Atomic Heart (Mundfish)
Let's talk about the elephant in the room.
When Atomic Heart was announced for the first time somewhere in 2018 with its bombastic trailer, the network was fired up and the nickname Russian Bioshock was attached to the project and it is very difficult not to compare the two.
Both take place in a brutally crashing utopian world, the player can shoot elements from the palm of his hand, the great visual design and of course the promise of a plot twist that will leave us all speechless.
Many times during the plot you feel the spirit of Bioshock hovering over the whole story, but apart from a few parts of homage in the style of easter eggs, you can definitely say that Atomic Heart is a game in itself and very different from Bioshock, for better or for worse.
Atomic Heart (photo: official website, Mundfish)
Plot: Utopian and Soviet robot apocalypse
The game takes place in a parallel world where Russian scientists have created a smart chemical compound called Polymer that technologically advanced Soviet Russia light years already in the 1930s.
Twenty years later, while the world is recovering from the horrors of World War II, Russia is becoming the most advanced power in the world with breakthroughs in the fields of robotics, aeronautics, energy and artificial intelligence.
We step into the shoes of Major Sergey Nechiev who is summoned to an innovative complex in the Soviet Empire where the robots perform all the manual labor of the humans who control them with the help of the same polymer compound.
What is supposed to be a paradise for the workers turns into a murderous hell when the robots lose control and start slaughtering the humans.
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Atomic Heart (photo: official website, Mundfish)
The first half hour of the game will introduce you to the perfect world where the Soviets control robot servants in every sense of the day.
You will get to experience the full splendor of communist engineering with magnificent parades of robots through the streets of the automated city where every little thing is managed by an artificial intelligence called "The Collective".
This great opening shows how advanced technology serves man who enjoys the world he created and can now live his life without worries and without lifting a finger.
Throughout the opening we can notice the problems bubbling beneath the surface and when the robots erupt in violence, within seconds this ideal scene is turned on its head and we find ourselves fighting for our lives.
The game's plot starts out great and tempts us to go out into the game world and explore it, but at some point Atomic Heart starts sending the player on annoying repetitive missions in places we've already gone through pretty blatantly to extend the game time.
All this is very detrimental to the story and the progress of the plot, and by the time you get to the end and the twist of the story, you feel like after running a marathon and you just want to finish the whole thing.
Atomic Heart (photo: official website, Mundfish)
Gameplay
Major Sergey, or p-3 as he is called during our adventure, is armed with a special polymer glove that stores an artificial intelligence named Charles inside, and allows Sergey to have access to all the advanced technology of the city and to get special powers that will allow him to fight the rampaging robots.
The more you explore the game world, the more you can upgrade Charles and get new powers such as shooting different elements from the glove, breaking locks and computers, taking on enemies silently and improving Sergey's physical data.
The problem is that most of the powers feel a bit unbalanced or redundant.
For example, shooting lightning bolts from the glove is nice, but there's really no reason to upgrade this power because it neutralizes enemies for a few seconds and that's it, while the power to freeze enemies both neutralizes them and makes them take more damage for a few seconds.
The other powers mainly allow access to closed or blocked places on the map or add more life points to Sergey.
In fact the most useful power is the way in which we collect equipment, where the gauntlet becomes a kind of small vacuum cleaner that collects all the equipment that is in a certain range and stores it right in our inventory.
Atomic Heart (photo: official website, Mundfish)
Besides different powers, we can also use different weapons in the game that are divided into close or far range.
And these weapons don't feel the most balanced either.
Atomic Heart follows the classic formula of a starter pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, missile launcher and several different energy guns.
There is nothing new here that shooters haven't seen before, and most of the weapons do their job faithfully and there are no complaints.
The shooting mechanics are simple and easy, aim at an opponent and fill him with holes until he dies, if you managed to hit a weak point then he will die faster.
When you get to close-range weapons, you discover quite a few problems, the main one being the vulnerable system.
Many times the blow you give that should connect with the enemy instead misses annoyingly.
Another problem is that the close-range weapons feel weak against most enemies in the game, and until you manage to connect a hit with an enemy, even if you freeze or electrify them, the damage done to them feels like an aggressive caress at best.
All of this feels like a waste because the enemies in the game are very diverse and impressive both visually and in terms of battles.
Atomic Heart will throw at you a small army of various robots that will try to "turn off" you as well as organic enemies such as strange mutations that have undergone experiments and turned into bloodthirsty monsters.
Every enemy in the game looks great and feels special in their fighting style, you will have to learn the different attacks of the enemies to time your own dodges and attacks to neutralize them.
The battles against the bosses in the game are simply great, each such battle is challenging and fun both because of the different strategy you will have to implement against them and because of their excellent design.
Atomic Heart (photo: official website, Mundfish)
Graphics and performance
And speaking of design, it's important to note that Atomic Heart is definitely one of the most impressive games released in recent years.
You see the crazy investment in the way the game world is presented to us, the developers have done a tremendous optimization job here to present all this beauty on the old Unreal 4 engine, and in some scenes it will leave you breathless and wondering how it is about the engine of the previous generation.
It is also important to note that at a time when games come out bursting with annoying bugs, Atomic Heart manages to run without special problems that we have become accustomed to in the Day 1 Release of other games.
Atomic Heart (photo: official website, Mundfish)
soundtrack and sound
Another thing worthy of praise is the excellent soundtrack, which is responsible for no less than Mick Gordon, and some of you know from the Doom and Wolfenstein series of recent years.
From the very first moments in the main menu, the soundtrack gets deep into your head and refuses to let go, and as you progress through the game the soundtrack develops and upgrades the atmosphere at any given moment, but especially boosts the adrenaline in the action scenes.
The dubbing work and the dialogues in the game also do the job even though some of the dubbing in English fails to convey the jokes and the slang translates into Russian.
You can feel it especially in the dialogues of Sergey, who speaks like a Russian version of Serious Sam who spews out one liners and punch lines throughout the game, or argues with Charles about the best ways to destroy robots.
Atomic Heart (photo: official website, Mundfish)
In conclusion
The final question is, is Atomic Heart worth enough to allow the Russian intelligence services to collect data on you?
The game is definitely trying to be the next Bioshock, it presents an interesting game world and one of the most visually impressive released in recent years, but it starts to suffer from annoying problems as you progress more and more.
The system of powers and weapons is definitely one of the main misses because the enemies in the game are diverse but the way we can fight them feels uncomfortable and ineffective.
The other flaws are the extreme smearing and the repetitive tasks that start to feel in the middle of the plot that damage the story very quickly causing a loss of interest.
At the end of the day Atomic Heart isn't really a bad game, but like its great opener, it shows a lot of potential that is wasted due to bad choices by the development team.
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