Recent reviews by Kåt Tsun

men of war red tide right down to the stupid good difficulty but you fight the CIA instead of Hitler

true rpg fans only

it's the first game but two thirds to a half as long and twice as refined i guess

ATOM series is on its way to defining its own aesthetic style beyond Fallout 2; the addition of CYOA bits al a Space Rangers is cool af but the VA is not too hot in the english version (should have been a guy with a hefty accent like the intro imo) but that's a preference thing so it's not very important

about half as many areas as the first game, maybe, but the main quest is roughly about as long due to needing to backtrack to a few places for either faction

what it trades for length it makes up for in experimentation with the aforementioned CYOA and the power armor, though in practice the power armor is a bit too loud on the audio mixing for my ears and i didnt use it that much for that reason

crossing my fingers for atom rpg 3 and finding out what the big bad really is o:

Fantastic homage to the Fallout series. Enjoyed it a lot. Plot is very short, as the meat of the game is the sidequests, especially the starter village where you spend basically half the game, but the side quests are what make the game. A true RPG in the old school vein, with neat side areas inspired by STALKER and Metro series, and lots of cool characters that looked like they stepped out of Red Square circa the '90's. Very good game 9/10.

It took about 80 hours to finish the first run. I am now playing Trudograd with my continued character. If you're thinking of playing Trudograd, play this one first, so you can import your character.

If you like Fallout you'll like this. The tone is much closer to Fallout 2 than Fallout 1, as there are a lot of references and "memes", but the main story is still good, and a lot of the memes (like the chainsaw-wielding Cult of Lenin) are basically IRL anyway.

Also if you are going to do a full play, do not forget to recruit Hexogen as fast as possible and before doing any side quests in Red Banner/KRZ. This is an extremely experienced game tip.

robo booba lole but im gay

i got loved to death uwu rip

hardspace but you fly the ships you break

haha rcs go wrrrr

haha hull go womp

oxygen alarm go beep

haha it's quiet now

why is my saliva boiling lol

it took me about an hour or two to figure out how to get my mechs started and all the tweaks needed to survive them in a fight

been playing it for a bit and managed to go a month before i got stonewalled by bad production decisions, a misclick on the calendar, and boxed into a map box where i have like two directions to go and a big monster coming to get me i guess

i would suggest making the day turn thing ask if youre sure if you want to advance a day but that's about it

e: nvm i beat the giant monster by luck the tentacle monsters are hard and super annoying tho

e2: the ending popup is really cute even if it's not really a true "ending" <3

Actually difficult game that is hard.
Cyberpunk aesthetic and "bathroom" quality microphones.
Top-down view and simple minigames constitute core loops.
Easy to learn hard to master.

Rare in era of modern games where every game plays itself. Good game.

tl;dr: I really like this game. For $15 it isn't bad at all.

I have some issues with it, related almost entirely to the story, not the game itself. I'll grade it in a normal SPAG (Story, Performance, Aesthetics, Gameplay) method. It will be mostly my thoughts on the story element (IMO) issues, though.

=== Story ===

So the story in this game is bad, but in a manner that is so inoffensive I cannot tell if it wants to set itself up in the next game as being satire or serious. I’m assuming there will be a next game, if only to introduce swords and such.

You play as Ethan, a member of a “mobile mechanized company” of the US Army, an elite special forces mech unit that is helping “NATO Battlegroup Parmenion” (all NATO divisions are named after Greco-Roman generals now) with border patrol against the Russian Army. In short, you are a Modern Military Shootman. It’s that story, yes, the generic COD story dudebro game. But this isn’t a dudebro shooter game, this is a mecha game where I fight demons. Why am I being given a minute plus long exposition dump about overpopulation and Peak Oil when I just need to fight demons? What? Armored Core only gives you this much lore after the first three or four games, but this is the real world, not some fake one like PW. Is this going to be a send up to the self-seriousness of AC? Of COD games?

I thought I was being punked or something and setup for a Predator-type situation. You know, the Shootman game turns from a Shootman game to a satire of the Shootman genre by introducing an enemy so unbelievably alien and discordant to the genre trappings that it can’t help but be noticed in a meta-narrative manner. Even if only subtly through acting or mission design, rather than cringe call out. I bet I’ll be fighting the Russians for the next two or three levels as an extended tutorial only for them to be whisked away in a dramatic send up as something vastly more dangerous appears. I was almost right: instead of something like Mech Predator, though, I got Serious Sam 3.

So as Ethan you go through generic border patrol, assert Sigma dominance over your wingman in about 10 seconds, blow up about a dozen helicopters and tanks, and are basically invincible to the weak enemies. Then you go to find a lost US Army battalion in the Mission 2 (“Lost Battalion”) and encounter the demons at nighttime. Genuinely sort of spooky, but I started feeling weird that this was only the second level. Gave me some true Exmortis vibes though. However, in the next level you fight monsters in the daytime, and I immediately can’t help but think of Serious Sam due to the bright background and silly monsters.

By about level seven or so I knew where this was going. It wasn’t going to be satirical. I wasn’t going to hear about the Stoic Military Man having to defend an ammunition resupply. Not because the aliens are particularly tough or able to kill tanks (they are not, in fact, as tanks can survive nearly a minute or so continuously being wailed on by several foes) but because the tanks are running out of ammo so fast that they can’t carry enough bullets.

The satire material here is so ripe and fresh that I don’t think it requires any serious looking, simply tell the story as if relatively little has changed, but keep the stoic generals behind the voice overs and the player character and pals losing their minds: “Why the hell are we invading Novorossiysk instead of fighting those monsters,” or “High command’s ordering us to defend these tanks while they resupply their ammo,” and such. Both of these would be hilarious background satire for the genre (fighting generals more concerned with the long term mundane, as fighting the Russians is eternal in this world, rather than the absurdity of the situation of fighting what appear to be a combination of Lovecraft and Biblical abominations), require no more effort than the actual missions as introduced, and would, I feel, have suited the hammy deliveries just fine. I can understand the author of the game wanting to be more serious with his drama, but that is far far harder than ribbing the genre of modern shooters by literally stepping on commandos with a five story tall mecha, and this is a one man project.

Things that sort of emulate this are done: there is an evacuation mission but it’s soldiers running instead of unarmed people? Shouldn’t the soldiers be shooting? Or at least be unable to fight, like a truck convoy, instead of being commandos with guns? There is a capture-the-port mission but it’s Odessa and you’re doing it to land ships. But it’s filled with monsters? How the heck do you do that? It would surely be easier to capture a port like that before the monsters invaded as the Russians are nowhere near as tough as these monsters are, at least according to the callouts in mission. Something hardly shown in game, where I watched an M1 tank receive about half a dozen blows from a 100-foot tall stone giant with blades the size out of a house for hands.

Also no one asks why the sky is green and the clouds are red. Mysterious.

But I digress…

== Performance ==

I noticed some people talking about performance issues with graphics cards in the reviews I should address it here. This game runs excellently on my system with an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 and RX 480 at max settings with basically zero frame drops. There’s not much else to say. The game is not particularly beautiful and it isn’t going to be looking like Minecraft with RTX but it is passable by far. The enemies are visible in large numbers and from long distances, due to very light LODs, and you can find dozens or even hundreds of foes on the screen at once without frame drop on anything resembling a modern gaming PC. Very similar to Serious Sam, actually.

== Aesthetics ==

I am still unsure why this game tries to pretend it is a modern war shooter without being +90 hours of dramatic build up before you see your first enemy, like Muv-Luv, but I am not especially complaining in this regard. The models are good and accurate enough for the Bradley and Abrams tank. I never quite got a good look at the Russian units, but I noticed that they were using fat T-14s and some Mi-24s. Sorry for fans of Apache or Cobra helicopters, you get nothing like that in this game, as only Russia has helicopters and you only see them for the tutorial and opening mission.

I do wonder though, why not make it something like the futuristic helicopters the US Army was looking at? Why Chinooks? Perhaps not enough time to make all the models in the game custom, though. The airplane model that you fly in on looks like a Beriev A40 with lifting engines like a VJ 101 in the middle of the wings. It is cool but not especially American or futuristic. I would have expected a C-17 with similar setup perhaps. Graphically it would perhaps have been simpler in geometries, but there may not have been enough references or perhaps the model is not custom made but a stock asset.

So the mechas were clearly the main effort here: they are certainly unique. There’s about a dozen or so combinations for each tier of part, and maybe 15 part types total. All different, so your mech is pretty deep on the customization, about as good as the early PS2 era Armored Cores.

== Gameplay ==

Little to say here, really. Optimal build is to go for as much energy and regeneration as possible. Usually two batteries on your arms and two generators on the legs, with preference towards efficient thruster bottoms, lighter mass legs, recoil reducing arms, and high energy cap/pool torsos. Heads can be whatever you want. This is not particularly necessary to have all the bits until around Level 6 or 7 perhaps, and you should be able to gather something useful by then. If not, do a couple raids to waves 4 or 5 and get 3-6 parts each.

After that it’s dual Gatlings and whatever you want on your shoulders. Upgrade those to the automatic sentry shotguns ASAP and you will be untouchable. Too fast too fwoom.

good sequel