We've seen an upsurge of Fallout copycat games in the past few years. Some, like Wasteland 2 or Dead State, were started by old Black Isle Studios veterans, and despite their flaws display a modicum of insight into the original's greatness. A more amateurish attempt like UnderRail can easily get swamped in superficiality or desperate attempts to tag every possible gameplay feature without properly integrating them.
But even UnderRail fared well compared to ATOM RPG. Thanks to communist mismanagement and over-development the Second World has, for almost a century now, provided a wealth of industrial decay perfectly fitted to post-apocalyptic themes. Long after 1989 you could drive out through post-communist cities' outskirts and be guaranteed to stumble onto disaffected, weed-choked, doggedly upright reinforced concrete skeletons of misconceived all-purpose industry. If some Ukrainians could draw on such inspiration for the brilliantly immersive STALKER to compete with the latter FPS Fallout games, then surely another mixed East-European team might be capable of duplicating that feat by building on the isometric Fallout progenitor as inspiration.
No.
Apparently they could not.
It's not just a matter of a horrendously incompetent English translation, of having your character log track the number of "fishes catched" or other odd pluralizationses. It's also the character portraits hailing straight from the uncanny valley, neither impressive or expressive nor realistic, recalling the gory days of FMV in the video games of the '90s. It's the unnecessarily minimalist combat mechanics, lacking the nuance of DeadState's special moves or variable melee ranges.
But mostly, ATOM's developers missed the critical point that to build a role-playing game one must needs build a world. Fallout's beginning took you from the computer-lined walls of your Vault to dusty, sleepy Shady Sands to the ramshackle Junkyard to the decrepit yet formerly futuristic Hub and finally to the Brotherhood of Steel's militaristic rehash of the vault look. Its factions were lent personality: some were Mad Max punks, others small-town farmers, others defined by being high tech or inhuman to varying degrees. Its gear was distinctly split between tribal spears and makeshift body armor to recovered assault rifles to futuristic laz0rz.
In contrast, ATOM shows a distinct lack of contrast. Every character speaks in the same awkward jumble of catchphrases, grand chest-thumping proclamations and ultrasuperlongwinded, flowery descriptions of nothing in particular. Where STALKER's zones were each dominated by an eye-catching feature (train tracks, garbage dump, industrial conveyor, tunnel system, apartment buildings) ATOM's hopelessly mired in the sameness of communist reinforced concrete construction. Every one of the first half dozen locations I've visited is dominated by the same visuals: same terrain textures, same flora, same square gray walls and tin roofs, same patrolling vaguely disheveled NPCs. Its perfunctory crafting system, while it at first offers an interesting glimpse of trying to MacGyver together workable gear out of plastic bags, duct tape and scrap metal, gets redundant before you can enjoy it.
Worse still, ATOM tries to compensate for its lack of inspiration by sheer volume of filler. Every single random mook forces you to trudge through the same list of standard adventurer questions, despite having nothing to say. STALKER suffered many of the same issues yet avoided the pitfalls of poor storytelling by maintaining a light touch: only the necessary amount of text, a few offhand lines of audio to lend the world an aural dimension and heavy reliance on non-verbal cues. As you wearily grind through dialogue after dialogue, ATOM starts looking like a clown car of endless randomly goofy comic relief characters with nothing to relieve. But there's a difference between telling a joke and being a joke...
It's not all bad. The basic graphics and animations are solid, and while it locks up upon death, forcing you to restart the program, it otherwise seems remarkably free of bugs for such an amateurish project. The basic bidonville appeal of a post-apocalyptic trash-based economy is spot on. Even the interface is actually pretty good, trim and clean and functional. But programmers have a nasty habit of assuming their expertise in computers qualifies them to create a computer game, and the past forty years are replete with examples to the contrary. The creators of this "game" took themselves much too seriously and seem blissfully unaware of their own incompetence in the creative aspects of such a project, beyond coding. Watching them pile on such awkwardness zone after zone makes one embarrassed to even be a party to their own public humiliation while touting the name of Fallout as inspiration, like watching a drunken acquaintance make an ass of himself.
This is not a product to be sold even at its bargain basement price, but a fumbling piece of fan work to be appended to an online forum for free critiques.
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