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Atomicrops reviewTough taters
Tough taters
Straight off, Atomicrop’s menu theme sets the tone. A chaotic, twee audio collage full of cartoony guffaws that sounds like it was composed on a banjo made out of a milk carton. It’s nauseatingly gleeful, and I want it to play every time I enter a room for the rest of my life. This is a world of mutant spuds and carnivorous plants, where you can marry a grasshopper and work together to kill the sun with a peashooter. It’s a Saturday morning cartoon after eschewing the cocoa pops for a healthy slurp of toad, or an advert from the 90’s shouting at you about how you can’t handle a sour lollipop. Obnoxiously bright, absorbingly nostalgic, and unironically pretty radical.
You can only take a handful of bullets from these murderbuns before death, but silky smooth, responsive controls means Atomicrops rarely feels unfair.
Each run inAtomicropsconsists of five seasons, lasting three sessions/days each. From an initially tiny plot of land at the centre of four different biomes, you’re given two measly minutes to run off, kill things, collect seeds and upgrades, run back, plant and water the seeds, fertilise them with the blood of your enemies, and maybe lay down some turrets or scarecrows. Then night falls, and you’ll fight off several waves of massive slugs or bunnies with sniper rifles trying to snaffle your prize turnips.
Eventually, the sun rises again. You harvest what you’ve grown for the cashews Atomicrops uses as currency, then a helicopter turns up to take you back to a hub area. Here, you can buy guns, upgrades, and seeds, as well as spend some of the rare roses you’ve grown to heal, or even to woo companions. Give them enough roses and they’ll join you back on the farm, helping you with combat or growing crops. Then it’s back to hoeing up vittles and blowing up critters.
This run to run system is very much of the ‘you get better at the game’ rather than ‘the game gives you ever more powerful permanent shinies’ variety. There are three characters to unlock, and there are also three ants to find and rescue that sell you very minor permanent buffs in exchange for a rare resource, but that’s it for permanent upgrades. This irked me at first, because I am lazy and like the option to brute force difficult challenges, but after a few hours I really didn’t miss it. So much of the variety and enjoyment here comes from collecting different combinations of upgrades that too much permanence would make things stollid and repetitive.
There’s so many of these upgrades and extras available, and so many odd and delightful synergies between them, that it’s best just to describe what I ended up with during a couple of different runs.
There was, for example, the run where I ended up with a near-fully upgraded ‘Parsniper’ rifle, which had a low rate of fire compared to the absolute chaos on screen but which was able to monch through bosses with ease. I also had a horse that let me zip around the map, and an ‘Atomitractor’ AOE special I could drop on clusters of enemies. I had a friendly cow that watered my plants while I was away murdering, and a triple watering can for when I was guarding my patch. This was especially useful, since I also had an upgrade that produced protective, bullet blocking bubbles every time I watered plants. There was also a huge worm that followed me around everywhere, although I never quite managed to work out what it did.
The detailed pixel art, pingy gun sounds, and some of the music gave me big Zombies Ate My Neighbours vibes, which can only be a good thing.
Planting the same seed in groups of four results in huge, valuable crops, and gives you yet another thing to worry about while being shot at.
It’s also worth mentioning that guns break after a single day. That was another annoyance that started to make sense after I’d got my bearings, and it forces me into playing a bit more strategically, if, say, I knew there was a boss coming up.
So, yes, the difficulty initially felt a bit too steep. And, yes, if you’ve been playing a bunch of Hades recently like I have - where some upgrades can last across multiple runs - then it may feel unsatisfying to more or less start over each time in Atomicrops. In time, it felt refreshing to play something that forced me to become intimately acquainted with it in order to make progress.
