This indie Russian Fallout 1/2 clone comes out of Early Access today:
I’ve already purchased this, so I’m hoping to give you some first impressions later.
I’m pretty curious about this.
I came into this thread expecting satire re: Atom Shop from Fallout 76.
I added this to my wishlist. Although I love throwing games on my backlog and then getting to them just whenever, I have a particular (new) rule about isometric RPGs in that I need to finish the current one before buying another… and currently I need to start and finish my copies of:
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Shadowrun Returns: Director’s Cut
Shadowrun: Dragonfall
Pillars of Eternity
Wasteland 2
I guess maybe I’ll be ready for this by Christmas 2020.
Fallout 1 is my favorite rpg of all time though, so maybe Atom should be reconsidered. 🤩
Holy crap, this came out of nowhere. I vaguely recall checking it out ages ago but totally forgot about it since. Will likely pick it up after holidays when I have access to my PC again. In the mean time, I’ll follow this thread like a hawk for any and all impressions/reviews.
Hopefully it’s more like Fallout 1/2 and not like Underrail.
Do we need to talk?
Not really, I felt like it had none of the joy of character creation, and it was really obtuse to start with. That’s half the battle in an RPG. Character creation should be fun, and Fallout 1 and 2 are the gold standard for that. Underrail’s character creation was less fun than Baldur’s Gate, and that’s a really low bar.
Oh yeah, having an advanced view at all the perks and detailed descriptions of stats and skills is surely inferior to BG2’s obnoxious dice rolling and guessing what the fuck stats do and which are actually recommended for the class you wanted to play. Or my favorite, locking yourself into Sorc spell selection without knowing how they’re going to behave in the game. Much more fun for sure!
(I’m joking. Or am I?)
In any case, went ahead and bought Atom since I still have a few days before I leave for the holidays.
You do realize that I was saying Baldur’s Gate’s character creation sucks? And that Underrail’s also sucks? But Fallout 1 and 2 are excellent?
UnderRail’s character creation follows FO2 model very closely so I don’t understand how it can be worse than BG2 if you liked FO1/2 so much. The only thing FO has over it is funny/witty descriptions. But anyway, to each his own. I’d rather talk about Atom if you don’t mind, especially since my original comment was a joke anyway :).
I just booted the game up, and here are the first impressions from character creation:
a) lots of skills, and a few stats more than in FO2. Very hard to create a jack of all trades character from what I can tell.
b) traits are pretty extreme, some come with severe negative bonuses, to the point that I decided to only pick one.
c) there’s SURVIVAL mode!!! Includes permadeath. Dream come true for me personally
d) lots of different portraits. You can write your own background bio if you want.
e) Intellect seems to be king, because it directly affects skill point gain and convo options. However, I’m hoping they also have convo branches set up for dumb characters lol.
Looking forward to dive in.
Darn it another one I wanted…picked it up! lol
Two hours in. This game is definitely a labor of love from someone who loved Fallout. The combat system, inventory, bartering with pretty much any npc that will converse with you, skill checks in conversations. Starting out with basically nothing. Explorable overworld map with random encounters.
The writing generally ranks poor to fair - it’s probably a mix of both amateur writing and awkward translation. There is no tutorial at all and that hid some critical, seriously need-to-know stuff about basic gameplay that I had to figure out on my own.
- ALT will highlight items.
- Holding left mouse click on an interactable object/person is how you open the context menu to use skills and such (like repair and lockpick).
- I still have no idea how stealth works. Is it automatic? Do I enable it somehow?
Positives are certainly outweighing the negatives and I’m happy with the purchase so far.
I’m curious about stealth too. As for hotkeys, you can view all of them from the main menu -> help.
Had a proper QT3 moment with the game last night and ended up going to bed around 3 am. I’m now heading into work - pour one out for me, comrades.
edit: Forgot to add, skill checks (repair, lockpick) seem to be chance based because I was able to repair the pump and pick some locks after a few unsuccessful attempts. Same goes for crafting - always save before doing any heavy crafting if you don’t want to waste materials. I’m still not sure about the stat checks though - the boulder that requires high STR to move for example seems to be fixed, possibly the same for other convo checks like Speechcraft.
Also, if anyone feels like savescumming a lot let me put your mind at ease - both saving and loading the game seem to be lightning fast, at least in the first village. I can’t quite tell what engine the game uses - I’m tempted to say Unity but the performance I’m getting says otherwise.
I am playing Kenshi right now, and loading is… painful. :(
A word of warning to any potential buyers - inventory is more or less a carbon copy of Fo2’s, which is to say, it blows. It’s a really long list of two columns. You can also sell quest items so be careful when trading.
Combat seems to be pretty hard, even on Normal. I started over with a focus on melee but I read on forums that the focus shits towards ranged enemies later on, hopefully it won’t bite me in the ass.
Bat you should always rate a game on your Underail score – e.g, “Atom RPG is about a 4 on my Underail scale” Then we’d know exactly how you feel.
But warning understood. I am curious though: Is apocalypse Russia more depressing than apocalypse America?
Apocalypse Russia is more depressing than current America. :-)
Lol I’ll keep that in mind for future reviews. So far it’s not anything like UnderRail though, it feels closer to Age of Decadence, with a mix of Wasteland 2, Dead State and Fallout 2, all of course with the constraints of a russian indie game (But boy can such teams do some black magic on small budgets). I don’t know yet if there are any perks beyond the initial traits that you pick but I can tell you that in the first village already I missed out on a quest and some side activity because I started a new character with low attention (perception). But so far the game feels…smooth. Level detail is reduced to essentials, which is completely fine with me but some people might be put off by it. Everything seems to work according to specs, hardware utilization is good, loading is extremely fast. The game gives impression that it was primarily designed by someone who is a programmer by trade.
I’ll post some more impressions tomorrow but after that I’m flying back home for the holidays and won’t have access to my pc so I won’t be able to update until after new year.
As for the setting, it’s too early to tell. I think the tone would feel a lot different if the text had been written by a native English speaker, or maybe I just perceive it that way as an ESL myself. But the surprising thing was how seriously some characters seem to take themselves and I look forward to meeting more of them.