KickStarter ATOM RPG - Wasteland Soviet style! - now with Dead City update

[Junmarko]

The circus was one of the most atmospheric places I've been to in an RPG.

The circus freak rivalry between:

Spoiler

Woman with-a-beard

VS

Woman who-can-lay-eggs

LMAO

 

[Sigourn]

I dreamt I told this to someone, so may as well actually say it. Does anyone feel the game is a bit too on the nose... stereotypical Russian? It's as if Bethesda made an isometric Fallout game set in Russia, to put it bluntly. You see in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 constant references to commies and so on, which is a far cry from Fallout and Fallout 2 where the Great War and its factions are almost never referenced. I understand this game is set very early into the post-apocalypse, with plenty of characters having lived before the bombs went off. And unless I got my dates mixed up (admittedly I'm not good at retaining information), this appears to have happened before the end of the Cold War, so it makes sense there's some Russian-ism to the characters talking about "comrade", "proletarians" and such, over and over again. But I can't help but think "this looks like something Bethesda would write", complete with squatting and all.

Or maybe Russia is like that, or was like that back at the end of the Cold War, and I'm biased against media representations of Russians to believe that's how actual Russians behave...

 

[Mortmal]

Yeah, ATOM RPG is basically a 1:1 clone of Fallout 1 if you ask me, and I just completed Fallout 1 a few weeks ago so it's fresh in my mind. The game is incredibly similar.

From what I've played so far it would seem ATOM is a considerably more punishing experience than Fallout or Fallout 2, and I'm playing on Normal mode. But it really feels like Fallout. It's a shame that as a non-Russian I'm missing lots of references, but then again references (blatant ones, on top of that) were something I didn't like about Fallout 2, so maybe it is for the best?

Its unfair and punishing at the beginning cause you get the same random encounters no matter your level. Most of them are instant death encounters, then when you get some gear, far too late in my opinion, everything become trivial. I dont know if a non melee character can even survive first few hours.

But Comrade you can use stealth to hide, speech to talk with bandits or survival to avoid both of them. My both toons started with speech 60 so did not had any problem whatever you can get to 5-6 level without any forced fights and if you have also decent INT and take perk then you have enough SPs to invest in combat ability of your choosing and lift your other skills.

Take Perception 8 Attention 8-11 and Int 8 and you will also get tons of additional quests, loot and XP... or Just make STR 10 DEX 10 melee fighter and bludgeon intimidate everybody on your path the choice unlike most modern western imperialist games is yours Comrade.

It's good other character types are viable, but even with high speech you can fail and get those bandits encounters, then only thing to do is save scumming. Now if someone starting the game, i suggest him to go see the bartender in the big town immediately then do the strategist quest. You get ton of stuff early that way and quickly two companions . Also it would be good to get the random encounter with thugs attacking merchant caravan early, another easy way to gear up, if you are unlucky you are really getting not much for a long time.That's why there's so many steam reviews saying its unfair, if you go to bunker 317 straight away your game experience will be miserable.

 

[razvedchiki]

So areare game battles hard?
Does it have resource management?
If you could compare it with either fallout 2 or fallout nevada which one would you choose?

 

[Sloul]

I didn't think the game to be hard, although I played in normal mode. Honestly, more on the easy side imo.
But people all over steam are crying that the game is too hard... so... I don't know...
It's a bit harder than Fallout 1 and 2 probably?

 

[Vrab]

I dreamt I told this to someone, so may as well actually say it. Does anyone feel the game is a bit too on the nose... stereotypical Russian? It's as if Bethesda made an isometric Fallout game set in Russia, to put it bluntly. You see in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 constant references to commies and so on, which is a far cry from Fallout and Fallout 2 where the Great War and its factions are almost never referenced. I understand this game is set very early into the post-apocalypse, with plenty of characters having lived before the bombs went off. And unless I got my dates mixed up (admittedly I'm not good at retaining information), this appears to have happened before the end of the Cold War, so it makes sense there's some Russian-ism to the characters talking about "comrade", "proletarians" and such, over and over again. But I can't help but think "this looks like something Bethesda would write", complete with squatting and all.

Or maybe Russia is like that, or was like that back at the end of the Cold War, and I'm biased against media representations of Russians to believe that's how actual Russians behave...

People addressing each other as 'comrade' and using some marxist terminology was a perfectly normal thing in commie countries, even in some unofficial contexts.

It's not like stereotypes pop out of nowhere. Squatting, track suits, alcoholism, that shit's all real.

That said, game really is bit heavy on references and jokes. I like it though.

 

[Mortmal]

I didn't think the game to be hard, although I played in normal mode. Honestly, more on the easy side imo.
But people all over steam are crying that the game is too hard... so... I don't know...
It's a bit harder than Fallout 1 and 2 probably?

It's done by slavs, i am playing a pen and paper session with one serbian guy as DM recently even not getting basic equipment and the good days you can boil the leather from your shoes to not starve. That's how they see things in the east when it comes to roleplaying games apparently. Considerably harder than fallout 1 and 2 tbh, you get gear a lot more easily in those . Max number of bullets i got per weapons at a given time were around 20 . A real good rpg, almost as good as fallout, and even sometime doing things better , that explains the lack of codex front page coverage.

 

[Commissar Draco]

I dreamt I told this to someone, so may as well actually say it. Does anyone feel the game is a bit too on the nose... stereotypical Russian? It's as if Bethesda made an isometric Fallout game set in Russia, to put it bluntly. You see in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 constant references to commies and so on, which is a far cry from Fallout and Fallout 2 where the Great War and its factions are almost never referenced. I understand this game is set very early into the post-apocalypse, with plenty of characters having lived before the bombs went off. And unless I got my dates mixed up (admittedly I'm not good at retaining information), this appears to have happened before the end of the Cold War, so it makes sense there's some Russian-ism to the characters talking about "comrade", "proletarians" and such, over and over again. But I can't help but think "this looks like something Bethesda would write", complete with squatting and all.

Or maybe Russia is like that, or was like that back at the end of the Cold War, and I'm biased against media representations of Russians to believe that's how actual Russians behave...

People addressing each other as 'comrade' and using some marxist terminology was a perfectly normal thing in commie countries, even in some unofficial contexts.

It's not like stereotypes pop out of nowhere. Squatting, track suits, alcoholism, that shit's all real.

That said, game really is bit heavy on references and jokes. I like it though.

Addressing the people by Tovarisch (Comrade) is still official in Russian Army for example and this fad about visual side Marxism like red banners, Lenin, Potiomkin, Chapajev etc... was popular in Eastern block outside Potatotland and maybe Hungary till the system fell and then people gradually accepted new reality and started to look up for new icons either from west (liberals) or pre-revolutionary past (nationalists), Yet still in Russia and Belarus every town has its Lenin and WWII era tank statues... more monuments to the tragic yet glorious past than cult sites but everybody needs symbols Comrade its wiser to let them stand than do this insane Bolshevik style historic vandalism that Potatoes and Ukrops did. Maybe its a bit overdone but its game after all not documentary still it shows an esprit of early nine-ties nicely: the devastation, corruption of elites and rampart alcoholism among the masses, banditery of the men in track suits etc.... not at all like Bethpizda would do: Giant Robot painted red and spinning Communist propagand.

 

[Commissar Draco]

I didn't think the game to be hard, although I played in normal mode. Honestly, more on the easy side imo.
But people all over steam are crying that the game is too hard... so... I don't know...
It's a bit harder than Fallout 1 and 2 probably?

It's done by slavs, i am playing a pen and paper session with one serbian guy as DM recently even not getting basic equipment and the good days you can boil the leather from your shoes to not starve. That's how they see things in the east when it comes to roleplaying games apparently. Considerably harder than fallout 1 and 2 tbh, you get gear a lot more easily in those . Max number of bullets i got per weapons at a given time were around 20 . A real good rpg, almost as good as fallout, and even sometime doing things better , that explains the lack of codex front page coverage.

In western fallouts you bought ammo by clips which was 10 or 20 each here you buy single bullets so you are not wasting ammo onto the rats and like.

 

[Doktor Best]

On the nose is not bad if done right. Bethesda writing is not bad because its on the nose(i think thats even one of their more or less charming attribute) , its bad because usually there is absolutely no deeper narrative level layer beneath it, rendering it completely autotelic and therefor boring.

That doesnt mean Fallout or Atom is some form of higher art or something, but those games do want to say something about the distortion of humanity and society as conclusion to a cataclysmic event. They explore the theme, be it subtle or with a sledgehammer.

 

[Junmarko]

I dreamt I told this to someone, so may as well actually say it. Does anyone feel the game is a bit too on the nose... stereotypical Russian?

Fallout games were very much caricatures of trigger-happy/cold-war America. Believe it or not, Eastern Europe can laugh at itself in a similar fashion too (larpers have a harder time with this though).

 

[toro]

CohnCarnage just started playing the game. I don't like the guy but this is good PR for the game as he has 12k viewers on his stream.

 

[Sigourn]

I dreamt I told this to someone, so may as well actually say it. Does anyone feel the game is a bit too on the nose... stereotypical Russian?

Fallout games were very much caricatures of trigger-happy/cold-war America. Believe it or not, Eastern Europe can laugh at itself in a similar fashion too (larpers have a harder time with this though).

I guess I never got that feeling out of Fallout and Fallout 2.

 

[bataille]

Has anyone started writing a review of it for Dex already? Asking for a friend.

 

[Lyre Mors]

Has anyone started writing a review of it for Dex already? Asking for a friend.

I think your "friend" should most definitely write a review for the codex and doubt very much that anyone else has officially started one.

 

[fantadomat]

Has anyone started writing a review of it for Dex already? Asking for a friend.

I think your "friend" should most definitely write a review for the codex and doubt very much that anyone else has officially started one.

I always wanted to write reviews but don't have the mind to write long and pointless parts of the review.

bataille ,don't forget to say that Politician said that it is Fallout game .

 

[Lyre Mors]

I always wanted to write reviews but don't have the mind to write long and pointless parts of the review.

bataille ,don't forget to say that Politician said that it is Fallout game .

It takes some balls to write a codexian review, but if the intelligent, insightful, experienced, and entertaining things bataille has written in this thread are any indication what their friend is capable of, I think we'd be in for a real treat.

 

[Black Angel]

i would describe it as "too weak to burn brightly, but too proud to be completely extinguished". it also capture the atmosphere of what imagine a more rural russia is like. old, a bit downtrodden, still filled life yet. people feel the nostalgia of the soviet identity they can flaunt. a camaraderie if you wiill.

That's what I like to think the first Mad Max is: It's directly after the nukes hit and the old order is stuggling to recover, but it dying a slow death. Major cities are gone so the largest small ones are trying to take over. Local or regional government is trying to become national government and failing, which is what created the MFP. Beyond these embers the world is what we saw in the sequels and the final collapse is left unwitnessed as Max takes off giving up on civilization.

Wait, weren't the nukes hit in-between Mad Max 1 & 2? Or are you talking about the reboot to make Fury Road possible?

 

[fantadomat]

I always wanted to write reviews but don't have the mind to write long and pointless parts of the review.

bataille ,don't forget to say that Politician said that it is Fallout game .

It takes some balls to write a codexian review, but if the intelligent, insightful, experienced, and entertaining things bataille has written in this thread are any indication what their friend is capable of, I think we'd be in for a real treat.

I strongly disagree with you!!! It takes a purse filled with shekels to write a review!!!


On the second part i do agree .

 

[udm]

I wouldn't mind having a shot at it, but I'll need to clock in more playtime. Right now I have to juggle my workload and ATOM, and the former is winning

Not to mention I have other games on the 2018 backlog like Vigilantes

 

[Parabalus]

What are you supposed to do after the elections, when you return to the factory?

Dan's alive but won't talk to me.

 

[Sloul]

Are you very sure you went through the elections? Did you talk again to the official? If you don't do things in a strict order the game doesn't register your actions.

 

[Vrab]

What are you supposed to do after the elections, when you return to the factory?

Dan's alive but won't talk to me.

He wouldn't talk to me either, might be a bug. But when I left the area and returned a bit later he was back in his office and was talkative again.

 

[Parabalus]

Are you very sure you went through the elections? Did you talk again to the official? If you don't do things in a strict order the game doesn't register your actions.

I won the elections for K and had to go back to Dan (quest which completed), where I won the fight with him alive. I'll try it again.

 

[Fenix]

I like how this game has really wild lore, too. Lots of strange monsters, more otherworldly types of creatures and even demons and other supernatural entities are explored. I really like that, it almost feels like a grounded, gritty yet magical world somehow.

Didn't played yet, but it looks a bit similiar to Marauder book, the second one. Atomboy can you confirm or something? Have you read it at all?

All Russia had after the 90s were their nukes, and it seems USA will be in a similar position a few decades in the future, when late stage capitalism will have completely destroyed this country.

We have exact capitalism that will destroy us even faster than US because we didn't amass that "fat" US have.