Farmlife roguelike Atomicrops' Epic exclusivity is ending, and it's adding new stuff

Atomicrops isn't like those other farmlife sims where you inherit your grandfather's farm. No, in Atomicrops you inherit your dead uncle's farm. It's completely different! Actually, what makes it different is that as soon as you inherit that farm a nuclear war starts and you have to defend your farm from mutants every night, working your way through seasonal bosses until you make it to Nuclear Winter. Or die trying and start again.

It left early access on May 28, but was exclusive to the Epic Games Store. That exclusivity ends soon, and it'll be launching on Steam and GOG on September 17. To celebrate the occasion, developers Bird Bath Games are updating Atomicrops to add a variety of new guns, upgrades, characters, and a tunneler tractor that can tunnel back to your farm. The Steam version is also getting leaderboards and daily challenges.

When our Chris Livingston played Atomicrops in early access, he arrived at the conclusion that, "Personally, I'm not sure I'm cut out for farming in the post-apocalypse—there's far more shooting than gardening in Atomicrops, and I prefer a farm where the only danger is tipping over my tractor. But Atomicrops is fun and wonderfully animated, especially the various vegetables you grow, which have faces (or at least eyes) and they all jump and wiggle around excitedly in the irradiated soil when it's time for you to harvest them."

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.