There are also instances that combine dialogue and action, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of a combination of Fallout's talking heads with a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure system. Chief among the latter are the revamped Ability Tree (with Perks being collected in a new Perk Wheel), the improvement to the Inventory (which finally breaks away from Fallout standards and "expands" to resemble more of a Grid and less of a list), and the introduction of the ability to Mod/Upgrade our weapons. These additions are both of technical nature, such as the noticeably improved graphics (which greatly enhance the atmosphere in Trudograd's snowy environments), and of purely gameplay nature. However, even if one enters the expansion completely unaware of what happened in the previous game, one can still create a new character and then answer a series of in-game questions about the main ATOM locations, with those answers forming the main pillars of the World State.įrom the very first moments of playing Trudograd, its virtues and the additions/improvements it introduces to ATOM's basic formula become abundantly clear. Completing the previous game does of course offer some benefits, such as the ability to directly import our ATOM character into Trudograd (a process which passes on our character's stats and perks, plus the world state of the imported save, but not the inventory and weapons we had in ATOM). Trudograd's status as a stand-alone expansion means that one can buy it and jump right into it without owning (or even having played) ATOM RPG. The game also features "Bombagan", a card game that can be played around Trudograd for fun or for money! The result is a highly interesting RPG cocktail of choices and consequences, within the particular post-Soviet and post-apocalyptic world we encountered in the original ATOM. Into this mix of class struggle and an invisible, impending threat (which in turn produces other side-effects inside the game's world, such as racism against the inhabitants of northern descent for "acting as spies for the rumored invading army"), we add our character's mission. Thus, each district of Trudograd and its suburbs has its own distinct character and inhabitants, elements that both underpin the broader guidelines of the game's narrative: on one hand, the struggle between Trudograd's corrupt ruling class and a budding "revolution" that threatens to drown the bourgeoisie in its own blood, and on the other, a vague threat from "the Peoples of the North" who are rumored to be about to attack the city at any moment. As expected, at any moment of our journey through it we may encounter a friendly or enemy random encounter.įocusing the action solely on a city and its immediate surroundings, as opposed to the much more expansive world of ATOM RPG, offers the benefit of delving much deeper into the Lore that characterizes the city itself and its individual sub-areas. Beyond the city itself, of course, we'll be asked to explore several locations outside its walls over the course of the game. This city is essentially the area where all of the expansion's action takes place, with its various districts being the available destinations on our World Map. Trudograd, located to the east of the wider ATOM RPG area, is an old industrial-research centre that managed to survive the Great War of 1986 largely intact. After the game's atmospheric live-action intro, we receive a briefing which informs us that our character must travel to the city called Trudograd in order to locate a scientist whose research may prevent a disaster, the exact nature of which I will refrain from mentioning to avoid spoilers, as it concerns the plot and finale of the original ATOM. The events in this expansion take place two years after the events of the main ATOM RPG plot. A scene from the game's impressive, live-action intro cutscene. The expansion was originally released on Steam in May 2020 in Early Access status and in full release last month. Given the above, it's no surprise that the announcement 2 years ago of a stand-alone ATOM expansion called Trudograd filled fans of the original game with excitement and anticipation. However, beyond this superficial identification, the game managed to be an excellent old-school RPG in its own right, with its Falloutian mechanics masterfully combined with a highly interesting, well-written and. It may have been given the overly simplistic description of " Fallout in Russia", and perhaps not unfairly so, as the game seemed to directly copy a lot of the gameplay aspects of the first two Fallouts. ATOM RPG was undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable RPG surprises of recent years.
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