izigame.me

"It's dark here. I've got a bad feeling about this..."


Introduction

A first-person shooter set in the USSR in the years following World War 2, Russia has become a technological dystopia where advanced machines are completing a wide range of tasks for humans. Atomic Heart attempts to reinvent what games like Prey and Bioshock did in a new environment and setting. But did their formula start the reaction they were hoping for or did the experiment blow up in their faces?


🟩 Positives
🟥 Negatives


🟩 Atomic Heart is a stunning game. With a beautiful open world and captivatingly vibrant design, it's easy to get lost in the ambient beauty of this title.
🟩 There are a few different weapons to implement chaos on your journey. From different styles of melee weapons to the more standard selection such as pistols, shotguns and assault rifles.
🟩 The soundtrack, while being mostly in Russian, is outstanding. It's fast-paced when it needs to be, it slows down for the emotional scenes, and it's perfect everywhere in between.
🟥 The story is an utterly confusing disaster of boring events, terrible dialogue and rushed storytelling.
🟥 The "powers" you unlock are underwhelming and practically useless. I only really used them to unlock achievements and then put them away.
🟥 There are bugs and glitches galore in this game.
🟥 While Atomic Heart is technically an open-world game, it is more accurate to say it's closer to a linear experience with slightly wider parameters.



Story

You play as Agent P-3, a special operations soldier, in the employ of an influential scientist in the USSR, Dr Dimitry Sechenov. Having just arrived in Chelomey, the capital city of this fictional region of floating islands in Russia, things quickly get out of hand when the robots everyone relies on get switched to combat mode and begin to kill indiscriminately.
Agent P-3 gets ordered to bring the man who has done this heinous deed to heel by any means necessary, and thus his journey across this newly war-torn region begins. Fighting both organic monsters and deadly machines, P-3 will have to master a series of weapons and abilities to come out alive and hopefully find an answer to why this all started in the first place.
For the most part, Atomic Heart has the potential to be a pretty decent story experience. The bones of something substantial and remarkable are there just beneath the surface. Unfortunately, however, this is never acknowledged and rapidly stagnates in its cumbersome dialogue and tedious event cycles. If you push through the seemingly endless sexual innuendos, and corny one-liners, you will discover there is very little else to experience here. The pacing is terrible, and the amount of missing context is confusing. If you were hoping this to be your story-driven experience of the year, you're probably best skipping this one.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2941935330

Gameplay Analysis

The Hammer and Sickle.
The best part of this title, hands down, is the combat. There are very few feelings more intoxicating than bringing a giant mace down on the head of a robot enemy and having their shell cave in before your eyes. There is a minor variety of weapons to choose from, such as maces and axes, both one and two-handed. In addition to the melee weapons, we have the more common implements of warfare, such as the Kalash, Makarov and the tantamount bringer of destruction, the Shotgun.
With all that said, the unfortunate downfall of this paradigm is that the "powers" P-3 unlocks throughout his development remain underwhelming until they have a substantial investment from the player. The "Shok" skill at the beginning of the game is extremely weak and provides little reason to use it beyond taking down the miscreant flying robot before a reload.
Freedom for all, or close enough.
As I mentioned above, Atomic Heart is technically an open-world experience, and it could be the interpretation based on map scale. However, from a player's perspective, you will begin to notice red laser barricades all over the place that bar you from freely exploring. So, essentially you will have the illusion of open-world exploration from the safety of a linear experience.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2941935148
While we are speaking of maps, the one implemented here, while visually detailed and impressive to scroll over, is fundamentally useless as you can't set waypoints or zoom in enough to use it when exploring towns.
A puzzling outcome.
The puzzles in Atomic Heart are pretty fun! They test your aptitude, ability to think under pressure, and how you process information in your environment. The "testing grounds" are particularly entertaining situations as they are built purely to do this to you and act, for the most part, as puzzle dungeons for you to complete. Easily one of the best parts of the Atomic Heart journey.
Unable to achieve excellence.
My last point is more of a peeve than anything else, and while it is an annoying bug, it doesn't fundamentally change the gameplay experience. The achievements for Atomic Heart are fundamentally "broken" as many will not tally their objectives, and others will be impossible due to missing or poorly designed mechanics.

Audio and Visual

From a purely visual standpoint, Atomic Heart is above many in design and presentation, and it stands as one of the most breathtaking gaming experiences I've ever had the opportunity to enjoy. The general ambience with how the trees sway and the subtle way the grass ripples with each gust of wind is sublime. It's also true of the finer textures, old and worn rails have visible paint peeling away, the makeshift guns you create have scratches and scuffs on their surface, and cables are frayed and worn. The attention to detail is immense.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2941936287
The audio doesn't quite hit the same mark., The voice acting is pretty subpar, the general audio ambience feels generic, and dialogue is interrupted by things and doesn't continue afterwards, which leaves plenty of conversational blanks.

PC Performance and Specifications

With Atomic Heart set to Ultra settings and running at 2560 x 1440, I had minimal framerate drops below 60 FPS. There was a substantial quantity of bugs in the game, such as; textural and gameplay issues.
🟧 Achievements are broken and are impossible to 100% complete at this stage.
🟨 Visual quality drops greatly in the latter portion of the game, and the number of graphical tears and missing textures increases exorbitantly.
RAM: 32GB (Under Load Usage: 42%)
CPU: i9 10900KA 3.70GHz (Under Load Usage: 21%)
GPU: MSI Ventus RTX 3080 (Under Load Usage: 47%)

Final Thoughts - Imperfect

Review chart here.
I wanted to love this game so much. I gave it many chances to impress me, and the experience failed to meet my expectations every time. The game isn't bad, it's just bland in nearly every facet of its creation, and that's why it will be unmemorable. The voice acting is poor, the jokes are crude and dry, and the overall gameplay loop is unsatisfying. If you are still keen to play Atomic Heart, wait for a steep enough sale to negate the sting of the purchase.
The machines may have turned on humanity, and the end times might be upon us, but if you head on over to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, you will realise that a glorious afterlife was always just a click away.