Roguelike farming sim Atomicrops enters early access on the Epic Store

The good news is you've inherited a farm. The bad news is a moment later a bunch of nukes fall from the sky. But no farmer worth their salt ever let something as paltry as a nuclear holocaust stop them from growing crops. And neither will you.

Atomicrops just entered early access on the Epic Games Store. Developed by Bird Bath Games, it's a post-apocalyptic farming sim and roguelike action shooter all rolled into one. You'll have to do all the typical farming sim stuff like gather seeds, till the soil, plant crops, water them, and harvest the mature (and wriggling) vegetables. But you'll have to do it while swarms of mutated rabbits, gophers, and insects—and much, much worse—attack you. Constantly.

I've played a bit, and it's quite a busy and challenging game, and losing all your farming progress when you die makes it even more difficult. Thankfully you can multitask, so while you're watering your crops you can simultaneously shoot at the attacking mutants. Things get harder at night, as waves of invaders begin directly assaulting your crops, meaning you can't wander far or your precious veggies will be destroyed.

There's other farmlife sim stuff happening, too. If you survive for a few days, a helicopter will arrive and whisk you away to the safety of a town where you can sell your crops, buy new weapons and gear, meet the locals, and romance a few characters. Maybe you'll even get married!

But that's only if you last long enough. To gather more seeds, you'll need to explore the areas outside of your farm, which means braving all sorts of new threats and mutant mobs. There's also a boss fight the night before the chopper airlifts you to safety, which delivers a powerful mob-spawning monster right on your farm.

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.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.