As the title says, it's a pretty decent game for it's price.
I do not understand why they put Martial Arts into it though. When I see that as an option for fighting, I usually choose that because it's generally pretty good.
Martial Arts is god damned garbage in this game though. I even gave myself the Blackbelt Perk, so that I'd be even better with it, but it makes you useless with guns. And guess what?
Every Bandit/Radier/Person in Rags you'll find uses Guns. So have fun getting close.
111 Points into Martial Arts, and it is a complete waste. Any gun will hit harder, has range, and you don't have to be molested by Bears for trying to give them a punch.
Seriously, who designs Martial Arts to be useless? (They should just call it brawling or some such, it's not like you do any cool moves or anything, like Martial Arts generally have.)
Fine extension of the the Fallout ethos. I am especially encouraged by frequent updates and serious effort to eliminate bugs. Keep it up, guys!!
Good value at the price.
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 never ran into any bugs. I think it's interesting to play a game made in a country other than the US, it gives the game a fresh feeling despite being about a topic that's got a lot of games made about it.
I expect to get many hours of fun out of this game.
