When you are very small the world is a fast and dangerous place. Open spaces are frightening, so you rush through channels underground and find your perch in hidey-holes and gaps snugged between temple walls. When you are very big, the world moves more slowly: you are stately yet terrifying in your bulk - and you are also exposed. Everyone who wants a piece of you only has to look up to see exactly where you are, and that landscape of hidden channels and hidey-holes, that world of gaps and knots and secret causeways, has essentially disappeared. Open spaces are still frightening, and even as you slap your enemies away or seer them with ancient light while they race through your feet, you realise that the entire landscape is an open space now, and you the only real monument left.
Atomega is fascinating, a multiplayer shooter that feels nothing like a multiplayer shooter most of the time because it is driven by powers of ten. In Atomega you start each game with up to seven other players and one aim: to grow and grow and grow, sucking down the purple cubes that are scattered over the golden blocks and temples of this ancient arena you find yourself within. Purple cubes will take you from the glowing atom you start life as, through the tiers of life itself: from single-celled organism, to protozoa, to staggering dinosaur, loping gorilla, towering Superior and then the spindly skyscraping majesty of the Omega. Cubes are mass, and the more mass you have the more points you earn - and getting the most points is your defining ambition in this single-arena, single-mode blaster.
There is a boldness here: single-arena, single-mode. And a boldness in that idea, too, that you race through the game going from something tiny to something gigantic. And there is a splinter of glorious ruefulness too, because Atomega is a game in which you have to be careful about what you wish for. Collecting mass may be the objective, but how best to do that when seven other players are after the same thing? When everyone's moving endlessly across the same environment, waiting for those purple cubes to respawn in polite rows or tumble out of fountains, or deciding, instead, that enough time has passed, enough growth has taken place and that they now fancy their chances shooting you to pieces and picking the mass from your crumbling corpse.
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