Recent reviews by Rubberhead

Interesting experience.

Less an action focused explosion filled spectacle but a piece of art that gets you reflecting and thinking.

Nice short little Metroidvania.

The end game could have been a tinz little bit more challenging, but not everything needs to be Dark Souls :D

Looking forward to the sequel

A beautiful Metroidvania with a unique twist on the formula the manual pages and lots of love poured into it. Death´s Door wishes it was Tunic (I love both, but its true) .
Great hommage to very first Zelda game.

Or as we say in German: "Da kann man nicht meckern!"

Hello there !

I usually enjoy a lot of RPGs and ATOM seemingly had a lot going for it, but after not even 30 hours I think I am already done with the game. I love post-apocalyptic settings, especially if not within the USA, Fallout is a series I love and this one seems to draw inspiration for it, so all the ingredients for some RPG fun seem to be there.

So I played...

[/b]TL/DR: [/b]

Great ideas but falls short in some implementations and does not seem to have something really interesting to say.
If there was neutral option, I would have chosen that.

Exploration:

This is mostly fine, your usual overworld map containing several location maps (there are 3 world maps though) . Time passes, random encounters can happen and the map is covered by fog of war. Some UI elements to eat from the world map would have been fine (you need to enter a random camp map to click on a campfire to cook you food there, and then you need to walk out of that map). You can unlock a car, traveling faster, which is nice.

Combat:

While the fundamentals are solid, the long-term viability of combat suffers from drawbacks. Melee is basically useless and I just with there were more battlefield control effects, more crowd control or special conditions and such. Fidel was mostly useless in my playthrough, though I might have mis-invested some skill points. There are like 2 valid combat skills.

Dialogue:

Sometimes there are unique dialogue choice when first initiating dialogue with someone, which is awesome, but often its the just the same 4 standard questions you can choose in a dialogue. There are usually just 3-4 NPCs with more unique dialogue in the settlements, sometimes just 1-2 in the smaller locations. After a while, it feels extremeley same-ly. The dialogue contains a lot of references to soviet history, space program and even more pup culture references.

Other Gameplay:

The game falls into the familiar RPG trope design trap where certain attributes and skills significantly outweigh others in importance ( here Action Points (AP) based on Dexterity), one basically needs to max that in order to prevail (especially on the higher difficulties). Strength also is a requirement because of the ridicolous weight management system (it is just too annoying. Increase the basic capacity by 20 for everyone by default and it would be fine and you would still need to manage a lot).
Settlement construction feels lackluster, demanding substantial amount of resources for meager benefits.
You pay someone 3-4 times money to set up the basics and then (I stopped after fixing the generator) you still can pay for 3-4 more upgrades, but just 2 really seem to have any benefits.... too much resource tax for too less of a benefit (later stage unlocks a companion).

Story:
Society collapsed and you are sent out by the secretive ATOM program to find a lost expedition and rebuild the wastes. You follow the trail through several settlements and meet strangers, traders, slavers, thugs and people in need. Along the way you can rebuild a small village, infiltrate a mushroom cult and visiting the ruins of a giant dead city. There are some twists and like some other older RPGs in similar vein, its a matter of knowing where to go for the finale (they patched it so you cant cheese the end quickly anymore apparently). Like with Wasteland series, I not often connect with the idea of the militaristic super organization swiping in and saving the day.
The end has interesting story twist, but its very ..short and unspectacular. Bonus points for being able to resolve the end without violence.

World:
The game is set in post apocalyptic soviet area which is a very interesting playground of a setting, including many references to the Soviet space program. The are villages, cities, strange mutated creatures, trader networks and so on. People lost a lot of the old technologies and try to get by in a harsh world. The character portraits are real people and are often an easter egg or reference to someone. However, the portrayal of female character portraits using mugshots of prostitutes strikes an odd note. I think the audio/music selection could be more extensive. Missing voiced dialogue is not the problem, but other audio elements make up so much of a good atmosphere.

Regrettably, the world, much like the dialogue, appears overly saturated with references, sometimes feeling forced and detracting from the overall experience (coming from someone who usually enjoy references).

Pew Pew Heisty Heisty!
Fun!

Best Metroidvania of the last decade (yeah, a bit better than Ori, even though that game is awesome as hell as well).

Civilians are an acid.

It´s really great, BUT any news about upcoming DLC please ?

.

puuhh

I really wanted to love this game.

Medieval Payday 2 -esque game? Sounds good on paper !

But yeah, read the other comments, you can not do stealth only runs, combat and movement feels super clunky and really bad, no real special abilities for the characters (you can use your ulti maybe 1 or atmost 2 per game!, skins are awefully ugly, no real progression system, boring mission type (there is only one kind).

Huge letdown, I dont think they will ever recover from this.

But in my dreams they will do No Man´s Sky level redemption arc. That would be nice