Once again, Epic Games grabbed something exciting and even in an unexpected genre of farming. The events of Atomicrops take place immediately after the apocalypse.
Be a farmer on Atomic Crops! An ordinary farmer lived quietly for himself and here you are – nuclear bombing, radiation and mutations. The representatives of the flora and fauna together became bloodthirsty monsters, and the rabbits learned to use weapons. And, of course, the whole gang is aggressively tuned exclusively to the protagonist.
Local radioactive farming, mutant rabbits and business planning in an environment where every bush wants to eat you. The gameplay can be called roguelike: each run starts with a basic set of handy items and randomly generated terrain. Monsters, scattered artifacts and seeds, the location of boxes and useful scrolls are also randomized – in general, everything is mixed.
In the morning the farmer must take part in raids for prey, in the afternoon he works hard on the beds, and in the evening – to repel the fierce attacks of monsters. It doesn’t have to be in that order, everyone decides for themselves! The gameplay is simple and clear from the first seconds: hover the mouse cursor, start clicking. The tactic is proven to work even on genetically modified food. Further – for the economic component or in a simple way for trade.
“To sell something unnecessary, you must first buy something unnecessary”. So the hero has to rush among angry bulls and rabbits with an ordinary gun to find at least some seeds. Then you have to dig a place, remove the weeds, prepare a garden bed and finally plant a mutated miracle. It remains to water and take care of the sprouts from time to time so as not to swallow the teeth of caterpillars. The next morning a helicopter will fly in and pay for the entire collected product in kind, and with it we are already buying packages of seeds, better weapons and even building materials to access distant biomes.
Some more interesting gameplay nuances
The game world is static, which means that the location of all locations is always the same, so once you look closely, you can judge the strength of your opponents in terms of potential benefits.
Ordinary crops grow singly and bring little profit, but if you add a little genetic fertilizer … mmm. delicious … then you get a huge mutant woven from several plants. There will be more serious profit from it, and more money by the morning – more opportunities tomorrow. Also, one of the main tasks from the very beginning is the search for tree sprouts. They repeatedly bear fruit, maintaining a stable income and much more convenient in terms of cultivation. Also, don’t bother finding a mini-chef and choosing a random artifact in the style of the good old Binding of Isaac. It can be either a banal superstructure of an attack, or completely changing the gameplay mechanics.
By the way, there are two types of opponents: neutral (they just do their job, do not touch anyone) and dormant (the same). An evil farmer is always the first to enter the path of war, start killing everyone or calling a tractor from the sky, and he is already making bugs, rabbits and buffaloes in the manure. By the way, tractors are different, there is uprooting, watering, killing – just for all cases of apocalyptic life. In addition, you can get magic scrolls that activate rains, earthquakes and other weather events (always only good). It is usually enough to take out a small group of two or three enemies to take from them a package of seeds or a box of objects. The golden box and the homeless tractor provide better protection. Well, sometimes random neutrals can kill you inadvertently – you’re alone that you haven’t calculated and climbed under a herd of bulls or a swarm of locusts.
But there is also a bright side to the story – the opportunity to play a wedding by giving flowers to one of the NPCs. So you get an extra pair of hands ready to help in the battle and water the garden bed. And help is really needed, because the hero, in the true sense of the word, works hard. With one hand we hold a watering hose, with the other we dig a bed with a pickaxe, periodically stop and pour lead on the annoying rabbits, not forgetting to carry buckets from the well with our backs. All at the same time, without stopping, without rest. And finally Night monsters are very different from day monsters. They are aggressive, naughty and want to steal your loving crop. There are also bosses who appear after several waves of small fries. The full day-night cycle takes five minutes of real time, so Atomicrops activity is out of scale: days and even seasons change quickly and a lot needs to be done.
Based on the success of the season, the mayor awards a prize, often a package of any useful permanent loot. But the weapons here are disposable – they live only one day and break immediately. Although upgrades are placed on them, you will need to properly allocate capital and plan their purchase in advance. Also, it is not always possible to find something interesting on the first day, and then on the second it will no longer be possible to go deeper into the forest or steppe and as a result the overall approach to party planning will change a bit. .
Although it would be an exaggeration to say that compilations can be created here, but the game strives for this and has all the prerequisites to become a really great computer project.
Results
Now only an early version is available without game mode + and no endpoints, and although there is a cross-currency, it only allows you to buy some weird cats. If we take it honestly and truly, then Atomicrops turned out to be a one-off, but as a Nuclear Throne no one will pass it the first time. However, the game is fast, chaotic and fun, as far as it can be done in the style of GMOs and the end of the world.
Atomicrops has huge potential. But what it will eventually become is a great mystery.
Now this is a beautiful, original arcade game, which managed to perfectly combine different genres.
