Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Feb 25, 2022

  So, I would like to commend the developer(s) for this game. It shows a lot of effort and a the great base for a game is here. Buuut, for a released game, its too shallow, as many have pointed out. The tech list has about 10 items that can be unlocked with no prerequisite at all, just waiting, there are almost no production chains, the upgrades consist on only one upgrade for each building and always with the same item, batteries, people are just a number that goes up and down with no real meaning and almost no impact on the game, etc. So, yeah, the game is not bad, but is not at all a complete game. I cant imagine playing dozens of hours to this game. So I cant recommend it as a full release.
• Deadmeat5150

  Jul 31, 2022

  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.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 16, 2018

  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.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 16, 2018

  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.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 17, 2018

  [b][i]Atomic Society[/i][/b] shows an extremely promising start with a solid foundation to make it a complex and engaging city builder. Society has completely collapsed, and the remnants of humanity must now scrap together whatever they can find to survive. Establish a village in the wasteland and gradually rebuild civilization. Decide the laws and morals of your new society, and spread your beliefs to neighboring settlements. The concepts in [b][i]Atomic Society[/i][/b] are strong and the buildings has quite a lot of strategy to it, but issues can more or less be solved fast and you are then left with just maintaining the balancing. [b]THE GOOD[/b] - Great data feedback - Quite a few structures - Nice art style [b]THE BAD[/b] - Not much to do when city is build [quote] If you like this review, then please consider giving it a thumbs up. I've also reviewed other games that you might find interesting. If so please follow [u][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/27418263/] Top of the Chart.[/url][/u] Reviewed on: Win10 Home 64-bit, Intel i7, GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB GDDR5 OC, 8GB RAM[/quote]
• gamedeal user

  Oct 19, 2018

  I am not just recommending this game because it is already pretty good with great potential but also because of the exceptional response I got from the dev's (Scott) when I contacted them yesterday. I was having a major problem encouraging settlers to my town and my population had dropped from 250 to less than 200 causing lots of impotant buildings to suffer unemployment. I couldn't see any real reason for this so I e-mailed a copy of my saved game to the dev's to see if they could advise what was wrong. Now I know this team still have day jobs so I wasn't expecting a quick reply but Scott must have read my plea for help as soon as he got home from work and his response was far more than I could have hoped for. Not only did he list for me several reasons why I might be failing he also continued playing my game for a while and then attached a new save file that I could continue with. To me this was well beyond the call of duty though it indicates clearly the passion that they have for this game and how much they want it to succeed. The future for "Atomic Society" looks very bright indeed and if you are on the fence about buying it then jump over it and get it, this will probably end up being one of the best games ever of this genre. Thank you dev's for creating it.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 20, 2018

  Dang, I was looking forward to this game for a long time, like top of my wishlist above total war games and other AAA titles. I wanted to love this game. TL;DR = This is not a "city builder" in the classical sense of the genre. This is a snake path game to predetermined goals that seem a little arbitrary. There are a few things I think that could really help this game. Namely is not using the "mayor" character as your main builder. Sure you start with 5 builders that die a little faster than I thought they should, but your other hired builders you can make also all are way too slow, they take forever even on x6 speed so that the entire time you're just making your mayor run around and build everything by himself because some how you're faster than a team of 4 or 5. But I think they allow your leader to do this because outside of that he has to be the main person reparing everything too! because like your builders the repair people are so slow that I think the idea is to build a repair shed near every single one of your buildings. In fact a lot of the buildings seem to be really tight AOE type effects that quite frankly are horrible design choices with the rather cool maps the game makes. So you've got these really great scenic views but the game mechanics make you want to cluster all your buildings together as close as possible so you can make do with one less repair hut. Outside of the boring day to day routine one mayor builder your other task after you're set up and maybe don't need super bob to build and repair everything it seems you can stash your leader in a radio tower where he tries to convince everyone to join your religion. Because, and get this, you can't enforce your laws on people unless they are of the same faith as you. What? My idea would be to create a "heirarchy designer" and let you designate customized chains of command and go give other people orders rather than running around doing the jobs all these other people supposidly want to do. This is a hard pass for me and anyone that wants more than a couple hours of meaningful game play.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 23, 2018

  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.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 29, 2018

  It has a solid foundation for early access, but this game needs a LOT of work. Necessary improvements: 1. Real end game goals 2. Increased building variety 3. Increased needs variety. 4. Raider interaction (boring atm) 5. Improve the visuals of the various "spheres" of workzone/influence of each building 6. Actual combat 7. Consequences for laws/actions that are meaningful. Great start, but only limited gameplay and replayability at this stage. If you are looking for a more immersive game, don't buy in this stage.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 3, 2018

  Lots of potential here, very intriguing. But the game is a long way away from being great. What I've learned so far: 1.You need at least 3 repair shacks or you will spend literally all of your time running around repairing things yourself. Seriously, I repaired the same well 5 times in the course of 18 in game months. How does a well decay that fast? How does anything decay that fast? 2. It's supposed to be post-apocolyptic but it's really just an open field. 3. The forest setting has very few trees somehow. And you can't harvest any lumber from them somehow. 4. Everyone dies from diarrhea all the time. You can't make medicine fast enough or build enough hospitals to stop it. 5. Raiders make ridiculous demands that seemed forced. They are upset that I tolerate vegetarianism? Why? How does this make sense? I got this game because I know it is early in development. I think it has a good chance of being something really special. But right now, at this price, I don't recommend it unless you are a severe fan of this genre, like I am.