Atomine is a twin stick shooter rogue lite where you control a computer virus and navigate it through a set of procedurally generated levels. The game was developed by Broken Arms Games who had previously developed Kaboom Monsters.
The game starts you out as a cube which is able to fire a variety of weapons, and your goal is to go through and kill all the enemies in the level. Once they are all dead a portal opens up to the next level. Every few levels once the level is cleared instead of going to the next level, you will be taken to an arena for a boss fight. These boss fights help to break the flow of the gameplay from just going through and fighting the same enemies over and over again.
The gameplay is not the most intricate collection of systems and objectives, however I never felt like the game needed anything added to it in this regard. There are enough enemy types to keep the game from getting stale and there is always a clear indication of how far you are through the levels and the whole game. One issue I did come across is that there is one enemy type which when they attack are almost impossible to avoid unless you run away and hide or get extremely lucky. This felt like an unnecessary decision to implement in the game.
Throughout the levels you will be given experience points (xp) by killing the various enemies or by collecting a large green orb that is usually in a room by itself. When the xp bar is filled you need to find a “secret” area which will contain a weapon upgrade and a place where you can choose a variety of perks based on how many times you leveled up between the current and previous level up station.
During my runs of the game I found a lot of these abilities to be rather pointless, such as the one that allows you to see secret areas, due to the fact that the orbs that contain weapon upgrades hidden in these secret areas are marked on your map anyway and the levels are big enough or the secrets not hidden enough to really need help finding them. That being said there are useful ones which you will quickly learn in your attempts at beating the first few levels.
The weapon system consists of four slots which can be changed whenever visiting one of the weapon change or ability upgrade stations in the secret areas. The first slot contains the type of weapon such as bullets, a rapid fire gun, lasers, rockets and lightning gun. The second slot determines the amount of bullets or lasers being shot at any given time. There are off centre loadouts, double, triple, quad and quintuple loadouts which can lead to some very confusing flashes of attacks covering the screen….. Which is more fun than it sounds. The third slot determines the range and speed of the attacks and the fourth slot contains special effects such as piercing shots, ricochet bullets or precision boosts.
Once you die you are taken back to the menu screen where you will be awarded progress for a type of coin which can be used to unlock additional upgrades, to be found during your runs. There is also a chance to get new cubes, which will start with different weapon loadouts and abilities. This selection while adding some variety does not work as well as intended as besides a few drastic perks, they all still feel the same with different starting weapons and amount of health. One example of a very different cube was one where every time you select your weapon you don’t get a choice and it randmises the 4 slots. While this was fun for one or two runs, it quickly grew old as the different combinations could turn out to be very inefficient and cuts your run short if you don’t get lucky.
The music of the game is relatively simple and suits the game, however I quickly found that after playing a few runs in a row, I was reaching for my phone to listen to other music while I played the game.
Visually the game is well presented, and while the first few levels (especially since you'll be doing them repeatedly) get a bit dull, the later level after the first boss really each have a unique presentation to them which kept me engaged for longer than I expected to be.
During my playtime the only real technical issues I noted was that in the loading screen between runs I found the game sometimes got stuck and I would have to reload it before starting a new run.
With regards to story, if you were looking for a narrative driven game, I suggest you look elsewhere as while the game has a short cutscene setting up the premise at the beginning there is no real story to follow. But to be fair in a game like this, story isn’t needed. The emphasis here is on the gameplay and controls, both of which are very fluid and fun to experience.
Pros:
-Good visual design and presentation
-Fluid gameplay and tight controls
-Lots of replayability if you try to unlock all the characters and power ups.
-Large variety of weapons and power ups.
-Lots of different enemies
Overall I would give it a 7 out of 10.
Cons:
-Certain enemy types are almost impossible to deal with unscathed
-Music gets a bit repetitive
-The different characters don’t provide much variety to gameplay
-Difficulty spikes are drastic and not built up to
