I couldn't see a thread on this so apologies if there already is one.
Anyone playing this ? Watched a bit on Youtube and it looks a lot like the early Fallout games.
Seems to get good reviews on Steam as well. Only £11 so might give it a go once I am bored of RDR2.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/552620/ATOM_RPG_Postapocalyptic_indie_game/
I bought it a few weeks back when it was on sale on GOG. I forget what I paid for it, since I bought a couple of dozen games at the time. Certainly less than £10. I liked the idea of it, but the UI put me off. That sort of thing was as good as it got in its day, but I'm not a fan of retro gaming. I bought Fallout 1 and 2, but stopped playing FO1 after about an hour of trying it and never played FO2. They're great games, but that type of UI really puts me off. What I'd like is FO1 and FO2 remade (without any changes) in an open world 3D game engine, even if was Bethesda's aging and limited engine.
But I do like a post-apocalypse exploration RPG, and I mean RPG. Not a hugely simplified pseudo-RPG where the dialogue options are "yes/no/sarcasm/question" and you can't even see what your character is going to say for each selection. Fallout has dropped the RPG aspect pretty much entirely. Great world-building, crappy game-making. Then Zenimax destroyed what was left with drooling greed and blatant contempt for customers.
So I was definitely looking for a post-apocalypse RPG, enough to chance a small amount of money on buying one that looked very good in every way apart from the very old-fashioned simple UI. Then I left it in my library and didn't play it, as usual. I don't play most of the games I buy. Obviously I intend to play them, but I buy more games than I have time to play.
I got around to playing it last night, on a whim. Time to give it a chance and see if that deeply unappealing (to me) UI is a deal-breaker. 4 hours later I stopped playing it because I had to pee and then I decided that it was past time that I should be in bed.
That UI? Not my preference, but so well implemented that it's smoothly playable even for someone who dislikes that time of UI. Unlike some more famous offerings, it really does just work. I didn't even read the manual and I skipped part of the tutorial section and I still found it easily usable. It doesn't get in the way of experiencing the game and the gameworld.
As for the rest of it, oh yes please! An RPG, an actual RPG! Happy dance time! Detailed and appropriate skills and stats, all of which are relevant and useful. World-building. Lore. Dialogue, proper dialogue based on the assumption that players don't find reading more than a few words a chore. Choices, so many choices. Places to go, stuff to examine all over the place. It's always interesting to walk around everywhere, just to see what's in the places you haven't seen yet...and there will usually be something. Maybe an interesting environmental feature, maybe a new location, maybe a shack that might have some stuff and/or lore in it...the only way to know is to look and it's always fun to do so. Loads of junk that I want to have because I think it will probably be of some use for something. Yes, yes, give me 20Kg of empty bottles, scraps of plastic and lengths of wire to haul around! Scavving and exploration - two of my favourite things in a post-apocalypse game. And crafting. Crafting in a way that makes sense. Basic stuff you already know. It's not that complicated to know how to make a crude club or shield or even (for a person in a modern post-apocalypse society) a crude gun. You might lack the skill to do it right or to make a good job of it, but you shouldn't lack the knowledge of roughly how to do it, enough to have a go at making it. And people, people to
talk with. There's dialogue, real dialogue with choices and those choices are affected by your character's personality and skills and by your character's choices. Did I mention that it's an RPG, an actual RPG?
I did a favour for a character in the first village, refused payment partly because I was thinking that reputation affects dialogue options and partly because I'm roleplaying someone decent and the NPC clearly didn't have much of anything (did I mention that this game is an actual RPG) and they gave me an old rifle as thanks. Sweet! I wanted a rifle. Punching rats to death is not my ideal course of action. But...they gave me a rifle. Just the rifle. They didn't have any bullets of the right type. Neither did I. Neither did any of the traders in the village. I knew the general idea of how to make bullets, but lacked the materials to do so and lacked the skill to do a decent job of it. And that's how it should be, in the context of that gameworld. So was I annoyed at having a useless rifle? No. In character, I was pleased at having the potential for a useful weapon. Out of character, I was pleased at having a very well made game.
Here's another thing that makes it stand out. It has explicit mod support integrated into the game. It's right there in the main menu. The game itself has a mod manager built in. It's not "screw our fans and screw your mods, we want all the money you have for a collection of insultingly crap microscopic mods - give us $18 real money for a paintjob for one suit of armour, you stupid suckers!"
Do I recommend Atom RPG for the £5-10 I paid for it? Yes. Do I recommend it for the £11 you can get it for now? Yes. Would I recommend it for £20? Yes. Without hesitation. £30? Maybe. It's very good, but it is a simple and outdated type of UI. It's a very well implemented version of such an UI, but it is an outdated UI. But for £11? Absolutely. I came here to enthuse about the game and found your post when I searched to see if there was already a thread before I started one of my own.
Minor issues, most of which very likely stem from me jumping straight in and not reading the manual:
1) I didn't know that left-clicking
and holding on an interactive item brings up a menu of interaction options. A simple click performs the default action, click and hold is used for anything else. I only found that out because I didn't know how to try to pick a lock and went online to find out.
2) I'd like to be able to scroll the map. Not the gameworld - that's the usual method of simply moving the cursor to the edge - but the map. Maybe there is a way and I just don't know it. Maybe there isn't a way.
3) English is not the language the game was developed in. While the dialogue is still very good in English (and vastly better than the current norm for games), it is a translation and that means some nuances are lost. Also, the gameworld itself is in Russian. The UI is completely translated, but where there's writing as part of the graphics of the gameworld itself, the writing is in Russian. Completely correct for the gameworld since the game is set in Russia, but it does make some things less immediately clear if you can't read Russian. For example, there are some signs on some buildings. If you can't read Russian, you won't know what the signs say. Not a big deal - e.g. if you go into the building and it's an improvised clinic with an NPC selling medical services you can deduce that the sign outside says "Doctor" or "clinic" or somesuch thing.
I will buy stuff from this dev. If they announce a sequel, I will pre-order it. I hardly ever pre-order games (2 so far, in the decades I've been buying games), but Atom RPG is so good that it has earned the devs that much status with me.
but good to know it is worth the asking price 
