ATOM RPG Review 👎
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(1min read)

WARNING: This a rant more than it is a comprehensive review. I did not enjoy my time with ATOM RPG even though I’m a big old school Fallout fan but I seem to be in the minority so take my words with a grain of salt (a bucket of salt perhaps).

ATOM RPG is Fallout 1/2 if it was set in Russia in an uninspired world filled with hundreds of characters who barely have anything interesting to say with little to no environmental storytelling, it strongly encourages you to play certain character builds and it doesn’t seem to actually allow you to make meaningful choices (small or big) defeating the purpose of playing a CRPG in the first place.

Cons

  • ATOM RPG feels like it was released in 1997; nothing of relevance has been modernized. I didn’t fall in love with Fallout 1 and 2 because managing my items felt like getting waterboarded.
  • The world doesn’t feel cohesive or interesting largely because speaking to the NPCs usually have nothing to say and only respond to being asked about their name, their job, their thoughts on where they live (eg. a slightly extended version of "ASL?") and a couple rumors that they all seem to repeat. The NPCs that have a little bit more to say aren’t going to blow your mind.
  • Travelling on the overworld map is tedious due the slow movement speed, the long distances between places (I’d say zones of interest but usually they’re not) and the fact that nothing interesting happens during the travel time (actually I’d rather nothing happened instead of fighting the same groups of monsters/bandits all the time).
  • Dilemma: If I kill nine bandits that have been shooting at me with their pistols forty plus times then when I loot them I expect to find at least some extra bullets so that at least one of my companions can sustainably use a ranged weapon for combat instead of all of my characters running around like headless chickens with knives. So, the ATOM RPG universe doesn’t have enough bullets to sustain one of my characters but the hundreds of bandits I encounter all seem to have enough bullets to shoot at my party until they die at which point their bullets disintegrate into nothingness or perhaps in this universe enemies die the moment they run out of bullets.
ATOM RPG is probably not for you unless you are an even bigger fan of the old school Fallout games than me and are stranded on an desert island (to be fair we all sort of are given what has happened to the Fallout franchise as of late).