Atomic Heart review(-ish)
Kia ora, friends! Surprise extra post!
So, you may be wondering why I am publishing this so late. The game has been out for a while now and everyone has mostly forgotten about it. Well, I had already written 95% of this review back in the couple of weeks post-launch, and I had fully intended to return and finish Atomic Heart and have some final thoughts on it. But friends, I hated this game so much, and when I thought about picking it up again after a short break, I just said “Fuck that,” and uninstalled it.
But, since I had already written so much about it, I decided I didn’t want to waste the time I had spent - I think y’all creatives out there especially will know what I mean. So here we are. My semi-polished takes on this awful videogame that came out like, 10 weeks ago at this point.
I went back over this and sanded off the edges, rearranged some stuff because it was extremely messy (like my brain), and overall I think I did a good job with this. This is only the second review I’ve ever written, so I would absolutely love any feedback y’all might have! If you missed it, I reposted my first ever review, for A Plague Tale: Requiem, a couple weeks ago and you can find that here.
Anyway, let’s jump in, shall we?
I played this on Xbox Series S with Game Pass and it looks gorgeous. Apart from the occasional stray framerate drop, it ran at a solid 60fps. My only complaint right out of the gate was that I had to fiddle with the stick sensitivity a little bit to make moving and looking around feel better, but I have a weird brain so maybe that’s just me.
On the surface, the premise seemed sound. It’s an alternate history story, a la BioShock, set after the Cold War where an amazing new compound has been invented that allows all sorts of rapid technological advances, they built a “utopia”, and then something goes horribly wrong. The beginning of this game gave off hella BioShock Infinite vibes to me, and I was into it. But almost the second you take full control of they player character, it all starts to fall apart.
The main characters, Major Sergey Nechaev (P-3), and his robot glove Charles, are so poorly written that I felt a lot of second-hand embarrassment during their conversations. P-3 is constantly using the phrase ‘crispy critters’ and it really felt like someone on the writing team for this game thought it was the funniest thing in the world and decided they had to use it as much as possible. P-3 is pretty consistently quipping back and forth with Charles, and it’s almost never funny. In fact, most times I found it really annoying and embarrassing. As for the extremely horny upgrade machine, NORA, I literally had to start muting my TV every time she was on-screen, because I simply could not put up with it anymore
This game also has the problem of presenting itself as an immersive sim, but without actually being one. Typically, an immersive sim will hand you several different ways of approaching a given challenge - games like Dishonored, Prey, or Fallout 4 do this really well, with both tools given to the player, and through interesting level design that you can approach at different angles. Atomic Heart has none of that.
The one example of this that sticks out in my mind is where I was busy exploring the side rooms off a hallway leading to the next objective, when I came across a room full of dead soldiers, random serving robots milling about, and a robot arm lying on a desk. Approaching the arm, P-3 says something like “Hey, there’s that arm we’ve been looking for,” except I hadn’t been looking for it and didn’t know it existed until this moment. After collecting the arm, I carried on toward the objective until I reached a door that the robot arm was apparantly a key for. I don’t like it when a game will let you search an area top-to-bottom and not find a thing, then later send you back there to find the thing has magically appeared, but it feels almost equally as bad when there isn’t at least unique dialogue for when you find the thing early versus when the game has told you to go looking for it.
Atomic Heart has a lot of problems, and overall I do not like this game. But I really wanted to like it, and I did find some joy in it, so I wanted to take a second to speak to some of those moments before, in the cons section, I eviscerate it.
Pros
Once I figured out how to use it (and remembered to use it), the scanner is actually pretty useful. You can use it to spot enemies through walls, but also to spot items and lootable containers - that’s helpful because you need a lot of resources to craft things like ammo, health items and weapons.
Combat is not super intuitive, but once I got the hang of it I started to have fun… when I had the right tools for the job.
Playing on Peaceful Atom (easy mode), it felt pretty generous with crafting materials, but I don’t know if that changes on higher difficulties. Finding resources to build weapons was a little challenging , but crafting health items and ammo was always a breeze. Once I had acquired the pistol, shotgun, and ammunition recipes, I rarely felt like I didn’t have enough firepower.
The way you loot containers and corpses is interesting. Holding right-bumper and aiming at a group of desks and filing cabinets causes any items inside to be pulled out and sucked toward you - I would like to see more games use this.
Pros and/or Cons
It wasn’t until about nine hours into this game that story started to get interesting and where the gameplay was really clicking for me. The motivations of some big behind-the-scenes characters start to become more centered and discussed, and P-3 stops taking the piss out of everything for a little while. That’s a long time to wait for any kind of payoff, though.
Cons
P-3, is constantly complaining about the tropes the game is using is really grating. They have designed a really visually striking world, with all of this interesting background lore, and yet P-3 is constantly talking shit about everything that happens, leaving the game to just really feel like it’s not taking itself seriously.
Similar to my previous point, the level and mission design here are honestly really lackluster at best, and frustrating at worst. Levels try to extend the duration of an area by asking you to repeat similar or same actions multiple times, punctuated by waves of enemies, while P-3 will not shut up about how bad the level design is. It’s almost self-aware, but fails to hit in any meaningful way.
The puzzles here are often obtuse and frustrating, with little-to-no help from the game or its characters - I’m not the best at puzzles in games just in general, but I found myself having to look up guides constantly. Not to mention the awful lock picking mechanic, and the varying types of combination locks are all just really badly designed.
“Crispy critters!”
You can’t make the subtitles bigger, add a background, or change them at all. Sometimes they’re not even in sync with the dialgoue, so if you are sometime with audio processing issues like me, those issues can conspire to make some dialogue completely incomprehensible.
This game is miserable if you don’t have the right tools to deal with the different enemy types - especially when you get outside.
There are some colour-coded laser puzzles where even I, not a colourblind person, had trouble telling the difference at times.
The map is completely useless for the entire first six or so hours of the game. For whatever reason, it only works outdoors and the entirety of the first chapter of the game is underground.
The skill trees available here are mostly full of things you won’t need or care about.
Elevator take too long.
Altogether, I was really disappointed by this. It wasn’t even really on my radar at all until like a couple days before it launched, but when I saw a trailer for it I was sold. There are so many choices made here that if they had just not done a thing, or done it a bit differently, this game could have been a lot better. All of that said though, I have to admit that it’s pretty darn impressive that this is developer Mundfish’s very first published game. While this was a big miss for me, I am genuinely intrigued to see what they do next.
Would I recommend this? Absolutey not. Unless! It is on Game Pass, so if you’re a subscriber then you can play this for basically free on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, on mobile devices via Xbox Cloud Gaming, and on PC with Game Pass Ultimate or Game Pass for PC. It’s also available on PS4, PS5, and Steam.
Well, that’s that, folks. Thanks so much for taking the time to read this! It means a lot to me. I’d love to know what you thought! Hit me up in the comments, or at the social links below. Have you played Atomic Heart? If so, why?! Tell me your feelings on it, I’d love to chat about it.
Look out for another regularly scheduled post on Monday - I’ll talk to you all again super soon.
Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚