5.2 hours played
Written 7 days ago
Atomicrops is a farming-sim rogue-like bullet-hell that fails to combine the three genres in a cohesive, interesting way.
When you first load the game, you must complete a tutorial that teaches you the basics of the game. You collect seeds, which you sow in dirt that must be mined, tilled, and watered. Eventually, the seeds will grow into crops that you can harvest for money, and fertilizing the crops will improve its yield. At night, you must protect the crop from from plant-eating monsters. So far, it sounds pretty good, and I was excited to start my first run. I tried doing the things I learned in the tutorial, but I quickly realized that this way would not work. In fact, there were many aspects of the game the tutorial failed to explain, including the map that you can explore for extra loot during the day, the animals that help your crops grow, the town, tractors, pigeons, powerups, planter boxes, biome seeds, cornucopias, etc. After failing my first run because my weapon was too weak to defeat the first boss, I decided that exploring the map would be much more effective than managing the farm, and my next run easily cleared the first year, where a year in this game is a complete run from spring to nuclear winter. As it turns out, engaging with the farming system yourself is quite inefficient, which was among many pitfalls I noticed during my next few runs. Furthermore, many of the mechanics of the game are not explained well and are not intuitive.
A full run starts in spring and goes through each season, with 3 days and 3 nights for each, followed by a special night at the end called nuclear winter. Each day lasts for about 2 minutes, and each night several waves of monsters attack you and your crops. A boss spawns every 3rd night, and the boss ranges from a normal monster with extra health to ufos that steal your animals. You start on a farm in the center of the map, and there are 8 areas to explore in total, 2 for each of the 4 biomes in the game, with an easier and harder area for each biome. Each area contains camps with enemies who defend loot, and you must defeat them to get the loot. Between each day, a helicopter transports you to a town area where you can spend your money, and on the third day you get an extra reward from the mayor based on your performance during that season. Roses, a currency that is not explained in the tutorial, must be grown from a special seed. They can be used to romance two of the strangers who stay in the town on any of the days but can also be used in a special shop on the days the mayor comes. After completing each season, a final boss appears that you must defeat to win.
My problem with this game starts on the first day. When I spawned in, I tried to do what I learned in the tutorial: till the soil, plant the seeds, and water the crops. Simple enough, but once I finished, I was already done with the first day. I did not even process there was another area to explore yet. The first night was not that bad, but by the time I visited the town, I had 0 money to spend. So, I tried to survive another day, and again I had nearly no money to spend. For reference, a better weapon at this point costs around $120, and I only had around $20. On the third night, a giant flying worm spawned that had too much health for me to deal with, and I ended up dying.
For my next run, I thought I would try going to the area to the right first, and I ended up getting nearly everything I mentioned before. I found a cow that helps me water crops, a lot of seeds, including the aforementioned roses, berry bushes that gave me nearly twice what I made in my last run, a pigeon which, when used, mined some of the soil on my farm, and a tractor which, when used, granted me invincibility. On the next day, I went to the area to the left and got more of the same, including a pig that tilled the soil for me. At this point, growing crops was a lot easier, and I could afford to buy a shotgun from the town, which did a lot more damage than the weak starting gun. Other animals that I eventually found were chickens, which ate the weeds that grew on the soil (a mechanic not explained in the tutorial), a bee that boosts crops (I still don't really know what this means), and upper-tier variants for each animal. Furthermore, there are powerups that you can get in each of the areas, such as an ability that allows pigs to dig up truffles and an ability for your bees to turn weeds into flowers. At this point, growing crops was a lot simpler; all I had to worry about was planting the seeds and harvesting them when they were grown. In fact, it is even possible to automate planting the seeds with garden boxes, which you get as a reward for harvesting a certain amount of a seed from a certain biome. After learning all of this, I was having fun running around the areas and picking up everything I could find during the day, and harvesting all of my crops at night. The waves of monsters were no longer challenging now that I had a strong weapon and some powerups, and I had no trouble completing the run.
After that run, though, I realized there wasn't much more for me to do. I tried romancing one of the strangers, but the buffs they give can easily be found by exploring the map. After you interact with them around 4 times, you can get married to them and have them help you around the farm, but at that point I was already very strong, and they did not seem to help much. The shop at the town is not very interesting; everything they sell can be easily found by running around the areas, and the items are expensive for what they area. The weapons are very hit or miss, and their price does not really reflect its strength. In one of my runs, I had a $120 blunderbloom that was significantly stronger than a $1000 squirrel launcher, and there was no way of reclaiming some resources from them or changing them during the day. I also learned that you can only have a limited number of powerups, and many of the powerups you find around are not that useful compared to others ones like the garden boxes. Without really trying to, I conformed to a particular way of playing the game: run around the areas during the day, run around my farm during the night, and skip the town entirely, besides on days the mayor is there and when there is a cheap gun available.
After a couple of runs, I completely lost interest in this game. Running around became tedious, and the bosses were not very interesting. There was not much variety to the enemies I encountered, and trying to kill them with a mediocre weapon was not fun. The final boss was especially disappointing because I could not even understand how it was taking damage. There was not much depth to the powerups you could get beyond what I described here. The only interactions I found interesting were with the garden boxes, and those took awhile to set up. Even if I did get a good run, there is no option to continue playing beyond nuclear winter.
