At first glance, you might mistake Atomfall for a Fallout-style game. Perhaps, even, an *actual* Fallout game set in a post-apocalyptic England rather than a post-apocalyptic America. Atomfall is first-person, it’s post-nuclear (it’s called Atomfall for a reason), and it has an alt-history design, as Fallout famously does.

Ryan Greene, the art director at developer Rebellion, understands where the Fallout comparisons are coming from. The development team anticipated that Atomfall would be compared to Fallout as soon as it 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 Fallout's going to come up as a thing. And those guys are great at what they do. And that's cool.”

But Atomfall isn’t really like Fallout at all. This was pointed out by IGN last August when we reported that Atomfall is something much more interesting than a British Fallout. Greene himself 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 noted that Rebellion isn’t Microsoft-owned Bethesda. The independently owned British studio behind the Sniper Elite franchise has created an ambitious game, relative to its other games, but it's not on the scale of an Elder Scrolls or Fallout-sized 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, Greene said, is “probably 25-ish hours.” However, completionists can stretch that “a long way.” To find out how the game plays, be sure to check out IGN’s most recent Atomfall hands-on preview, in which our Simon Cardy went off the deep end and killed everyone during his playthrough.

It turns out, you can go through the entire game killing everyone and it will cope with that. “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 a side quest in the traditional RPG sense. Rather, “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” you can. “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.”