We would like to thank the developers for providing us a copy of this game for reviewing purposes
I am going to start off by saying that this review is going to hurt me while writing this, as I do think there is a great game here. However, in its current state, I can’t recommend Atomic Picnic, and this is coming from someone who has played a lot of shooters in their time. When I received a free copy for review of this game, I was hyped, the game looked fantastic and fun to play but a bunch of problems held it back from me enjoying it.
Pros and Cons
Pros
Gameplay is fun
The visuals are nice to look at
Cons
The game’s balance is a mess, enemies will kill you in two or three hits sometimes
There are too many projectiles for you to dodge sometimes
Upgrades are very lackluster to use
Enemies will spawn right next to you
The game will not explain certain things and give little info
Gameplay
The one thing I will say that is good about Atomic Picnic's gameplay is that it’s good, the shooting is fluid, and your character moves very well. There are multiple characters for you to play as but I have been only able to play as one and I’ll explain why in a bit.
All the characters have abilities that they can utilize in combat, you have a dash that you can use to get the move on enemies. When an enemy dies, they will drop experience points, which you can use to level up, from there, you can select from three different upgrades. These help you out in combat, slightly, while useful, a large majority of them are underwhelming and certain upgrades are just straight-up better or are required to even get decently far in the level you are in. I’ll get back to this sort of thing later on in the review.
The balancing in this game is terrible, enemies can pretty much kill you in a few hits and you don’t do enough damage to help take out the tanky ones. The enemies have attacks that can kill you in two or three hits if you are not careful. There are also way too many projectiles for you to avoid sometimes or too many enemies for you to really deal with at a time, due to you only having a single-shot weapon. You don’t have access to a secondary at all and are only left with one gun, grenades, and a special attack. The other characters may have something different to them but I haven’t had the chance to play them yet.
Also, in case anyone wants to say to me that this is a skill issue, I just want to point out that shooters are one of the main genres of games that I play. I have played Team Fortress 2 for at least 13 years, played Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands on hard mode, and completed Warhammer Space Marine (the first game) on hard mode. Warhammer Space Marine is a much more punishing game than this one too. So in case anyone wants to question my legitimacy on this, I have the proof right here and I can show off more examples if necessary. Atomic Picnic advertises itself as a casual shooter, not a hardcore one.
Now I can talk about the upgrades, they are very lackluster, and the good ones, don’t do enough to help you. Some of them are just mandatory for you to get anywhere in this game. You can level up the upgrades to offer more utility, but the problem is that, even then, they don’t do enough to help you. Some of them are also not very interesting or not worthwhile to use either. There isn’t an effective way to heal yourself, there are these green crystals that can heal you and an upgrade that gives you a small chance to heal yourself when taking out an enemy, although it only heals one HP.
There are a select few upgrades that are cused, that offer an extra benefit but at the cost of reducing the stats on your character. The issue with this is that it’s not worth it, if your stats get lowered like damage, you are just shooting yourself in the foot because enemies are pretty tanky. Sometimes enemies will spawn right next to you, the devs did state that they fixed this issue but sometimes I do get some enemies that will still do it. There is also no indicator of where you are taking damage or when enemies are around you. Enemies are so tanky that some require an entire magazine to take out.
There are also zones you can go to but the game won’t explain what to do in them, this game has a bunch of stuff that they don’t explain. There seems to be a lot to this game, but the lack of explanation makes this entire game hard to play. There is one thing that can make this game easier to play and that is having some friends to play with, although I have none that play this game, so I am out of luck.
Graphics and Performance
Atomic Picnic does have some very nice visuals, the colors are very pretty and look good. I tested the game on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, and 16 GB of RAM, I had no issues while I was playing.
Final Verdict
Atomic Picnic is a fun game, but it’s held back by a bunch of design problems that are preventing me from enjoying it. I do think this game has some clever ideas, but it needs more time in the oven. If you want a game that makes you fight a bunch of enemies with worthwhile upgrades, then Vampire Survivors is the game for you, and it’s priced at 5.99 CDN.
However, I do think this game can be worth it when more updates come out, the devs do seem passionate about it and are still updating it. While I don’t recommend Atomic Picnic now, I do think the game will be much better when it’s worked on more.
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