Developer: Live Aliens
Publisher: Live Aliens
Platforms: PC, Xbox One, Switch
Tested on: PC
Atomic Heist – Review
More and more Indie games are coming to the Nintendo Switch. Top-down shooters are one of the genres that fit this handheld perfectly as the Switch has two sticks to use for navigating your ship and aiming your weapons. Atomic Heist is a top-down shooter with roguelike environments that has now come to the Nintendo Switch. Atomic Heist sets you on a mission to steal a nuclear power core and escape from a space station through levels full of enemies that will try to stop you.
Story
The game itself doesn’t have much story, but a backstory is present. The world of Atomic Heist has a long history of humans and the Delotians being at war with each other. Now, six years after this war, the Delotians are coming again, but not for the humans. They’re actually fleeing from the Rhaokyns, another dangerous alien race. The Rhaokyns have now found us and threaten to destroy the human race. You are on a mission called the Atomic Heist. You have to steal a nuclear core and fight your way out of the space station with your combat ship before it will be sealed and all hope will be lost. Small pieces of the backstory can be found when traversing through the levels of Atomic Heist, but these could be easy to miss if you’re busy shooting your way through the levels and aren’t searching for this story content. As this is a game that focuses more on its gameplay, you won’t really miss a story while playing the game.
Graphics
The levels in this game have an industrial Sci-Fi look in a roguelike environment. Each level will be randomly generated when you retry a level after you died, so no level will be the same. The ship you command looks very small, especially on the handheld screen with two blasters at the front of the vessel but it looks detailed enough to distinguish all of its important features. There are a lot of different enemies you can encounter in each level, each with their own design. Each level will have a slightly different design outside of the traversable area, but the layout of each level will still be very rectangular. The levels are also scattered with boxes of different colors that each have their own effect when destroyed.
Sound
There’s not all that much to say about the sound in Atomic Heist. In-game, you will hear some background music with a lot of sounds that are typical for the space genre. There’s nothing wrong with the sound effects as all the gunfire, collisions and explosions sound fine as they are. The intro is comprised of some text about the events that happened before you start at the first level will be accompanied by a narrator that will tell you what’s written on the screen.
Gameplay
Atomic Heist is a top-down roguelike shooter in which you need to navigate through levels, destroy your enemies and find the end of each level before your ship explodes of radiation. The game is set on a space station overrun with enemy spacecraft. Your goal is to escape the space station with the nuclear core before it explodes as it will constantly leak radiation and explode when the radiation levels have reached the maximum your ship can handle.
When starting the game for the first time, you will get the chance to pick up a power-up for the first level. When you get through a level after defeating all the enemies, you can pick up a power-up again for the next level. When navigating through each level, you’ll encounter many enemies and a lot of obstacles in the shape of boxes. These boxes will al explode when destroyed, and this explosion radius can be used to blow your enemies up as well. Sometimes, boxes will leave circular items on the ground. These can be ammo, radiation healing, rate of fire upgrades and new weapons with other effects. You can have two different weapons at your disposal at one time. Aside from these two weapons, you can drop a few bombs each level that will have a huge explosion radius that will also one-shot yourself if you don’t watch out. This bomb is ideal for destroying many enemies at once, but it also brings a lot of danger in small areas with its big explosion radius. You’ll start with a standard weapon that will fire one round at a time. The fire rate of this weapon will be increased with multiple particles per shot and faster shots by picking up the rate of fire upgrades left behind by boxes and enemies. The health of your ship will drain as the amount of radiation rises. When damaged, your ship will automatically repair up your maximum health minus the amount of radiation damage to your ship. When you pick up a radiation healing item, your ship will repair more until it reaches the maximum again.
Atomic Heist is definitely not an easy game to get through. If you’re not used to the gameplay of this game, you’ll be sure to die a lot in the beginning as the game won’t go easy on you. Yes, there is a small tutorial to teach you the basic controls of the game, but this won’t be enough to survive the many enemies in each level easily. There will be small spacecraft built to ram you to pieces and a lot of bigger enemies with a lot of firepower and big particles that are hard to dodge while in narrow places, which you’ll find yourself in a lot. All this will make completing each level a hard task to complete. One downside of the game is that when your ship gets destroyed in let’s say the second level, you’ll need to start all over again at the first level, so not only are the levels very hard to get through, the game is also very merciless with destroying your progress each time you die. This could be experienced as very irritating if you die a lot because you won’t progress one bit.
Conclusion
Atomic Heist is definitely one of the more difficult top-down roguelike shooters around. Each level is packed with many enemies that will start to attack you on sight, giving you little time to react. From rammers to ships with big guns, there are various enemies that offer a big challenge to get past. Upgrading your weapons is crucial for defeating your enemies as better weapons make beating your enemies a lot easier. Unfortunately, these power-ups drop randomly, so if you’re having some bad luck, it could happen that no upgrades drop in a level. If you like these types of shooters and are in for a tough challenge, this game is an ideal game to purchase, but if your strength doesn’t lie in these type of games and you don’t like the fact that you need to start over with each death, it’s best to skip on this game.
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