Atomcraft

[h3] THE SHORT SELL [/h3] If you've ever played any falling-sand game, like maybe The Powder Toy as an example, but you found yourself wishing the game/simulator balance was more 50/50, this is exactly what you would've been wishing for. And I say that with confidence. If that sounds appealing to you, read no further and just put this game in your cart because you know everything you need to know. If you still want little bit more to sell you on this game, and you're familiar with the genre, I'll try to lay it out nicely just down below. And, last but not least, if you're someone who doesn't even know what a falling-sand game is, just skip the long sell section for now and head to the context section. It's kind of important. [i] Just a little bit. [/i] [h3] THE LONG SELL [/h3] Atomcraft is a fully actualized falling-sand GAME. You need to process materials into other materials through relatively complicated reactions in order to achieve real objectives, and it's really fun if that's your sort of thing. At first, it's more basic processes that will allow you to upgrade your gear and become more competent thanks to a bunch of different tools. Eventually though, thanks to your newly acquired tools, you're going to be building (or even browsing community creations for) complex machines with multi-stage reactions in order to achieve your goals. The biggest of which being that you need to attain every element on the periodic table and use them to fix up your ship. Now, if you know about the genre then you're probably sold by now. And you should be, this game rocks. And metals. And gasses. And- And this game really feels like it was made with love. I don't know if it's just one dev or if there's a small team, but you can tell it's indie... in the best way possible. The UI is a little rough, I won't lie, and there have been a couple of bugs, but that's it for any real critique. That's nothing compared to the vision and the execution that the dev(s) have with this game. Plus, the dev(s) are absolutely cracking down on the bugs if you report it in the Steam discussions, it's unreal how good they are. Then, you add in how much content is in the game plus the fact that it's going to get even more? I have 30 hours down and I haven't even started fixing the ship yet. Yeah, if you ask me, it's EASILY worth $15USD. Do yourself a favor. If you've got an extra $15 and you feel like this is something you'll have fun with, then just get the game. I can almost guarantee you'll be glad you did. [h3] CONTEXT [/h3] If you don't know what a falling-sand game is, this is important context. A falling-sand game is a "game" where you're presented with a wide assortment of materials, and each of them has their own properties. Also, each of the materials exists as individual pixels! So, thanks to their properties, steam pixels float and sand pixels fall; hence the name "falling-sand game". For another example, fire pixels are really hot and wood pixels are flammable. So when fire touches wood, it might catch on fire and slowly turn into charcoal pixels. You take that and imagine as many materials as you can: stone, ice, acid, etc. Now, that was basically the extent of those games, which is why I put "game" in quotes earlier. Really interesting and fun to mess around with, but it always felt more like a raw simulator than a real game to me. You could load up people's creations and see the different contraptions they'd built that would allow them to create certain reactions, but there's no objective or anything to really sink your teeth into. Even the most popular one was (and still is!) called "The Powder Toy". Not "The Powder Game". But that's not to diminish it entirely, it's a very fun toy! But then... then there's Atomcraft. Now, if you made it this far and you still want to finish the review, please go on back to the section that I had you skip :)