Atomic Society

Overall: Atomic society is a game I really want to love, but it is not at a stage where its fun to play. Some design decisions feel they are heading the wrong way but I will keep an eye on it as it develops and see if it changes for the better. Atomic society is a city building game, where you take control of a survivor of a post-apocalyptic world and with him/her build a city. You have to manage scarce building resources which you can only scavange for, food and water, the laws of your settlement and defend against raiders. Pros: - Scavenging: Instead of mining etc, you scavange the resources that you build your settlement, from structures of the previous world. This feels really good mechanically and fits well in the setting. The only thing I can say here is that there should be more structures (but each containing less resources). You can also convert an old world structure into a useful building as well which is cool and fun, but this is far underutilised due to the relative rarity of said structures. - Leader: If you want to focus on a particular aspect of the development of your town you can manually control your leader who will preform the task with superhuman speed (compared to your other "lazy" survivors). This allows you to overcome slow bits that might otherwise slow down the gameplay and make the game boring. - Personalisation: You can select your leaders beliefs, and personalise them a bit which makes the game feel a bit more personal, compared to other similar city builders. - Setting: I really love post-apocalyptic settings, and the look and feel of the game match the setting well. Cons: - UI/Controls: The switching of leader to overview control is clunky and often you will accidentally be in the wrong mode and cancel the leader doing something - its unnecessarily fustrating for something that should be a simple action. Sometimes the game will change the mode from one to the other without your input and it will take a couple of hours of gameplay before you "learn" the pattern instead of fighting against it. The max camera zoom is also often not enough for a good overview of everything. - Beliefs: While its a nice bit of customisation, the beliefs system is kind of weird - people not of your religion will ignore your laws. Since only the leader can convert people - and you always have a steady stream of survivors of different religions joining your settlement (due to high "turnover") you are forver trying to convert people to your religion. It doesn't really make sense - why do people who come to your settlement refuse to follow the laws of this settlement? - and why do your police do nothing about it? I persevered, but I suspect it is propably easier to just ignore then engage with this mechanic. - Laws: Similar to above - you can set laws for your settlement which is a nice bit of customisation but there are several issues with it mechanically and thematically. 1) they have little to no impact on gameplay, 2) they are severely time gated (you can only change one law every 10 minutes of game time) which means you can't address issues at the speed at which they come in, 3) most issues are more about the politics of the 21th century then something a barely surviving people care about (e.g. abortion, homosexuality, vegetarianism, euthanasia, transgenderism) - there are good ones there too (murder, slavery and cannibalism), but where are the issues of survival? Do we give food to those too old to work? Do we abandon the children who are likely too sickly to survive? How do we deal with the disabled? How do we deal with the sick and injured? In my mind its a missed opportunity to do something interesting with this mechanic. - Raiders: The interaction with the raiders is kind of disappointing. Instead of fighting them, you build guard towers that automagically defend an area around them. If buildings are out of the radius - they get damaged / destroyed when the raider event comes up - its all handled abstractly. The game makes a big deal about how raiders are difficult to deal with and you need to give in to their demands but I've refused every one of them and had little damage from them as you can just build a 2-3 towers and you are safe. - Feedback / Balance: Its early access so I'm a lot more forgiving in this category - but I note it here nevertheless: Its hard to know how much food / water to produce - you sort of build production until you have too much and then stop untill you have too little. Buildings degrade way too quickly requiring lots of repair buildings (or leader micro). People die from not having enough entertainment (one of the 5 needs). Overall its not a bad start, but some of the features need a bit more thought and integration into the overall game.

[h1]Society needs YOU![/h1] [b]Overall review[/b]: Great, enjoyable game that's easy to get into but still offers a challenge as you play. I've played Atomic Society since Pre-Alpha (before Steam-launch) and I absolutely love it! I've seen a few city-builder games close to the same setting and plot, but this one adds a lot of different views and scenarios that can't be found in said games. Closest thing is a mix between Planetbase and Tropico, but there's still a lot of added features and options while playing. And Atomic Society brings all the great features into one game. [b]Positives:[/b] [list] [*] There's no one-way to play this game. You make the rules, you build your town and you either fail or keep expanding. [*] Mistakes are not lethal. You don't have to start over just because you were a few days late with a certain building, and there's no disasters to ruin your entire village. Sure, your people will die without food/water/healthcare but you'll manage just fine with following basic instinct. [*] It's not overly complicated. Have you tried SimCity 3000? God have mercy. You do not need a PhD to figure this game out, it suits everyone from the most basic user to players who's been into the city-building genre for a long time. [*] The look! Oh my God, the look of the game! We dont need another game that fries our GPU, and I honestly love the quirky looking people in my village! It adds charm and a certain feel when moving around. [*] The simplicity makes it all the better. You have the standard charts of moods, tasks that your villagers are currently busy with, number of births/religious people/murderers etc - That is all this game needs to be enjoyable, instead of a hassle (think upgrades á la Tropico 5 - eww). [*] Customization options are close to infinite. You can pretty much choose to encourage or kill anything and anyone for a belief or "social issue" they have. This allows you to moderate your village to your liking, much more than any other game I've played so far. [/list] I could honestly go on and on about the positive aspects of this game, but I'll cut it here to not make it too long. [b]Not so great (yet):[/b] [list] [*] The game is still Alpha, which means some minor bugs here and there. The devs are very attentive though, and community input seems to matter a lot here. [*] I'd like much more upgrades and such for buildings and choices you make. It might be implemented later on, I'm crossing my fingers for it. [*] A minimap! That would help keep track of your village, the scavengers, remote buildings and everything else (like where to scavenge certain goods). [*] Limited to Sandbox (afaik) [/list] Yea that's about it.. All in all, one of the best (and unique) citybuilding-games out there right now.

The game is functional and it introduces some interesting concepts to the genre, but the UI needs a lot of work and the core loop isn't that interesting/fun. The devs recently said they're nearly done with early access, but imo what you get right now is below average for the genre. Your leader is a super human of sorts, able to build and gather at a very fast rate and perform other special tasks. Being able to directly control a single citizen with outsize influence provides the player a bit more direct control of the colony's fate than is typical in games like this, which is nice. Shaping your town by defining repercussions (beatings, jail, execution, acceptance, encouragement) for certain social situations (stealing, murder, abortion, homosexuality) is a super interesting concept, but I found the outcome of all choices to be minor changes in population growth. The system really needs something more impactful to make it feel meaningful, maybe visual events enacted by citizens or some sort of notification when something actually happens as a result of your laws. Aside from that the UI is pretty frustrating. Live display of key resources and unemployed/homeless citizens should be mandatory in a game like this, instead you have to open various submenus. The game warns you when problems exist but you can't tell if you're close to a problem state, for example you can see homeless citizens but not vacant home slots. Food and water arrive in big chunks with long gaps in between, without stats tracking it's impossible to evaluate production over time. The game will unpause if you do anything (even if you open your warehouse to see your stocks) which... is just not how pause should work. And honestly the town doesn't feel alive. Nothing you do feels like it has an impact. Buildings look the same if they're in use or empty. Citizens look the same regardless of job or happiness or faction. Other than rotting corpses, at glance there's no way to see if my town is doing well or not - the game tells you what is going on but rarely shows you. There are some good concepts here and the basics work, but fundamental problems keep it from being fun or engaging right now. I can't recommend a purchase in the current state, and it doesn't sound like a fix is in the works.

Atomic Society is quite good for an early access release. However, there is much that still needs to be fleshed out. This definitely is an alpha! Pros: I found this game far more challenging than other city builders I've played. It took me a few tries before I figured out how to expand consistently, and the in-game events keep you on your toes. I didn't come in expecting raiders to be a significant threat, but here it was extremely important to maintain robust military capabilities while making sure basic needs are met. Your citizens are going to die, no question. The setting is unique for the genre, and the music (which only has two or three tracks) does a fantastic job at amplifying it. The game is supposed to be bleak, and the developers have accomplished that. The in-game pop-ups (which hopefully will be expanded on significantly in the future) also do an excellent job of enhancing the setting. This game runs exceptionally well for an early access title. It runs at a consistent 60FPS on my computer and on release day I've only had three crashes in six hours. Some other developers should take a hint from these guys. The law mechanics are interesting and give the game a unique element that's absent from other city builders. While it is possible to pass laws in other city builders, I've never seen one where I can change what is and is not socially acceptable in a society. It's a neat element. Nice and lightweight. It's only 600 MB. Cons: The graphics are undeniably bad. The in-game camera is annoying and uncustomizable. The rotation and movement speeds by default feel off. Commanding your leader to do something makes the camera automatically lock to him, and if you don't turn the lock-on off, you can easily cancel his commands on accident. I couldn't find an option to turn off the leader lock-on, so I suppose we're stuck with it until the devs add it in. This game is in dire need of a better worker distribution system. Workers will stick with their assigned jobs until their jobs are eliminated, in which case they will pick a new open position at random. There is no one screen for reassigning jobs, so if you want to redistribute workers you need to click on every single building and open or close its positions. This is often necessary and quite time-consuming. Sometimes it seems I have massive dieoffs for no reason, only to be followed by a large number of births. The game needs far better explanations of why citizens are dying. "Five basic needs are not fulfilled" is not adequate in explaining what I need to fix. The game also needs to introduce solid cutoff points on the five basic needs bars to show when people will start dying. Each of the bars has a line labeled with a grim reaper, which one would expect to mean death will begin when the bar drops below that line, but citizens will die in large numbers if the bar isn't significantly over the line. The game has no autosave. I've lost progress a few times due to crashes, and I've been sure to save regularly since, but it certainly detracts from the game. The game is extremely barebones right now, but I expect the developers will fix this in the future. Essential Things to Add as Soon as Possible: A single, unified screen showing all workers, the jobs they are doing, and the buildings they are working in. Allow us to manually assign workers to different buildings. Better explanations of why a citizen died. Better explanations of when citizens will start dying due to a specific need not being fulfilled. Autosave. Things I Would Like to See Implemented: Better character customization. There are only a few options right now. Customizable flags for our society! Since everything else about the society can be made so unique, why not let us make unique flags? At the moment I don't see much of a reason to adopt one state religion over another. I believe it would be good if each religion had a specific bonus that increases in effect as a larger percentage of the population follows it. Why not let us select between different forms of government with different bonuses? It goes with the theme of being able to set different social policies and a state religion. Introduce ways of getting resources besides scavenging. I see lots of rocks, trees, and presumably, there's metal to be found underground, but right now it's only possible to get these things from ruins in the environment. Introduce more detailed settlement defense mechanics. Right now it does provide a challenge, but I don't feel involved in defending my settlement beyond seeing the summary screen after an attack. More pop-up events like the slaves coming at the beginning of the game to reinforce the setting. I would like to see some sort of trading. You can make items from raw materials, and you can scavenge items, but all you can do with them right now is use them. Right now, this is one of the most unique games in its genre, and I see it becoming an excellent game as it develops. Atomic Society is absolutely worth its price.

You are the bravest one in the group willing to go out into the unknown to rebuild society when all other politicians refuse to leave the safety of your bunker - Yup, sounds believable so far... So you start the game by making your fearless leader. A person who can move and do just about everything around four times faster then every one else in your group but we'll come back to that in just a minute. You pick your starting location from a list of nine different types of terrain and biomes. The map loads and your informed you have picked up a group of people who you've found wondering around and they follow you with the hopes of rebuilding a better life under your leadership. This springs into the tutorial. This is an example of a tutorial done right. It's easy and clear enough that even my Grandma could easily follow along. Continues at your own pace that you control or you can simply ignore it and figure out the game on your own. The group of people you start with has four construction workers and everyone else is basically your unemployed labour. You need to act quickly to start claiming and converting one of the nodes on the map to your storage location and start setting up your town around it as your followers will soon start to die a death most horrid in varying ways of post apocalyptic nastyness. Once you've confirmed which node you want to convert the construction workers will slowly make their way to it and start building, but all of your followers are way too dam slow! I was able to move my leader to a node that was twice as far away to gather items and then run to the node where I wanted my base to be, got my leader to completely build the storage node before any of my workers even got there. So little bit of balancing needed here I think. Once you have your basic buildings up and running your towns folk can start to gather as well as your leader but you don't have direct control over them but can set gathering instructions to get the items you need the most but again they move extremely slowly and it's hard to follow what they are actually bringing into your town. Because of how much faster your leader will move and gather you'll really want to micro manage him to be more effective. You can control him directly using W,A,S,D or arrow keys by entering 'focused mode' but your limited to how much of the map you can see when doing so meaning realistically it's not worth doing and better to simply click a node on the normal map screen to send him away to gather, leaving you to manage the town. This is the first annoying part of the game as every time he reaches a node a pop up will close what ever your looking at and the screen will shake most annoyingly! Once your town hall is built you'll enjoy being the overload of your settlement and start setting your own laws and different punishments. You'll need a building and workers acting as law enforcement but your town folk will also do this job as long as they have the same faith as your leader. You have the ability to change not only your leaders faith but the local town folks as well by either education or more darker, forceful means. A few other things I've not touched on include, sorting medical needs, immigration, different forms of entertainment that help effect folk differently depending on their preference and defence and warring with others. So far really enjoying this game and looking forward to it's future development. A few quality of life improvements I would like to see... Having an easy access button for the leader to return and unload his pack Stop the screen shaking and pop up when the leader gathers! More details of what is needed / consumed by the town on the needs bars

Got boring quick. Doesn't take long to exhaust the research tree and just repetition after that. It's not a typical building game as people just keep showing up to populate the village no matter what choices you make. The game attempts to elicit an emotional response by adding required social decisions, which include the subsequent punishments, around hotly contested human rights issues, but these failed to engage me. The whole game seemed boring to me, only having control over one "leader" to control to do the scavenging seemed way too slow than it had to be. I had to force myself to play on for a while to see if it would improve for me and it didn't. I didn't have expectations of something more than a casual city builder but this hits way below the mark for me. *edit*I asked for a refund but was declined because I played too long giving it a chance to improve. It doesn't.

I've only played a little bit of the game (naturally, since it's only just released on Steam), but I like what I see so far. Here are a few initial observations. Pros: + Atomic Society differs from most town building games in its emphasis on a 'leader' that you create at the beginning of the game. You select a gender, age, belief system, and appearance. This is an interesting approach that provides a little bit of roleplaying depth you don't really get from a game like Banished. + The building models and land textures are nice. Not incredible, but they look pretty alright. The whole thing has a nice 'End of the World' feel to it. + Tying into the aforementioned character creation, systems of belief are a significant part of the game. You can attempt to convert citizens of your settlement to your way of thinking, or torture and exile them into submission. Enforcing religious unity over a post-apocalyptic shanty town is surprisingly fun. + One of the big things advertised about the game is its system of crime and punishment. Though the game is early access, and largely unfinished, this feature stands out as particularly well done. You can choose various punishments for the different issues which come to the fore, or even encourage the behavior. Since I've only played the game a little bit, I suspect there's a lot more that could be said about this that I just don't know yet. Cons: - The UI is kind of counterintuitive, and some of the menus aren't entirely clear. I think the 'settlement needs' bars could stand to be a little more explicit. - Building off of my previous point, 'Leader Mode' is particularly annoying, since the way the camera follows your character makes traveling longer distances an aggrevating experience. This is definitely a part of the game that needs more work. - The music and sound aren't very impressive. I hope this is something the devs improve in the future. - While the buildings and ground textures mostly look good, people don't. Citizens look bland and sort of 'samey.' - Though (as noted in the pros above) I'm pretty impressed by the inclusion of systems of belief, there doesn't seem to be much functional difference between, say, choosing Catholic or Shinto. Maybe I'm missing something, but I hope there are plans to flesh out this part of the game a bit so that choice of belief feels a little more significant. Summary: I think Atomic Society is a good early access game, and if the developer keeps working at it, I think it has the potential to be a real gem upon completion. I think it's already worth the $15 I impusively spent on it.

I had high hopes for this game. Played for a while and even after release. But then nothing happened. The updates stopped, the developer doesn't respond, and there's just... nothing to really do. There's so much more than can be done or can be made so much better, but the dev just up and ghosted. Save yourself the disappointment and move on.