Watering can? Check. Hazmat wellies? Check. Shotgun? Check-check. Let’s grow.
Atomicrops is Stardew Valley with a dose of nuclear hellfire. You, a humble farmer, are simply trying to grow a perfectly normal, certainly-not-irradiated crop of carrots and cabbages. But each night, mutated critters descend to wreak havoc on your farm. Blasting warped bunnies and the like nets you resources to pick up new guns, grow new plants and rustly up some farm animals to help around the pasture. Play your crops right, and you might even find love in the post-apocalypse. Fending off the wasteland’s denizens requires some deft twin-stick run-and-gunning, with screen-filling storms of chunky bullets coming straight out of Nuclear Throne. It’s so Nuclear Thone, in fact, that it bears one hell of a resemblance to nade_’s Farm mod for Nuclear Throne Together from 2017 (available on YellowAfterlife’s NTT mod list). I don’t know if there’s any throughline between the two. Just thought it a neat little fact worth sharing this morning. At least Atomicrops isn’t straight-up “borrowing” assets from Stardew Valley. The things modders get away with… Premature Evaluator Steve found it a brutally unforgiving affair in his Atomicrops early access review, but definitely felt an intoxicating appeal to watching a farm expand as you brutalise toxic goo-men. Atomicrops, he reckons, “giddily subverts the farming genre, offering a skill-based, frenetic and challenging roguelike with a punishing permadeath that forces you to restart from scratch each time you cork it.” Since setting up shop in early access, Atomicrops has added more baddies, more mutant farm animals, tractors and polygamy. Launch brings a harvest of new content, including two new potential spouses, legally-distinct mushroom powerups, and brings the total number of difficulty tiers up to 10. Atomicrops will launch on the Epic Games Store on May 28th for £12/$15. Right now, though, it’s going for 10% off ’til April 23rd.
