Recent reviews by n13e86

If you like puzzles, you will enjoy this.
If not, you will find out that you don't like puzzles. Like me.
Later puzzles demand additional abilities that have nothing to do with puzzle-solving itself: aiming, quick reaction, platforming, and spatial orientation.
Many recommend this game to complete beginners. Please, you should stop doing that.

Play this game, if you like:
- first-person games (with optional third person - if you want to watch all the dirty hanging stuff from the ceiling in your face)
- spiders
- narrow corridors with even more spiders
- empty cities that you can pointlessly run across
- disconnect between what characters say and what they actually do (you can't even offer to help them with a thing they just said bothers them!)
- bland, unimaginative setting (fantasy Europe? Again?)
- unimaginative monsters (giant spiders, and almost nothing but giant spiders)

The game does not let you rebind controls - and nearly all buttons it suggests are under your left hand, around movement buttons. (rebinding requires going into a confusing text document and trying to figure out which is which - I gave up)

Secondly, it has no words. Which might be something you like, but it's a very specific choice that not everyone will enjoy.

Perhaps, this is normal for this specific subgenre - but the game has no campaign or meaningful narrative of any kind.
Which might work for replayability, but doesn't help you get there - where replayability begins to matter.

Excellent soundtrack, great characters, ability to pet Cerberus, all great.
However, I advise you to watch the trailer or check gameplay descriptions first, which I didn't do. The game is extremely fast-paced, and that can't be altered.

The game is perfect at what it does.
And what it does, is turn-based combat. With almost no random involved in the combat itself.
Despite the outcome of every single action known in advance, it remains unpredictable.
And then, there are fun extra bits: setting, visual style and interesting mechanics.

Before you play the game, make sure to thoroughly examine screenshots. I am not talking about graphics quality - my concern is its artstyle - or lack thereof.
The portraits are so bright and colourful, they might have been accidentally uploaded from a mobile game about farming. And their prevalence in the game affects immersion.
Secondly, I played Wasteland 2 somewhat recently - and can't avoid comparing more recent RPGs to it in terms of combat. Turn-based system does not work for a one-against-many, with firearms. Gritty realism that Atom's authors are clearly going for, requires at the very least a cover system - instead of just standing there and being shot (or shooting people standing there).
Also, why is the world map worse than in 30-year-old Fallout 1? You literally can't scroll it. A character marked something on it for me, and I wasn't able to check where - and which of the marks on my map was that one.
Another another problem, is how the game introduces you to its world. In comparison, Fallout 1 shows you: a pristine bunker, an abandoned bunker, and a settlement built after the war. Atom offers you a regular Soviet village. With some military outposts. It feels a lot more like a post-Soviet warzone, rather than a post-apocalyptic one, specifically.
Play this game if you want "a lot of content" (the world promises 90 locations?!) and "choices" (your skills and attributes affect how the dialogue goes), not bothered by disfunctional combat, and not afraid of spiders. Have I mentioned spiders yet? Because apparently there are spiders.

Almost every choice made about gameplay solves an existing issue within the genre.
The game offers a lot more points of choice than its predecessors.
Music is excellent, and visual style is on point.

There are some minor issues with interface (notifications block interactive objects "beneath" them, even when they aren't open) - but the game is still in early access, so it might be expected.

A tactical game with 3rd person view? And weirdest interface you would ever come across.
WHY?

The game does exactly what it aims to do.
It has excellent visual style - and even better sound.
Unlike the rest of the game, that has save rooms pretty often, the opening section is long (and does not tell you how saving will work before it gets there).
Most importantly, unlike Resident Evil, it has no spiders. Or classic jumpscares, for that matter.