I finished finally, took me about 100 hours but this included some afking and slowly reading all the text I could find. Also got the car very late. But it is a long-ish game for sure, if one doesn't rush it on purpose.
Really liked the way events are clarified just before the end and the choice presented. It is a good story, not complicated, not trying to spoonfeed me dumb hipsterish worldview and forced moralization like some games nowadays do.
I have some criticism.
Being able to fairly trivially just skip the final fight through dialogue is awkward. Best way conversation focused character can influence fight in my opinion was in the encounter with the female leader of the Death gang, I managed through conversation to make some of her followers die before the fight, thus making it much easier. But this 100% binary deal of either you fight a room full of elite, armoured, AK wielding, grenade tossing badasses or you just tell the boss "how about you give up of all your plans?" and he says "oh... ok" is quite meh. Maybe it's because you wanted to enable a mostly pacifist playstyle? If so it would be nice if it felt a bit... heftier. The way player can talk the other party into just giving up from their carefully laid long term plans of cosmic significance in a couple of lines is totally off given the situation.
Combat has been criticized already, but there are some weird things that go beyond simplicity. For example, even if I begin the fight by shooting someone first, I still sometimes had the enemy interrupt what was supposed to be my turn (I still had action points left after my shot) and just began moving immediately after my hit. Or when enemy is far away, but combat is still active, my followers would begin moving as if they are in real time mode, following me as I move on my turn. As if they were out of combat, while I wasn't. And yeah, balance between weapon classes. I used pistols and SMGs and it felt very subpar. I finished the game on expert (skipping both fights inside the final bunker through conversation) so it can be done, but it's not a seriously recommendable choice given how powerful machine guns and rifles are in comparison. I don't even want to imagine going melee lol. Grenades are also too rare and expensive to be of practical use outside a handful of the most difficult fights, making throwing more or less redundant.
Abilities/perks: I'm not so much put off by the tree system. Yeah it's somewhat decline but I can live with that although it could have been done better. What kills it for me is getting only 1 point per level on higher difficulties. This makes large majority of the tree totally obsolete. There's just not enough points to dip anywhere except whatever your main focus is plus maybe a couple of secondary picks. It isn't good when a game allows too much and player becomes master of everything by late game as often happens, but this is the other extreme and it's not much better, just in a different way. I doubt you'll go reworking the whole character system and get rid of the tree altogether, but giving out 2 points per level at all difficulties except maybe the lowest would IMO be an improvement. Distinctions also don't look appealing with perhaps an exception or two.
As was mentioned earlier, some skills don't do what one would expect. Besides stealth, which is not stealth as it's normally understood at all, I don't totally get first aid either. I didn't notice I regain more hp by using stimpacks or food. I saw skill checks in dialogues and I suppose it does reduce the chance of addiction as the description says but apart from that (and it's not much let's face it) I don't get what it's for. Seems like a waste. Would be nice if they worked as they had in fallout.
And yeah, there's too much non fluff dialogue crammed in too little space as I've mentioned earlier. I suppose this one is the only issue that can't be fixed any more. It can be dealt with, it's just quite overwhelming to see all those people and realizing many of them have quests and hints hidden in their dialogues. Can be a good lesson for when you make the next game or expansion.
Then there's a whole bunch of little things.
- Quests that rely on random encounters that often simply don't trigger in reasonable amount of time. I was running circles around some towns waiting for them to pop up, it took so long I thought it's just bugged and doesn't happen or that it might be some hidden location I haven't uncovered, but it wasn't, it just took that long to happen.
- Resistance to toxins is pretty much 100% or bust, which makes anything that isn't gas mask mostly redundant. The craftable mask might as well not exist, old gas mask isn't much better. Radiation is similar, but at least it just means I have to pop 2 pills instead of 1 and doesn't make items useless.
- Shadows in Dead City. There are too many of them and they attack 4 times a turn, it takes just too long for their turn to finish. Apart from that they were perfectly harmless and ended up just a boring time and ammo sink. It would be much cooler if they were fewer, stronger and slower. There's still room enough to keep them as weak swarmy type of enemies, just not as trivial, boring and unspeakably numerous as they are currently.
- Friendly fire with shotguns using pellets
- Most NPCs have too little ammo, mostly not even their weapons fully loaded, so they run out after a few turns and have to resort to fists and frying pans lol. It's nice ammo is scarce, but in some cases this went a bit too far.
- People's barter inventories getting clogged up with junk. It would be nice if there'd be some throughput. You know, items I sell them disappearing and new items or rubles appearing. I saw that their original inventories get reshuffled, I came to the gun merchant in Krasno a few times hoping to get the Stechkin pistol but every time I had the cash the gun would be gone. So I guess you could make other items go away too? After a while most merchants had inventories full of garbage I sold them lol so I had difficulty figuring out what's new.
- Typos and grammar errors, like using superlative "worst" instead of comparative "worse", consistently. "It could be worst...", "To make things worst...", "Even worst..." Later on in the game there are whole dialogue lines that look like errors or placeholders. Forgot to screenshot those, will do it if they don't get fixed by the time I get to those spots in 2nd playthrough.
Anyhow, the game is great. As one old election promotion said in my country 20 years ago "My grandpa told me that a fine horse has a hundred faults but a bad only one: it's no good." ATOM is a fine horse, everything that matters is in its place, virtually every issue it has is a matter of polish and tweaking. After you're done with that you should definitely do a sequel or five.
