ATOM RPG: Trudograd Preview
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Introduction
Following a successful crowdfunding campaign and an early access phase, ATOM RPG was released back in December of 2018. The game offered a unique spin on the classic Fallout formula - it moved the action to the other side of the Iron Curtain and gave us all a taste of the Soviet Wasteland.
ATOM RPG was pretty well-received and successful enough to warrant a standalone expansion. Entitled Trudograd, that expansion has recently entered early access. Having enjoyed our time with the original game, we jumped on the first opportunity to check out what the new expansion had in store for us.
Back to the Soviet Wasteland
Despite being a standalone expansion, Trudograd is positioned as a direct continuation of ATOM RPG’s story. It even lets you import your old character. But even if you don’t have your old save files or simply decide against importing a character, you will still be technically playing the ATOM agent from the original game.
As such, when starting your Trudograd adventure, you will be asked to create a new high-level character and then answer some questions that act as a recap of your earlier major decisions.
Trudograd’s story takes place two years after the grand finale of ATOM RPG where you defeat a mushroom cult that wants to take communism to a brand-new hive mind level. In the process, you happen to learn that the cultists were trying to prevent an asteroid from hitting the planet and eradicating the human civilization for good.
With the general level of technology greatly diminished by the nuclear apocalypse, dealing with this asteroid, that some consider to be a UFO or a mystical omen, is proving to be quite a challenge.
As ATOM’s hero, you are of course the one tasked with finding a way to save the world from complete and total annihilation. To do this, you’ll need to find a secret railgun that’s rumored to be hidden somewhere in the relatively well-preserved snow-covered city of Trudograd that revels in its corruption.
At this point, whether or not this story will work and end up being satisfying remains a mystery. The current early access build of Trudograd is a far cry from something like Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord that offered hundreds of hours of entertainment straight out of the gate. Instead, Trudograd’s early access version in its current iteration is more of a demo with enough content to last you somewhere between four to eight hours.
This content is spread across five areas. It’s hard to say at this point how much bigger the final game will be, but by the looks of it, the developers still want to add more encounters, locations, quests and dungeons, or in numerical terms, roughly 70% more stuff.
And while most of the existing areas are clearly unfinished and lack polish, the very first location is already quite impressive, featuring a combat quest with different sides to support, an investigation where everything is not what it appears, a quest that introduces us to the new trap-finding system, and plenty of challenging skill and attribute checks.
If the rest of the game ends up being as good, Trudograd is going to become something no RPG enthusiast will want to miss.
