Atomic Reconstruction is a Java app, a block placement puzzle game with an atomic fusion/fission "Theme"... and "theme" is a nice way to put it. The game doesn't follow any actual science and the developers grasp on atomic physics seems highly tenuous at best. I'd go so far as to say this is anti-educational, the more you play, the less you know. Anyway the game is played by dragging "atoms" around a hex grid, right clicking on them to split them and dragging them onto each other to "fuse" them while blindly ignoring how science works. It's a garbage concept implemented badly.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game features extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
Comically, the game was written in Java (I'm not making this up). Talk about not using the right tools for the job. Might as well try to bake a cake with a screwdriver. The extremely poor choice of game engine here is a major contributing factor to the defects with the game.
This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).
Regardless, for all intents and purposes Atomic Reconstruction might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Atomic Reconstruction has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for right clicking on a hydrogen hex, you can do this within seconds of starting the first level, so it's trivial to achieve, but less than 2 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 2 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who weren't even playing the game? Trading cards. Players will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
Atomic Reconstruction is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
