Atomicrops adds a little roguelike danger to the normally-soothing days of post-apocalyptic farming in this week’s IG+ First Look.
If you’re into growing crops and tilling fields, everything seems pretty normal when you start the game up. You have to walk to a nice patch of soil, till it a bit to get it in the right shape, plop a seed into the hole, and then water it with your trusty long-distance auto-watering device (which is pretty cool for a farm sim tool). Except then moles come and shoot fireballs at you while you’re working the grounds. And rabbits with guns. Oh yeah, and your potatoes and veggies are kind of dancing and alive.
I don’t normally find farming sims all that engaging. Something about pretending to do all of this manual labor and veggie tending isn’t my style. Apparently if you throw guns and mutated animals into the mix, you catch my attention, though. Juggling blasting your foes while planting and tending to your garden gets tense quite quickly, creating a tight loop of things to do. My mind was always racing as I played, making for a solid mixture of two very different play styles that somehow worked really well together.
It doesn’t hurt that Atomicrops has a bouncy, silly art style that makes its goofball enemies and living produce come to a cartoonish life. There were many different vibrant mutants that made the time I spent exploring the countryside in search of seeds much more pleasant, even if there were killing me pretty quickly. The soundtrack that accompanied my death was even better, though, adding this calming twang to the chaos I was working through. What I’d heard was quite relaxed and catchy, and it made everything seem even sillier.
Basically, if you want something that brings a little goofiness and mayhem to farming, Atomicrops is worth looking into. And if you want to see it in action, you can check out the Twitch VOD of us playing it.
Atomicrops is available now on the Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and Epic Games Store.
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