Mobile Gaming: Atomas

WARNING: Written while high as a kite on allergy meds.

Being in a condition that often leaves me rather immobile, I indulge in mobile gaming a lot more than I used to when I was working. Recently, I’ve been playing more puzzle-based games that help me cool down my brain. Some are good at this, some are not. This is a super short recommendation, but it’s a very simple game!

Atomas (made by developer Sirnic http://www.sirnic.com/) is one of those games. It’s a simple game, based on matching and merging.

By going through the elements, you tap on the outer circle where you’d like the center element to go. The goal is to not only put matching elements together, but to lay them out to chain a fusion. By receiving at random a red +, you can then merge them together and create a higher element. When you receive a blue -, then you tap an element already placed to either move it to another spot, or to tap it a second time in the center (where it moves to) in order to eliminate it.

 

If you get too many elements on the outer circle, the game ends, and the remaining elements are added to your final score. The goal is to unlock various cheats/perks (found by sliding right to left on the start screen) to help you play.

PROS:

You don’t have to worry about cumbersome ads, and I have yet to encounter a crash with this game. The music/sound effects aren’t overbearing, so if you’re wanting to play it while trying to get sleepy, you don’t need to worry about it disrupting you. Because none of the sounds are vital, you can also play easily without any sound at all.

CONS:

The only downside to this game is that there is a function called ‘antimatter’ found here:

Antimatter allows you to escape the game ending by allowing you to eliminate half the elements in the circle. You’re gifted one (or two, I don’t remember which) upon first playing the game. After that, you get antimatter only one of two ways:

- Paying for it

- Opening a cheat that gives you .001% chance of earning antimatter on any given turn in a game, up to only one per game.

NOTE: I have one remaining cheat to open, so if that one pertains to antimatter, I don’t know as they don’t reveal what the cheat is until you unlock it, and they don’t tell you what’s required to unlock it.

So that aside, the game is very relaxing, so long as you aren’t chasing achievements, or you have the patience for the cheat, or you have the money to spend.  The cheats screen can be found sliding right to left from the main screen, under "Upgrades".  You can have one cheat active at a time, but can change which cheat is active during gameplay by backing out into the main menu.  Atomas saves your game when you do this.

There are three other modes of play: Time Attack, Geneva, and Zen, which I won’t be discussing. They’re unlocked by either paying $1.49 to do so, or by unlocking them through gameplay. Everything is unlocked based off of Classic Mode, which I’ve discussed here, but all modes function the same way. They only have different rules about losing (such as a limited amount of game time in Time Attack).

Overall:

Atomas is a fun, simple little game with minimal drawbacks for not contributing money to the app. You are subject to minimal advertising as a free user, and overall it’s a stable game that I personally have had no problems with.