Atomicrops (2020) [Switch]

“No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.”

-Alan Moore, Watchmen

Every once in a while, you encounter a game that takes ideas you never ever thought would fit together and turns them into a new sort of unexpected experience. I’m talking about Bird Bath Games and Raw Fury’s Atomicrops, of course, an action rogue-lite farming simulator, with adventure and bullet hell flavors thrown in for good measure.

What? Oh yes.

That was my reaction when I first caught wind of this game and its blighted post-apocalyptic wasteland stuffed with anthropomorphic mutant veggies and freaky mutant enemies. It’s like somebody took Mad Max: Fury Road and smashed it together with Green Acres, ignoring the pleas of the 1960s sitcom as it fused into some kind of painfully fleshy body horror amalgamation of joy. Atomicrops is Rogue Legacy crossed with Harvest Moon by some dark forbidden art, but the end result couldn’t be more fun.

SPRING

As someone whose guilty pleasure is spending way too much time in farming sims, I immediately wondered how Atomicrops worked.

Instead of farming endlessly in order to amass a fortune and an empire, Atomicrops moves at a far less leisurely pace. Oh sure the usual features are still here: court and get married, use farming tools, stockpile currencies. It’s just a much faster game. There are the typical four seasons, but each season lasts three in-game days and each day lasts just a few minutes. During the daytime hours, you can divide up your time between exploring the surrounding wastelands or tend to your garden of squealing vegetables. After each day ends, you’ll visit a nearby village packed with helpful goodies, weapons, items, and doodads you can trade for.

However, when the sun sets over your farm… that’s when things get intense.

SUMMER

When darkness falls, they come. Waves of ravenous monsters seek out your farm and attack. Some of them will even try to eat your precious harvest!

At nightfall, you’re therefore tasked with defending your farm from the marauders, outlasting them until the dawn. This of course gets progressively tougher as the year wears on. More and more enemies show up on your doorstep in an attempt to gun you down and munch on your crunchables. You can quickly become overwhelmed if you’re not properly geared up; I hope you set aside some time earlier to explore the other biomes for upgrades to your stats, handy turrets, helpful farm animals, attack drones, or coveted health restoration items.

And on top of all that, there’s the bosses.

FALL

At the end of each season, at nightfall, you’ll need to defeat a boss before sunrise. Do so and you’ll be handsomely rewarded with meat to feed your starving mutant plants.

Can I just say that the Fall boss has one of the best video game boss names I’ve ever heard? It’s “Old Mech Donald” and he’s a rusty tractor with a frowning old man’s face on the front of it. I’d have been immensely proud if I had come up with that pun!

Anyway, you’ll have to fend off hordes of enemies plus the boss and survive through the night victorious in order to see the next season. There are more than four bosses, though. There are five: one for each season and one for Nuclear Winter, which comes after regular Winter. It’s a very different boss fight but I won’t spoil it for you. Figure it out yourself. This is a critique, not a walkthrough!

WINTER

Health can be rare and the competition can be brutal on your fallout farm. Perish and you’ll have to start all over in rogue-ish permadeath fashion, losing all (or most) of your rewards, upgrades, weapons, items, etc. This returns you to a broken down old homestead where you can purchase permanent upgrades (provided you unlock the feature) or switch to different characters with distinct perks (provided you’ve unlocked them, too).

For me, I spent most of my time playing as Rye. Guns last an extra day before breaking and you can start the game with a turret, baby! Other characters either improve farming skills or speed up the game even more.

If you don’t die, though… if you can make it through the entire year and conquer Nuclear Winter, then the prize will be extraordinary. You’ll unlock Year Two, and then Three, and so on, so forth. Each year comes with more goodies to uncover and larger rewards to reap, but the game will also get harder.

While not at all a traditional farming sim, nor even a typical rogue-lite, I think that there’s enough of a unique combination of ideas here to keep the game interesting for folks who aren’t too keen on either farming or rogue-ing.

The 8-bit Review

 Visuals: 9/10

Clearly inspired by the 16-bit golden era of games, Atomicrops boasts fluid sprite movements, quirky designs, and a colorful palette. It stands out among all of the indies striving to replicate the look of a bygone age by opting for consistent and updated graphics.

 Audio: 8/10

If a standard for good, catchy, memorable music is that you catch yourself suddenly humming it, then let me say that Atomicrops has good, catchy, memorable music. Befitting its bizarre concept and setting, the music has some grunting and mumbling in it that, again, sets it apart from the “pixel sounds” that Indies of this ilk typically employ.

Check out some of the music by Joonas Turner here on Bandcamp.

 Gameplay: 10/10

The gameplay is fast-paced and seamlessly moves from one segment of the experience to another, complete with a timer to keep you on track, while still providing the player with lots of agency to choose between options for their best performance. With bullet hell, farming, adventure, rogue-lite, and collectathonish mechanics, there’s a lot here to love. Also, it bears mentioning that it’s a game where I experienced exactly zero glitches or crashes, which is more than I can say for some other games I played this year.

 Replayability: 8/10

The loop is strong with this one. I found this game to be highly addicting with a lot of replay value. It’s one of the few games I’d rather play than write about! The only thing that really impacts the replayability are the next two points:

 Accessibility: 4/10

Getting into Atomicrops for the first time proved to be quite challenging, and that’s because there is a very quick and basic tutorial before you’re left to fend for yourself and figure most things out. While this preserves the joy of discovery, it also means that many players may have a difficult time easing into and adjusting to Atomicrops’ demands on them. The controls are fairly simple but the game can soon become overwhelming.

 Challenge: 8/10

I made it as far as Winter of Year Six. I nearly unlocked Year Seven! Oddly, I spent a lot of time dying in Year One, trying to get a sense of how to best play the game, develop some strategies, plot out my farmland, and seek out the most useful items and tools. Once I hit my stride, I was able to push through a few years right in a row up until Year Five when things turned ugly again. Bullets get faster and enemies take more damage, so the increased challenge isn’t always easy to adjust to when visiting a new year. The good news is the bosses remain the same so you know what to plan for.

 Uniqueness: 9/10

Honestly, I can’t think of another farming sim or rogue-lite quite like it, and that’s a true testament to its distinctiveness that despite the fact that it combines pre-extant influences and inspirations, it still remains unique. I’ll remember this for a long time.

Personal: 8/10

One of the best indie experiences I’ve had so far this year. It was a bit of a short-lived experience, mind, particularly compared to traditional farming sims, but what a consistently enjoyable, grueling, explorative, engaging, fast-paced experience from Year One to Year Six, nonetheless. Just be forewarned that this game does take some time to get into and it’ll demand you practice at it.

Thank you to Raw Fury for providing us with a copy of the game for this critique.

Aggregated Score: 8.0

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.