Rise of Atom

I have to admit, this a a fun little management game. The gameplay loop is simple - make decisions and choose technologies to affect the world, for better or worse. The art is good and the gameplay smooth. I'd love to see more research projects and ways you can affect the world, but perhaps that's in the future.

so far so good. just needs a back button in the menus

I'm still on my first playthrough of this, and if you're anything like me, when you saw the first few reviews trickle in all negitive, I gave pause and held off for a few days on purchasing this. Starting with the cons, yes there are some spelling mistakes, and yes it does look like most if not all of the scientists and products have been made with AI. There, that's the big issues I've run into. The game itself flows pretty well, gives you several options for sorting what you're wanting to research and shows you what will be impacted. It gives you a varried number of quests that have different outcomes, and drops you in a semi sandbox with the express intention of 'go make money'. For the price tag, I'm enjoying it. There are one or two QoL things I'd love (like a quick exit to next month instead of moving to the elevator) but it's not major.

it was a very fun game even with its flaws, however the background art and how you can see the city change as you unlock more tech and publish it is truly amazing, I would love to see more tech and quests from this game.

I'm enjoying what i've played of it so far. Can see myself playing this for a few hours. I feel that some of the reviews are harsh given most players only have an hour of gameplay

The core idea is pretty good, the gameplay loop is decently engaging and is rather well-polished, but there are too many shortfalls, too little replay value, and too much AI usage to recommend it for full price. The loop is: you hire scientists, you choose a project (or multiple), you secure funding, you put scientists on it, you make some choices in quests/events, and you skip to the next month. Some of the quests are pretty fun, there's some branching, there's a modicum of consequences but most of it is rather obvious. As your AI assistant reminds you, there's no ethics board, so it's really on you whether you care about doing something horrible just to increase profits, and generally there's only a few ways you can behave throughout the game; those few ways represent the entirety of replayability of this management sim that takes 3-6 hours per run, depending on if you get caught pants down by one of game-ending events and can't research what you need in time. Those early gameovers are pretty funny, but too easy to prepare for once you know what they need beforehand (trying to trigger and survive a nuclear winter is probably the most involved). The financial side is the weirdest, because it hurts you early on, the first year or so, forces you to resort to investors for the next year, but then you basically have infinite money and don't care. The entire investment system falls flat once you realize that there's no pressure on you to earn all the money, there's no need to make the line go up, and the derivative of that line also go up, you can just finance everything yourself and get bigger profits way later, and you spend less time in the menus. At some point you will stop using even "free" investment options simply because they take extra mouse clicks. Money is infinite, nobody calls you a bad capitalist for earning less than you could've. No shareholders that demand more and more growth with ways to temporarily pacify them hurts the game a lot. With money turning into a tracked score number basically, you are only limited by your scientists. The hiring mechanism is so involved you will click on "hire everyone" button the first month and will never revisit the screen again. They train to be better passively, and you can't control it. You can bump the efficiency of the training, but the quests to do it are high priority regardless. They also have some of the most obvious AI portraits I've ever seen. Like, just about all the assets you pay attention to are made with AI, but those are the most obvious; not to worry though, they are just a set of numbers and are never treated as anything but such. You throw whichever at whatever project they are qualified for, as many projects as you can, and hope they'll level necessary skills fast enough. Finally, you are left with one last aspect of player agency: do you publish your research? Due to money barely being a system, it doesn't actually matter. You can guess the consequences easily, and you quickly learn that anything that has the plainly declared government approved tag, will likely have a request to put backdoors into it. Naturally, you can avoid such *interactions* with the government by simply not publishing such projects, after all, you don't actually need those profits, and the research done in secret and kept in secret still allows you to push progress further. Despite all of that, I felt the strong "just one more turn" energy playing through it, but eventually the game ends one way or the other, and there's only so many ways you can play it. As in, you probably have enough fingers on one of your hands to count those ways. And then there's AI art struggling to fit the overall visual vibes, there are only two voices you hear, both of which are AI characters voiced by AI, there are some puzzling typos in text, and the text itself is at least edited with AI if not written by it (so. many. em dashes). Definitely worth a try when bought on sale though, if the AI isn't a deal breaker for you.

Short but sweet with a decent bit of replayability. Should take you about 4-6hrs to finish a run, and there are a few things you can do differently, but the overall path you take will likely be the largely the same. There aren't "branching" paths as such, where one upgrade will lock you out of another. By the end, you'll have unlocked everything, but there are a few technologies that you may or may not want to publish given their effect on the world. For example, without spoiling too much, on one of my runs, I published too many "Government Approved" tags and it emboldened a crazy dictator to start WWIII. On another, I didn't publish those technologies, just kept them as company secrets, and the war didn't happen. Overall, I'd say give it a try

after just an hour of playing i loved this game, its honestly underated. Create a problem, sell a solution

Started with cola, ended as God Emperor of Mankind

Pretty nice game, kinda addictive and also funny