enjoyable at times, there were enough times that I found it frustrating and clunky that I ended up putting the game on the easiest difficulty which you can access in the menu at any time. This made the game a cakewalk.
There are multiple difficulty modes, and you can unlock a special difficulty after beating the game once. While I often found it frustrating, you may not, so I'd advise starting out on normal and going from there.

You have three attributes you can level up, which boil down to health, and two resources your fighting styles use. They also influence your conversation skills. And then you put points into fighting styles, but that boils down to "number go up."

As far as items, there's Techniques, which are permanent stat boosts you find or buy. And then there's Essence Gems with stat boosts and passive abilities, of which you can equip a handful of them at once.

The followers that can go into combat with you (because some can't, and have other purposes) more often than not just serve as a distraction for some enemies so you can deal with the rest. There is also one who throws alcohol at you so you can use Drunken Master style, but doesn't do any fighting himself. And there is one who unlocks a fun little minigame where you pilot your aircraft, that plays a lot like Galaga. Said aircraft has a handful of weapons and things you can unlock. You can skip most of these minigame levels if you want to however.

I don't have too much to say here. I thought it was all very well done. There's a number of nice environments in the game.
Nothing too complicated, but enjoyable. It's Chinese inspired, but is very much a fantasy setting. The voice acting was well done and even had some recognizable names such as John Cleese, Nathan Fillion, Brian Doyle-Murray, and probably several more. I thought the soundtrack was quite good as well.

Honestly, I'm not sure I want to try and score the graphics. Jade Empire came out in 2005 and it shows. The Special Edition came out in 2007, with some minor graphical updates included. All things considered I think it looks quite good for its age. If you don't think so, there are some mods for that on Nexus, but I have not tried them and don't plan to.

Despite all the game's flaws, I found it to be a very enjoyable experience. I loved Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins, and this took me back to that in some ways. It's not a Bioware masterpiece, but it scratches that itch for me, and it feels like a lot of heart went into making it. And there's definitely enough content here for at least two playthroughs, if not more, which I plan to do. Easily worth $14.99, and when it goes on deep discounts like $3.75 it's a steal.