60 Seconds! Reatomized Review

You have 60 seconds on the clock to grab whatever you need to survive the nuclear apocalypse. Do you grab your entire family or only the members you like? After all, you also need supplies and there's a high chance you might not have enough rations for everyone. That feeling of panic and chaos is what 60 Seconds! Reatomized is trying to get across in its early stages and once you make your decisions and enter the bunker you have to live with however it plays out, but the end goal is always to (hopefully) survive.

60 Seconds! Reatomized is a remastered version of the original game that released back in 2015 for PC adding a new challenge mode, interactions when surviving and ways to survive. Set in the 1950s, it follows the McDoodle family (Ted, Dolores and their two children Mary Jane and Timmy) as they try and survive the nuclear apocalypse for as many days as possible until they get rescued or they perish. It’s up to you and your decisions that will determine how long they last and if they last.

60 Seconds! is split into two parts that play pretty differently from each other. The first is the scavenging portion of the game where you choose either Ted or Dolores and get 60 seconds on the clock to pick up whatever you think you need to survive the apocalypse (which also includes family members). You have four hand icons on the screen that indicate how much you can hold; some things require more hands to carry so it's important to be quick on your feet and adapt to carry as much as you can efficiently or you may end up wasting precious time. The items you choose can drastically change how you survive and how long once you enter the bunker. For example, not picking up a medkit before entering the bunker could leave someone sick early on and if they aren’t treated they can die. Or you may choose the medkit over more rations so while you are all healthy, you may not have enough food to survive.

The scavenge part of the game is in third-person as you run around the randomly-generated layout of the house trying to collect everything you can while bumping into obstacles that slow you down significantly. Controlling either Ted or Dolores feels rather clunky though, which could be on purpose to add to the chaos and make it harder to collect items, but it doesn’t feel gratifying to control regardless. Luckily it’s only 60 seconds long so it's not a huge hindrance and once you enter the bunker it essentially changes the gameplay into a visual novel.

The survival stage is really the meat of 60 Seconds! Reatomized as you have to make sure the McDoodles survive and are rescued with everything you collected earlier which greatly impacts how this stage progresses. As the days go by one by one, you have to divide your rations with whoever is in the bunker along with making sure everyone is healthy while making some critical decisions that may or may not help you keep this family alive. All the actions that you make and how the family copes with them are kept in the journal which will also tell you if they need any sort of rations. Events will happen such as people knocking on your door or something moving in the ceiling and you have to make decisions on what to do about them, but sometimes you can’t do anything because you didn’t bring the right items with you. Not to fear though, you can send members of the family out on expeditions when supplies start running low that could give you key items to help, but they could also be killed while out there.

Playing multiple rounds and seeing how different each one could be is actually quite interesting and offers up a lot of replayability. Sometimes you could be in the bunker for more than 50 days with no hope as everyone starves, but another round you could get lucky by having the right items and be rescued within 20 days. Some items definitely feel more important than others such as the medkits and rations, but it’s really about how you use them in the bunker that will help you in the long run.

The newly added challenge mode offers even more to do in 60 Seconds! Reatomized with survival and scavenge modes. The scavenge challenge mode is simply collecting everything on the list before the timer runs out, but the survival challenge mode gives you some interesting scenarios in which you have to survive. An example would be the ‘Responsible Parent’ survival challenge where you have to survive for 50 days without letting any of the kids die or sending them on expeditions with weapons disabled. It can be rather difficult since some of the items they disable are the more essential ones, but it’s a nice change from doing whatever you want in the normal survival mode to being more strategic with your actions.

Visually, 60 Seconds! Reatomized has a unique hand-drawn style while in the bunker that changes the appearances of the family based on their status whether they are sick, tired or even mutated, but I really enjoyed how wacky things can look. The third-person portion for scavenge mode looks rather basic but the higher resolution makes it look much better than the original. Performance-wise there were constant framerate drops when in the scavenge mode and while in loading screens, but in the bunker, it ran perfectly fine.