Your first combat encounter is a dumb forced loss encounter that they PATCHED to be a forced loss. Your trained character hears a noise, sloooooowly stands up, doesn't bother grabbing their rifle next to them, just stands there like an idiot as 5 guys with makeshift melee weapons slooooooooowly surround you. Then, no matter your build you cannot talk them down. THEN a SINGLE one runs up, hits you for 1 damage and knocks you out immediately, loots all your gear, and then the game ACTUALLY lets you play. Cool.

I really feel like the Bethesda like inspiration for this open world game. Unfortunately that inspiration is the beginning of The Pitt DLC for Fo3.

Maybe the game gets good from there, but that level of unimaginative writing already tells me what I need to know.

devs decided to make a political statement, here's one back

ATOM RPG does a great job of modernizing the early Fallout experience, but, like with Fallout 1, you're either going to get into it and enjoy it for a while or the game will go out of it's way to screw you over and you'll want to put it down before too long. I think I'm in the latter camp right now. (I remember having very similar experiences with Fallout 1 and the only time I've actually been able to get anywhere in that was when I played it for the very first time.) ATOMRPG lets you choose how you want to play tbf, i went heavy armour full auto pyscho bad karma

The combat in this is profoundly unsatisfying and the game has a tendency to force you into "no-win" situations far to frequently. I have to fight my way through a cave of wolves that are way above my ability, so instead I give up and head to the bunker. I run into a fight where I was jumped by three guys with automatic weapons. I can give up all my stuff or basically get gunned down. Mkay cool, so no matter what I do I either die and quit or lose all my stuff and start from scratch. This after putting up with the game's crap up till this point and struggling to get some amount of gear, because at this point the best I have is a pipe rifle and some rusty Makarovs that constantly jam and a knife or two. I haven't come across a single other proper weapon to buy or loot yet and I've been to what feels like the entirety of the known wastes. Anyway... I save scum a bit and discover that I can hide some of my stuff beforehand and I manage to keep at least the pipe rifle, some food and meds and my clothes, but have to give up most of my other stuff in order to progress or I just die. To be fair, this isn't the only time the game pulled this kinda crap as the exact same thing happens at the very beginning of the game.

Companions are also fscking useless in fights. I handed Fidel, one of the companions early on, a gun an he shot me dead in the back of my head no less than 3 times causing me to lose a lot of progress. The only solution I've found is to revoke his ranged weapon ability by taking my rusty Makarov back. Oh did I mention that when shooting the enemy he doesn't get nearly as many crits as he seemingly gets on me when shooting me in the head.

Anyway... so I think the systems in the game are pretty cool, the writing is good, the setting is quite interesting, and I have enjoyed the game thus far but I think if you want the player to become invested you either have to give them more opportunity to get stocked up or... maybe lower the challenge a bit early on so that they don't just get gunned down by overpowered automatic guns at every corner. Fundamentally I like the idea of working my way up from nothing, but if you're just gonna pull crap like that later on in the game what's the point? Also I'm not the type of player that just rushes headlong into the next objective, I really have been to many places around the wastes and have found... all of exactly nothing as a reward for my efforts. Which, to be fair, maybe I'm just profoundly unlucky... but still.

I'd recommend it if you liked the early Fallout games, but... don't expect a smooth jouney. there other aspects of power armour being so late game its almost useless, honestly 8/10 the 2nd title polishes most of my complaints