Dig your finest cricket bat out of the loft – Atomfall developers Rebellion have revealed its second story expansion is set to arrive in September. It’s dubbed The Red Strain, and looks to star a not-Robobrain who’s connected to a bunch of crimson plantlife filling the Cumberland quarantine zone.
This second DLC follows Wicked Isle, the first Atomfall expansion that you got automatically if you plumped for the deluxe edition of the radioactive pasty survivathon. I still need to go back and play that expansion, and this next add-on looks like an intriguing excuse to do so.
As announced by Rebellion’s fittingly brief blog post and trailer, The Red Strain will be released on September 16th. There’s precious little further info about it at the moment, but the devs have whispered that we can “expect a highly confidential new location and plenty more mysteries to uncover”.
As for the trailer, which you can watch below, it shows off what looks to be a plague of red plants linked to a human-brained robot that’s part of an organisation going by the acronym CORE. One would assume they’re different to, or possibly an offshoot of, the base game’s British Atomic Research Division (BARD). One thing’s for sure, we can expect more rooting through old facilities full of malfunctioning doodads and god knows what else. There’ll be more details forthcoming as the cerise exertion nears, or so Rebellion promise.
Watch on YouTube
Our James liked Atomfall, writing in his review:
It’s a shame that next to the investigating, Atomfall’s shooting, sneaking, and cricket batting don’t deliver the same joys. Still, they’re competent enough not to get in the way, and with a little finesse it’s possible to enjoy extended bouts of that rich, intricate sleuthing without doing a single violence at all. Don’t let those village pub bores get you down: there are far worse places for a forgetful soldier-detective to be.
I’d generally agree with all of that, even if I was maybe a bit more downbeat in my review of it for my old home, mainly because I felt its endings were a bit too on the muted side to be truly satsifying conclusions to all of the great intrigue built up as you wander the hostile sectors of the zone. To me, that robbed Atomfall of totally nailing the ideal short-but-deep experience Rebellion were going for, but it’s all a matter of perspective. Those more into Atomfall’s British sci-fi inspirations than they are keyed up by Fallout to expect more in-your-face radioactive wackiness might find these conclusions perfectly fine.
Either way, I definitely need to give Wicked Isle a go, so am making a point of sliding the game up the great backlog list. I’ve tattoed said list across my inner thigh, so that every time I have impure throughts, I’m reminded that I bought The Saboteur in a Steam sale ages ago and still have zero hours in it.