Head into the dangerous, crime-ridden streets of America, following gangs, druggies, and much worse. Prepare yourself for a crazy ride in ATOM GRRRL!!
After time spent over in Japan, Jessica L. Huster is returning back home to her gang, The 99th Floor, in America. It turns out she also works with the mafia boss, Big E, and has been friends with her for a while now. Throughout this ~2 hour kinetic Visual Novel, you’ll go from shooting up a casino to busting into a drug dealer’s house all the way to trying to melt away a cop’s body. This VN is not for the faint of heart as the subject matter is one that is definitely very illegal.
The overall story of ATOM GRRRL is one that didn’t end up leaving a very lasting impression on me. The story jumps all over the place for whose perspective you are seeing it from, sometimes jumping back a little bit in time. This can be very jarring at times, and often just pulled me right out of the story. Along with all of the illegal activities that the characters will do in this story, there is a yuri subplot also happening. You get some hints and pieces of it until you’re a good portion in, and then it suddenly just hits you in the face.
I both liked and disliked the art style in ATOM GRRRL. I felt that the character models were cute, and I felt you could tell the general personalities from how they looked. Very was more “refined” and went more for that backstabbing methods to get people, Jessica just went for it and didn’t care, and Big E was the “sexualize everything” person. On the flipside, I heavily disliked the background art. The background pictures were taken from real life locations which then had a filter placed over them for use in the game. The two art styles felt like the contrasted very heavily, causing a pretty decently overall dislike for it. I get that they’re trying to get down the “set in America” vibe, the background art just causes such a high contrast to the regular art that it was hard for me to focus on it at all.
The music, however, I did quite enjoy. I felt it worked extremely well with the story and always seemed to fit the scene that was going on. The writing, while it was all over the place, I can’t recall any major grammatical or spelling errors, something that is always nice to see in a VN.
ATOM GRRRL!! is a story that will only last you a couple hours (depending on your reading speed), and during that two hours you may find it hard to follow. The art style feels clashing, but the music was definitely enjoyable. You may end up finding a chuckle or two out of it, but you may also just shake your head and walk away. If you’re someone who is easily offended then I’d definitely say to just give this game a pass. If you can deal with some unclean (and fairly illegal) humour, then perhaps you can at least give this game a look over. As it stands though, I can’t really give this game either a recommendation or a pass and just recommend you go check it out for yourselves. If I did have to lean one way or the other though, I would just barely squeak out a recommend on it – and definitely only if you can get it on sale – simply because I did enjoy the music and the art (not the background art).
ATOM GRRRL!! Review Score
3/5
I would like to thank Sekai Project for providing me with a copy for review purposes.
