This may be a bit biased, but I’ve always been skeptical of Atomic Heart. The trailer and gameplay shared by developer Mundfish prior to release make the game look pretty good, and years of disappointment with trailers has me second-guessing such an opinion. But anyway, Atomic Heart is here now, and over the past few days I’ve been fully immersed in the world, seeing how this anticipated project takes shape in practice.
Let me start by stating that Atomic Heart’s graphics and presentation live up to those trailers, and then some. The worlds are wonderfully realized, beautifully sculpted, full of character, and all play incredibly smoothly with silky smooth animations and frame rates. Atomic Heart’s Facility 3826 world is easily one of the most creative game worlds I’ve seen, although it’s very reminiscent of BioShock (especially Columbia’s floating city, BioShock Infinite, which is ironic since it’s a A game rooted in communism, while the Colombian game is all about capitalism and the American dream), there’s no denying that the team at Mundfish really let their creativity flow to make this compelling video game .
Atomic Heart’s first 30 minutes are also one of the strongest video game openings I’ve ever experienced, with an abundance of detail and color bringing this alternative Soviet world to life – although it’s worth noting that the opening is markedly lacking in player action and agency. The narrative is also interesting, rooted in mystery and betrayal, with players tasked with piecing the pieces together to determine why and how Facility 3826’s droid population lost its marbles, and what kind of dark and terrible secret. It’s very BioShock, no doubt about it, and I have no complaints about it, because the world and story are great.
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But in my opinion, this is where things start to fall apart in Atomic Heart, because the macro, the broader and more impactful parts of this game, are really good, but the micro, the little details related to the actual gameplay, tends to will struggle. Take combat as an example. The robots and enemies you have to face are beautifully designed and sometimes really scary. But fighting them feels like a chore, as Atomic Heart is a pretty rigid game in practice. You can’t sprint, you don’t really need to fight all the bots (even if you could, if you wanted to), and the gameplay isn’t designed in a way that feels smooth and fluid like other FPS games. It all culminated in an experience where I found myself avoiding combat as much as possible, because while the shooting mechanics were well designed and optimized, the movement and melee combat were far from it. It’s slow and frustrating, and it feels like you’re always fighting the game to push protagonist P-3 (also known as Major Nechaev) more like a generic, thrilling action hero.
Couple that with the fact that ammo is hard to come by, and even getting and upgrading new weapons is a chore, which is overly complicated since Atomic Heart has such an overwhelming resource system. You’ll need to collect a ton of different resources to improve the P-3’s weapons and abilities, and looting is overdone (you’ll walk into a room and find every drawer, table, cupboard, chest, shelf, etc. that needs to be opened in order for you to Get minimal resources) It’s all just rolled into one experience, I don’t get excited or tempted to improve my gear.
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The world is still jaw-dropping to wander around, though it’s not really begging to be explored. The closed world is designed in such a way that you’re mostly supposed to follow the core narrative rhythm, and you never really come across much of interest when you decide to explore elsewhere. The game does its best to keep it thrilling in the form of the Kollektiv Neural Network engagement system, which will see robotic reinforcements being sent anywhere on the map where you’re causing trouble, or simply being spotted by one of the hundreds of invasive cameras. However, this response system feels a bit out of touch with what Atomic Heart really wants a game to be, considering you never actually want to fight.
I say this because it’s clear that Atomic Heart wants to be more like BioShock 1 and 2 than Infinite. However, the gameplay is fundamentally built to resemble what Infinite brings, with lots of fighting chances in a compelling but hollow-feeling world, created simply as a platform for storytelling and nothing else. thing. For me, it all gave Atomic Heart a hollow feel that on the one hand I couldn’t help but drool over, celebrating the narrative and world design, but on the other hand it’s hard to really find entertainment and Stimulate.
I’ll also add that some parts are really bad, including P-3’s voice acting and the dialogue he shares with the talking glove. It’s bland, dull, and always makes you sigh in disappointment when one of the two says something incredibly stupid and silly that reminds you of Duke Nukem. Fortunately, gloves are at least useful as tools, and can be used for one of many abilities, including telepathy and frost attacks, which are handy for interacting with the world and slowing down enemies, which does lighten the combat and the fun – though it By no means is it a complete solution.
It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear that a game the size of Atomic Heart’s also has its fair share of bugs and clumsy design features, because in my experience, it does. Between doors not opening repeating dialogue lines, levels where enemies pin you to jagged terrain and then beat you to death and you can’t move or fight back at all, there have been many times I’ve died from reasons beyond my control, if not More so, I had to exit the main menu to get the game to work. Again.
Hopefully though Mundfish can iron out some of these issues before launch, because there’s really a lot to love about this game. The graphics are almost “next gen”, the world is great, the audio and soundtrack are top quality, and the narrative is very interesting and engaging. Atomic Heart might have been one of the best games of the year if it weren’t for its clunky and overly complex nature, which is why it’s been let down by such an extensive list of small but common problems.