So I reached year 9 (of 10) on Atomicrops over the weekend(!!) and while I’m only two years away from finishing the main game, the difficulty has been steadily amping up and I might be reaching the end of the road now; it’s moving into what I feel is bullshit territory. More bullets, faster bullets, faster enemies, a little tankier perhaps, and flying shrunken heads drifting in vertically and horizontally throughout the year. Okay, fine. The biggest problem however, is enemies that charge you–fast–from off-screen. There’s no warnings or cues so it becomes a split-second reflex flick to knock them back and hopefully kill them before they connect with you. In the plains area we’re talking wasps, bulls, bats, bugs, beeson, bullet barrages and the aforementioned shrunken heads. At least with bullet hell you’ve got some time to react and there are usually patterns, but here it’s a lot faster and looser so it’s messy and very difficult to control without adequate firepower/protection. I’m going to try for a little longer!
A few general longer term criticisms: the ant colony meta-progression is kind of pointless. It helps, without a doubt, but while it presents itself as an interesting series of choices (choosing one closes off another), it’s not: you’re just exhausting a list of upgrades that you’ll eventually fully unlock anyway. A lot of them are incremental improvements that you just forget about (but I’m sure if you rolled them all back you’d feel it). The best upgrade/discoverable is the time capsule which transfers some of the fertiliser, seeds and items from your previous run. It’s a nice early game boost. There’s also an ‘Atomicats!’ thing which remains a mystery to me. Seems like fluff but no idea yet. At present the character balance is a bit off so I suspect that to be tweaked in the next patch.
I think overall the core gameplay loop is unique and very interesting and I think its opacity has been a big draw for me: working out how best to play and discovering various things with each session. I fear leaving the game and coming back to it later because I’ve built up a lot of muscle-memory and a large part of the experience is gauging and juggling numerous elements in real-time to be as efficient as possible. It reminds me a little of Void Bastards or Cryptark in that regard. And while it’s not a heist game, you do have to scout the outer wilds, raid the ‘low-hanging fruit’ camps, look out for escape tunnels and get out before the sun goes down.