With the explosion of indie rogue-likes sweeping both PC and Console markets, it was only a matter of time developers would try strange brews of other genres to stand out. Atomicrops, by publisher Raw Fury and indie developer Bird Bath Games, attempts a challenging feat, marrying the fast-paced short progression of rogue-likes and the gentle pace of farming games. Bird Bath Games clearly show they wanted to do more than just Stardew Valley meets Enter the Gungeon. Having come from the often ridiculed realm of Early Access, the developers spent that time on making a focused and entertaining game.
The game begins on a calm country farm, planting potatoes before a nuclear catastrophe lands the player in an irradiated wasteland of mutated animals and sentient cash-crops. Most of the time spent in Atomicrops has the player farming, fending off fireball spewing moles, and venturing into enemy territory to find items to aid in your business venture. The player has a short amount of time to do this, so you always have to pick your battles. At night, the player returns to their field to fend off beasts of the night. If you survive the night, you go to town to spend your hard-earned profits. Once you finish, the cycle begins again.
What makes Atomicrops engaging is every element feeds back into your goal of farming. Killing enemies gives fertilizer to upgrade plants, exploring gives you new items and seeds to plant, the profits from crops buy upgrades and new weapons, roses allow you romance and marry furries that give you more upgrades. Finding and buying more items to deck out your farmer is so gratifying when the battles stop feeling so uphill. Farming games’ ability to make progression satisfying is on full display. Picking a field of fully upgraded plants and having a fat wallet after a treacherous night always feels great. Farming is simple; digging, tilling, and planting seeds is all bound to one button. The player is free to fight and use other items while farming, making night farming a frantic horticultural shootout, easily some of the most fun times of the game.
Shooting is passable, it gets the job done, nothing astounding. The amount of weapons is small, but all can be upgradable to make them devastating. I would only ever pick shotguns or machine guns since the number of enemies on screen can be high. The sniper rifle felt useless since any enemy far away enough for the range was always not a threat or too far away to be seen, and it made close-range fighting nearly impossible. Not much to complain about when you can buy a gun that is just a group of flying squirrels fired from a slingshot. The rogue-like standard of permadeath can be very crushing in this game. If you have a bad run, you don’t mind restarting. If you have an excellent run, beginning again feels very sluggish. Permanent upgrades make the earlier sections a little faster, but more could be added to make death not feel so defeating. Maybe next run, you can recoup some of your losses by finding your corpse à la Minecraft. Since movement upgrades are frequent, the player senses a significant shift in how the game feels to play when starting over. While this was sometimes annoying, it never stopped me from starting a new run.
The game’s presentation makes it stand out from other apocalyptic games. The wasteland is a vivid nightmare of monstrous cartoon animals instead of cold deserts of muted grays and beige. The bright pixel art makes items easily seen against the background. Sounds are punchy and fun, maintaining the game’s tongue-in-cheek tone. The soundtrack resembling a 19th-century rural wedding reception works beautifully, sounding like a group of wanderers playing instruments cobbled together from loose scraps and sticks. (Pairs great with Over the Garden Wall soundtrack)
Atomicrops has a small issue that underpins a lot of it. After the early, combat no longer feels worthwhile. Once you learn many encounters have avoidable enemies, you often spend more time ignoring enemies than fighting them. You can still engage them, but when you start with only six hits before permanent death, avoiding them seems far more worth it. When fertilizer becomes easy to find from the night sequences and scrolls that automatically fertilize crops are common, engaging with the enemy stops being a focus.
Atomicrops tries to counter this with the camps that require to kill all the enemies before the loot can drop, but you can see the loot before it falls, so you know before going in if its what you need. If you didn’t know, you would gamble health with the promise of something good. For some drops, you don’t know; However, you know which camps will drop seeds, rose seeds, scrolls, animals, turrets, and stat upgrades. With the time limit on the night sequences, you can pick all your crops and wait in a corner for the night to end, since enemies focus on your plants.
With boss fights with multiple stages, the amount of health you can lose makes it just better not to engage. Bosses adhere to the time limit as well, so the most challenging and rewarding fights can be evaded too. The later game feels like playing blackjack, and every time you win a hand, the dealer gives you the next page in a guide on how to count cards. Everything the game rewards you for doing can distract from base elements of the game.
Atomicrops is a beautiful example of how experimentation can lead to new ideas. It’s a solid rogue-like with fun presentation and music. I cannot wait to see what the game will look like after a few updates as more and more is added to the game, allowing for even more chaotic combinations. Its faults are hard to ignore, but it’s always worth starting that next run.
7/10 Rating
Check Out the Atomicrops Nintendo Switch Launch Trailer:
For more information about Atomicrops, please visit: https://rawfury.com/portfolio/atomicrops
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Nintendo Switch Review
Current student at Chapman University studying Film Producing and Game Development. Lover of film and video games. Aspiring game developer who loves Strategy, FPS and Action games, new and old. Favorites are Dark Souls, Doom, Half Life, Civilization, and Super Mario World.
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