I love so much of this game. I got addicted from the start. It feels alot like Fallout-1, but plays in European Russia. It is a more realistic world. I loved the graphics. The humour is rather direct and sometimes weird.
Unfortunately. There is a lot of weakness in this game.
* The combat system is almost zero tactical. It is boring.
* You get almost no hints, if you are "ready" for a certain part of the story line.
* In many dialogs you get a one-time chance to achieve something.
So you need to save before EVERY decision and every dialog. Tedious. Annoying. Horrible game design.
So after having fun with half the story. I simple gave up, cause it became more work than fun.
So sad.
The Fallout series met a grim fate with Fallout 76, but the earlier titles inspired a lot of games, Atom included. The general setting (albeit we are here in post-apocalypse Soviet Union), atmosphere, inventory systems, use of perks, turn-based combat etc.- it all can be found there.
The premises are alluring enough and going on a quest given by an organization created for such dire revents is a great start- which falters as soon as the first foray into the world, were your character is incompetent enough to leave his rifle out of place and gets robbed of his belongings.
Naturally, beginning the game with an AK-47 would have been too easy, but this is just an early sign of poor storytelling.
The sad thing is that with all the quests related to more-ore-less zany quests, you can the potential, but it's badly implemented- all mentioned conspiracies seem to be true but your actions mean little in the grand order or things, and your character has no personal involvement with this world or the main quest.
Unlike Fallout 1, you can sometimes easily forget you have to check for a lost battalion...
Humor is hit-or-miss and companions rarely add anything useful to the events or the dialogs, and are note efficient in combat. Combat system itself is nothing innovative and quite clunky.
The game seems afraid to really explore the ideas it comes up with, giving a general sense of dullness.
One of the most baffling faults shown by Atom is its overuse of references to better piece of media, for the sake of references- no witty deconstruction or commentary, a far cry from Fallout 2's take on the matter.
All in all, including too frequent random encounters on the world map and tedious fights, I would say Atom RPG does not respect your time. It could be more alluring for those living in ex-USSR countries but there are much better alternatives on the indie scene.
In any case, I would strongly advise to watch a Let's Play of the first few hours before buying...
I wanted to enjoy this game, I did. It's great in some places; it's creepy in some, humorous in others, meta sometimes, and choices you make do matter.
Unfortunately? The gameplay sucks. Real bad. Nobody played the original Fallout games for the combat, or to initiate combat and be CC'd before you get a turn. In fact, even in the first Fallout game, those moments were rare: it's why knockdowns were largely dislocations instead of 1-3 turns of doing absolutely nothing. The one way you could end up doing this is if you took Jinxed, and at that point every enemy is doing it too.
In this game, every single melee attack has a high chance to stun an opponent... for an upwards of thirty seconds of normal gameplay, and it's boring. You'll also be subject to this by the way, and for even less fun it'll often be before you get a turn. The implications on build variety and quality of gameplay are many, and I'll leave it to you to think them through.
A final note, this game has some kind of severe memory leak. It's the sole game that has caused my computer to BSoD on me. No Man's Sky at max settings for 30 hours? No problem. X4 for 500 straight? Just fine. Star Citizen? Smooth 75 at max for hours on end. This game? Unplayable on Survival because it could, at any moment, cause my entire system to crash, and sometimes more than once an hour. I'm done.
The sole reason it gets two stars instead of one, and why I'm keeping the game itself (and only refunding the supporter packs) is because beneath all the garbage is something with infinite potential. Too bad it'll never be realized.
To start with, there’s the tutorial in the beginning. Maybe my entire problem with the game is some sort of glitch, as after picking up the biscut the game would only allow me to end the tutorial. Could be there’s a bunch of information I was to receive on how to play the game.
In the first town I managed to pick up and sell a quest item before I found out it was a quest item; rebuying said item put a dent in my cash.
There are a number of skill and ability checks in the first town. I assume that the checks are flat against your scores. I say this because there were two plotlines that I could not advance in at all, despite each having three options to check your stats against to proceed, and another that I’m still not sure why I couldn't advance. Totally fun to be locked out of multiple stories in the first place you arrive at in the game, because you didn’t build your character according to whatever design the folks who made the game had in mind.
Because of that lock out, I proceeded into the wilderness. Turned out there’s one place where you can get one of the aforementioned quest items I sold before knowing it was a quest item. Random encounters were all four-on-one against me, so that was as deadly as you can imagine. When I got to the next town I found myself backtracking, as once again I failed every skill check needed to get past a guard.
I think there’s a resting mechanic. I developed two stat penalties with no explanation as to what they were from, or how you removed them. I’m assuming there’s some rest mechanic not listed, much as there are several items that list numerical values for your Toxicity, Hunger and other stats, but I can find no way to view them while playing.
There's more, but I'm out of characters.
Honestly, Atom is a nice-looking game with a neat concept, but seems to have been developed by people with a 1980s adventure game mindset of “Flail about and get frustrated trying to figure out how to do the most basic thing.”
