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The beauty ofAtomfall, aside from its stunning visuals, is that players have the power to craft the game’s story their way, and it doesn’t just end with who you align yourself with. In this game, you can also toggle a variety of gameplay mechanics to get the most suitable gaming experience for you.
As a survival game,Atomfalldoesn’t shy away from offering players the standard challenges of a game in the genre, from searching for loot and resources to surviving challenging combat encounters and exploring ruins and bunkers. The degree of challenge, however, largely rests on the player’s shoulders, so it is worth looking intothe differences in gameplay difficulty inAtomfallso you can curate your own brand of challenge.
Difficulty Settings in Atomfall Explained
Unlike your standard survival game,Atomfalltakes quite a different approachto how easy or challenging your experience is. Instead of difficulty options, the game offers playstyles, which are predetermined settings that are adjusted to suit your playing preferences. It does still have an equivalent to easy, medium, and hard, of course, but it also has options that prioritize more difficult combat or more difficult exploration. The playstyle options are as follows:
If none of these appeal to you, there is also the option tocompletely customize your playstyle, so you can make certain parts of each pillar more or less challenging, depending on your preferences. There are a surprising number of customization options, which will help you curate the perfect balance for your playthrough.
What Are The Differences Between Difficulty Options in Atomfall?
The three facets of gameplay that determine difficulty inAtomfall, combat, survival, and exploration, can all be tweaked to suit your preferences. If you decide to choose one of the preset playstyle options, then you will see that each facet will be set to either assisted, casual, challenging, or intense. Your choices here will have a significant impact on the gameplay experience, so it is worthwhile getting an understanding of how each difficulty level differs. Here are the three difficulty indicators and what each tier means.
Combat
Combat difficulty inAtomfallinfluences the behavior of non-playable characters, and is determined by seven difficulty sliders, ranging from aggression and population, to accuracy and skill. This is how the difficulty levels differ for combat:
Survival
Survival is primarily focused on the health, well-being, andresilience of the main character. This playstyle mechanic influences gameplay features spanning from bartering and look frequency, all the way to health regeneration. The difficulty tiers are split as follows:
Exploration
Atomfalllets players tell the game’s story their own waythrough the use of Leads. Instead of your standard approach-markers-to-progress setup, players will need to do a little digging to find notes that hint at where to go to uncover the game’s mysteries. As such, navigation is an important facet to the experience, and the difficulty tiers will help determine how much, if any at all, assistance you get when trying to find particular NPCs or locations:
Your choice of difficulty isn’t set in stone, so if you’re not enjoying the conditions of your chosen playstyle, you may change them at any time from the pause menu.
Which Difficulty Should I Choose?
While there is certainly plenty to be gained from choosing one of the preset playstyle options,the best way to experienceAtomfallis to customize the playstyle to your preferences. The customization menu is far more detailed than you wouldexpect from a game like this, so it really does give you more than enough freedom to tweak it to your liking. In a sense, it’s almost like a character build in itself, and really adds to the replayability of the game, aside from the multiple endings you can discover.
With that said, there is something to be said about the Investigator playstyle. A big part ofAtomfall’s gameplay is finding leads and figuring out mysteries, so to give yourself a more difficult exploration experience would lead to a more authentic playthrough. All in all,Sightseer is great if you just want a chilled game session, Investigator feels the most natural for solving mysteries, and Survivor is the most balanced if you don’t have a preference between combat and exploration.
