Atomfall’s Latest DLC Feels Like a First-Person Dark Souls Expansion

Atomfall has unexpectedly been one of my favourite games this year, and while its latest DLC has tested both my time and patience it’s felt like both a natural progression and epic send-off for the post-apocalyptic survival game.

I’m honestly surprised it got any DLC at all, as while it drew in a large following from the Fallout community it’s been overshadowed by the rest of 2025’s AAA titles.

I love it though, and I’ve loved its latest expansion, The Red Strain, even more.

The Red Strain takes players to a different part of the Quarantine Zone through a mysterious lift found in the Slattendale slate mines. You emerge in Test Site Moriah, a new location where some dodgy experiments were taking place. These experiments were interrupted by the Windscale powerplant fiasco, releasing the Red Strain from its containment. It’s now infected the population either turning them into vicious monsters or psychotic, rage-fuelled foot soldiers.

Like the main game and its first expansion, The Wicked Isle, it’s up to the player to do some more super-sleuthing and solve the mystery of this bizarre disease.

I went into this DLC as an Atomfall veteran. I’ve done every ending up to this point and scoured its map for all of its secrets, so I felt pretty confident in my ability to breeze through this expansion and tick off a few more endings. I was wrong. I was so, so wrong. Within 10 minutes of wandering through the DLC I came across my first group of enemies, who rapidly gunned me down in seconds. At first I thought I was rusty. I hadn’t played since The Wicked Isles expansion so perhaps I just needed to get accustomed to the gameplay again. Turns out the enemies in the Red Strain expansion are just that good, and I had my work cut out for me.

Lore-wise it makes a lot of sense. The Red Strain doesn’t just make people look like walking tomatoes it also brings out all of their hate, rage, and frustration. In the base game if an enemy group spots you, you have the opportunity to slowly back away, defusing the situation like you’d probably try to do in real-life. That doesn’t work in this expansion though, if you’re spotted they’ll kill you on sight making stealth paramount to your survival.

Now I love a challenge. It’s why I play FromSoftware games and have an absurd amount of hours logged on Dark Souls. Playing The Red Strain expansion felt like I'd stepped into a bizarro universe where FromSoftware made first-person shooters instead of soulslikes.

Rebellion Developments

If you didn’t get to grips with the combat in the base game you’ll be forced to now, as unless you can successfully sneak by you’ll be gunned down or torn apart. Suddenly all of the consumable items that give you buffs and resistances were a hot-ticket item in my scavenging. Before they were use-in-case-of-emergency consumables for when things got excessively tough, but now they were essential for most encounters, and I had to think carefully about when to use them.

The expansion does help you out a little bit by adding a few more tools to your arsenal. Silenced weapons were a perfect addition to this DLC as when you were inevitably spotted by beet red buggers you could at least take them out before they alerted their mates.

If you can wade through the crimson tide of death and destruction you’ll find that The Red Strain is yet another example of Rebellion's excellent world-building and creativity in Atomfall. It tests everything you know about the game thus far, and for those who are new to the game, the mysterious Operator will warn you as soon as it’s able that you’d be better off coming back later, in other words after you’ve beaten the game.

The Red Strain is an endgame expansion that doesn’t just enrich the story of Atomfall, but the gameplay too, and I’m hoping there’s still more to come whether it be additional expansions or a sequel.