ATOM RPG: Post-apocalyptic indie game

I love f1 and f2. I grew up with those games and adore them. There are many like me who wish for a fallout successor. And some even try to make one. This is obviously a result of one such attempt but the developer forgot that while people love a lot about first two games, theres as much to dislike about them. First of all, everything is heavily randomized. Do you love reloading same save for 10 times because your apparently military trained character misses someone point blank (and therefore has no excuse for it unlike f1 and f2 backstory) and dies because enemies have higher stats than you? Do you like wandering aimlessly between towns in search of doable quests to get xp and level up your skills because you just cant get to the next point sometimes without some stat? Do you absolutely love slow as hell crawling around global map with random encounters that lead to nothing but savescumming? Everything is slow, takes too much time and quikcly turns your playthrough to chore. The descriptions is misleading as well. Dialogues are all the same with dew exceptions and generic skillchecks. Gameplay is linear and limits your freedom of creating any character you want simply because you cant be not a combat specialised char ("but this is a postapoc rpg you should expect lots of fights" - if you think so, please eat a mushroom). Sure you can choose to be one, but it effectively limits your progression. Im suprised by the amount of 5 stars because the product doesnt deserve so much. My guess is people are just hungry for fallout like games and they praise anything that does a decent attempt at recreating the experience even is some of it shoud have never been recreated. It works, probably as intended, but with many questionable decisions made by devs im sure anyone would be better with playing wasteland 2 or jsut replaying f1/f2.

Game offers interesting setting, story and NPCs with Fallout 1/2 inspired retro design. However combination of unforgiving combat, absence of disengagement mechanics and occasional bad encounter design makes game unplayable without either metagaming or save scamming.

Great game, built like a perfect clone with every right gene and meme whose creator was very talented yet had very limited resources. Just like many Soviet scientists back in day. Like every great Sci-Fi story it's very social(ist), deriving its weirdness and strangeness from actual social processess, Zeitgeist shifts, and technological trends. Nothing innovative gameplaywise (what is these days) - stats, combat, dialogue, skill cheks all work OK, could use some polishing (some skills are need like twice). What got me was the atmosphere and characters. That very special humorous melancholia of the decaying USSR. Compared to Atom Bethesda's Fallout-4-kolhoz-sim is very much sovok.

The devs like Fallout 1 and 2. A LOT. So much, in fact, that they made a spiritual successor to Fallout 1 and 2, but instead of making a fresh take on the genre of isometric apocalyptica, they CTRL+F'd "California" and replaced it with "Russia". This game just doesn't feel like it has an original bone in its body, and that's a real shame. There's something skeletal and empty about the game world that's hard to put a finger on - Fallout 2 had this issue somewhat with the huge tracts of land you had to travel to once New Reno was available, but that's a game from twenty years ago(!), and it made up for the hollow feeling of the world screen by jam-packing towns with hours of shit to do. ATOM doesn't do this at all, and in fact reminds me of Morrowind with how the abundance of stock dialogue options serves more to cheapen the experience than flesh it out. The old fallouts at least had the courtesy to just not let you talk to people who didn't have anything worth saying - ATOM lets you talk to everyone, and ask the same four stupid questions and get one-sentence responses back. This is indicitive of another massive flaw in the game - the dialogue SUCKS. BIG TIME. It hurts extra bad that the dialogue is so trash, because that's the heart and soul of the OG Fallout games. There is the real possibility that the dialogue is better when the game is played in Russian, but I can get past grammatical errors and odd syntax! I can't get past people just running up to me and going "Hey! Get me something from the town you just left!" and my responses being either A) "What's in it for me?", B) "Sure, I'll do it for free" and C) "No", ad nauseum, over and over again. This game kinda...sucks. It's a valiant effort, but the whole is far, far less than the sum of its parts. For $15 it's alright, and you might like it as a cheap thing to fiddle around with, but don't expect anything more.

I can't recommend this game enough! It feels very comfortable after having played Fallout 1 & 2 and similar games since then. I thought the translation was very well done. I don't get why people are complaining. The game feels very polished to me. There are a lot of quality of life improvements over F1 and F2 that I appreciate. The first 10 or so hours are tough I admit, but you really need to stick with it. I love this game!