Today we are going to take a look at Atomine. This twin-stick shooter with small rouge-lite elements tries to interpret how hacking could look in the distant future. You become a hacking tool, trying to overcome layers of security. By killing them. It is available on Steam for 9 Euros and 99 cents or your regional equivalent.
With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

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Video Review

Text Review

Gameplay

So Atomine is one of the most prototypical twin-stick shooters I have seen in a very long time. It features a top-down view, power-ups, a decent amount of enemies to defeat in each level and the occasional boss fight. It does offer a few twists to these mechanics, but none of them are really anything we haven’t seen before. What it does offer, is a very distinct visual style.
But right now, we are going to talk about the mechanics of the game. I should start by saying that I have played the game almost exclusively using a the keyboard and mouse to control it. I did try to use the controller and it does work well, but I just prefer the precision of the mouse aim.
So lets begin by the combat. As you might expect from a twin-stick shooter you move and you aim and you shoot. There really isn’t much else to the combat at it’s very core. There aren’t any dodge mechanics. It’s all up to you to move in a pattern so you avoid all the incoming damage and it’s all up to you to aim properly to hit your foes.
And to be honest, I found it almost refreshing to see a twin-stick shooter that sticks to the roots of the genre. So many developers try to be too clever for their own good these days, introducing new complex mechanics, but they forget the most important thing – fun! And the brutal simplicity of combat in Atomine does actually provide quite a lot of fun.
But even then, there is one ways to alter your combat experience. More specifically there are upgrades you will find for your weapon during each run. These are randomly generated and you unlock more as you play the game – giving you incentive to replay it. Yes – these are the rouge-lite elements of the game. There isn’t anything special about them, but they do work pretty well. These upgrades always fall into one of four categories – they can alter the shot type of your weapon, the amount of projectiles you fire, the rate of fire and they can add an attribute to your shots.
And on top of that – we have a leveling system here. Just the levels are called versions instead of levels. These provide you with one of 4 option that vary a lot.

But what would a shooter be without enemies to shoot at. The number of enemies in each level is quite decent. Usually it is around 15 – 30 enemies. This might seem like quite a small number – specially if you take into consideration the amounts of enemies you can usually find in other twin-stick shooters, where the numbers can reach even thousands of enemies per level. But this smaller number makes each playthrough much quicker and thus makes this game much more available for just a quick 10 – 15 minute game before you need to go and do something different.
The enemies themselves are quite varied though because of the aesthetic sometimes – specially in the heat of the battle – you will struggle to figure out what the attack pattern of the enemies you are fighting is and to be honest – this is probably my only gripe with how the combat feels, because other then this issue, but even this one is quite small because you never get completely overwhelmed by the number of enemies on screen, the combat is fun, quick and very much skill based. And I really like hat.

Graphics

Okay, so that’s it about the combat. Now onto the graphics. As you can see from the footage in the video, Atomine has a very distinct graphical style. It uses the contrast of a just a few colors – mostly black and white with an occasional different color sprinkled in – like green for your weapon attacks to get the job done.
I honestly quite like this aesthetic. It’s simple yet it manages to provide the sense of being inside a futuristic hacking tool.

Performance

Performance wise I do have one big issue. I have been getting frame drops a lot. And in a game that should all be about fluid gameplay, this is quite the issue At least I haven’t seen any bugs nor crashes. But the frame-drops really need to be solved.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion: Atomine is a decent twin-stick shooter. But to be honest I wouldn’t recommend it for its price. There are tons of good twin-stick shooters out there and you can get most of them for a cheaper price then this. So if you want this right now – most likely for its aesthetic – go and buy it, it’s not a bad game, but I urge you to wait for a sale if you aren’t in a rush to buy this.

disclaimer: Images have been used directly from the Steam game page