Atomic Heart Review

Played on PC

Developed by Mundfish

Released 21st February 2023

Confession time: I haven't played 'Bioshock'. While some people would constitute that as a war crime, it has to be said that I have bumped the whole series higher on my "Next To Play" list. The reason is, amongst the reviews that range from as high as 9/10 to as low as 4/10, they all specifically mention one critical thing; how 'Atomic Heart' was heavily influenced by one of the most worshipped shooters of the 2000s. Being their debut title (excluding the cancelled 'Soviet Lunapark VR'), Mundfish made quite a heavy splash onto the video game scene. With an announcement in 2017 of this Soviet-ised 'Bioshock', many eyes were pinned on to it, given just how good-looking it was. Trailers and preview builds led all to believe that this one-time passion project would be a highlight of one of the most stacked years in gaming. Sure enough on release, with publishing from Focus Entertainment, the game managed to split people on whether it could be regarded as a good game, outside of the controversy it had concerning the Russian-Ukrainian war. However, one universal agreement was that, in some things, it does really well, and in others, it squanders its potential.

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Story

The story is one of those things where, on its own, it isn't inherently bad, but when coupled with the issues concerning the characters (such as the writing), it manifests into something unpleasant and unsatisfactory. The narrative is set in an alternative future of 1955 where the Soviet Union were able to design and manufacture many engineering spectacles that would usher in a manual labour-free world such as robots, an AI called Kollektiv that controls all these robots, and much more. As the player, you'll follow P-3, a soldier agent of the scientist who created these robotics and is preparing for the launch of Kollektiv 2.0, a way for anyone and everyone to telepathically control the robots, however as expected with any plot revolving around technology and human intellect, it all goes awry and it's for you to A) fix it and B) deal with the people who launched this terror attack.

While the robotic revolution is a common storyline in any form of media nowadays, it's done here in an intriguing way. The contrast between the glorified Soviet Union and its inhumane, scientific underbelly and the slight peek at the political side of the aftermath was enough to have me engaged from the start. However, what dispelled me from caring about its plot by the halfway point was how predictable and poorly written the game ended up. The events, plot twists, and progression were all so paper thin I could see through them and their shock value before they were unveiled, and even if I didn't, the way these characters and stories were written would've still made for some underwhelming reveals. The pacing felt jagged, stuck at one plot point before rapidly advancing to the next, and this injection of the forced, flavourless writing made me double down on all the negative aspects of the story that I was previously only nitpicking on. There are some excellent ideas here and there but the way it's structured and the way it's told through these characters led the execution to be inept and clumsy.

Gameplay

There was so much potential for the gameplay to be excellent, but instead, it got walled off by the frustrating design. Atomic Heart had all the conditions laid out to be a great survival horror: cramped interiors with an unsettling atmosphere, well-executed inventory management, and decently telegraphed enemy attacks. Yet, the game decides to not flourish here and instead opts for an action shooter route that brings about many issues for itself. Here you have the standard shooting that felt fairly responsive, a melee combat system that felt smooth and as powerful as needed (probably one of the better first-person melee mechanics in the past few years), a glove that lets you use specific on-cooldown attacks like a telekinetic slam or a frostbite freezing spray, and bonus items like an overabundance of health replenishes or cartridges that give your weapons an elemental flair. While all of this sounds great and probably made for a fantastic beta demo, in its final state, many problems probably should've been given more attention in these testing stages.

The biggest issue it has concerns the enemies, making each encounter poorly balanced. Other than the bullet sponge health they all have and how they can knock you on your ass within a few hits; a miasma of these enemies would be loaded into a singular area in hopes of creating tension but instead created irritating combat scenarios. What's worse is that the robotic enemies are all able to respawn. While this issue mainly occurs in the open-world aspect of the game, if you defeat a robot, a repair drone is flown over to its location to bring it back to life, and while you can destroy the drone, more will be infinitely sent until the job is done. To stop this, you have to lurk around the open world to find a terminal that shuts down this respawner in the nearby area, albeit temporarily. There's no permanent solution to dealing with this and the several other problems that arise during these situations.

The main one is stealth, which is one of the worst-designed stealth systems in recent memory. There simply is no possible way to sneak around. If you kill an enemy, an alert is flagged to all nearby enemies regardless of whether it was a sneaky takedown, on top of the repair drone. If you get spotted for a millisecond by an enemy, all the other enemies will now close in on your location with backup repair drones. If you defeat an enemy while spotted, backup robots will arrive. It genuinely feels like you can't win in this game, and I would've easily marked this up as a thematic or symbolic representation of the game's world if it weren't for the fact that the trailers, the characters and the gameplay designs all indicate the opposite. Instead of confronting and fighting these enemies, you aren't just encouraged to run past them, but more-or-less forced as fighting an infinite crowd of robots ends up being a waste of time, resources and engagement. Oh and good luck running away because this game doesn't have a sprint button but instead a dash and an upgrade that increases your walking speed.

The game is split into 2 levels, the underground facilities whose level design is pretty good, and the open world which you use to access these facilities. While the underground sections of the game are fairly decent in their combination of action, enemy density and puzzles (more on that in a bit), the open world is the complete opposite. The enemies are clustered together, the puzzles range from being obvious to unclear and while the insides are populated with all of these interesting environments, the outside feels empty as there aren't any on-the-surface buildings that are worth exploring. Even if you did want to explore, you'd have to walk for a ridiculous amount of time, or use one of the cars and drive, but since the cars' wheels feel like they're covered in oil and are as fragile as a wet tissue, you're better off getting your in-game cardio done.

It's not to say the underground levels are anywhere near perfect. Just like everywhere else in the game, the enemy quantity is an issue (especially in the later areas with the bio-organic creatures), and the hassle of scanning and grinding against every interactable surface like drawers or cabinets, just to pick up some scrap for upgrades/crafting does deter from the better parts of the game. A common aspect of the interiors is the presence of puzzles which mostly boil down to altering the structure of the massive room you're in by either changing its magnetic force, flipping the room onto its side with levers or gathering energy cores to place into a deposit. While these puzzles are well-designed and do provoke some rewarding thinking, they feel so out of place for the game either because of how "videogame-y" they come across, or how they break up the action/horror tone that the previous enemy encounter had.

The final aspect to talk about is the upgrade station, also known as NORA. This AI upgrade cabinet is infuriating. Not because the upgrades it offers are awful, but because every time you access her, she's making many uncomfortable and overtly sexual remarks to the player that are simply unnecessary. As for the upgrades she offers, they aren't bad but they are greatly lacking. Apart from crafting new weapon blueprints and ammunition, you can upgrade your character and their arsenal, however, many of the upgrades can be simplified to stat boosts which are helpful but not that interesting for a 15-hour campaign as it feels like most of what you use and do in the first 2-3 hours is the extent of which you can do for the rest of the game. Some upgrades do diversify your abilities and weapons slightly, like making your 'Shok' ability bounce between enemies or making your charged-up melee swing down instead of in a 360 vicinity, but these changes don't modify how you'll approach combat for the 15 hours you spend with the game.

Bossfights

The bossfights aren't great. Many of the issues that popped up in the gameplay, namely the bullet sponge health, are present here in these fights. While each attack is telegraphed really well, the environments coupled with the boss' design look awesome and they feel like a fair challenge most of the time, the issue of the bosses having too much health becomes a prominent issue that detracts so much out of them. Instead of Hedgie being this cool, intriguing puzzle-mix boss, it ended up feeling like a chore to take down. Another issue with these bosses is how they get recycled into being standard enemies that pop up quite frequently due to the unoptimised enemy quantities. Plyusch was a cool melee-needed fight but having to fight it again and again put me off from liking its initial duel. The next issue is the repetivity. There's a total of 7 bosses in the game and 4 of them share the same weakness of aiming for the glowing orange critical point, while another 2 share the same elemental disadvantage. It's good to see weakness variety in bosses, but I do think more than 2 types of weaknesses are needed for it to be called "variety", let alone "good".

Characters

The characters are the bulk of the problems with this game. I've played my fair share of video games where the writing is just abhorrently bad or where the protagonist gets exponentially more annoying with each line of dialogue, but 'Atomic Heart' really takes the cake with these issues. P-3 is such an insufferable character with dialogue that ranged from throwing a temper tantrum like a 5-year-old that just learned some profanity, to cringy quips that were exhausting to listen to - "Crispy critters" is a dogshit catchphrase. This "pissed-off" tone that the character had the whole game felt so forced that when the character is supposed to display a sign of a different emotion, it would instead feel barren and misleading, as opposed to what it was supposed to sound like. The writing isn't anywhere near as bad for all the other characters (except for NORA and her annoying innuendos), but they definitely don't tread into the "good" region, with voice acting that had as much depth as the one-dimensional lines would allow them to have. For lack of a better word; all the characters felt robotic (quite ironic) and like puppets that simply distracted away from the game's impressive factors. There is one particular thing that I did like about the characters and that's the one-on-one moments that P-3 and his AI companion, Charles, would have together where they slowly uncovered and figured out the truth as they felt like genuine moments of the protagonist being confused and coping, even if you could see the outcome of more than half of these plot twists from a mile away.

Atmosphere

The atmosphere had great components that were simply disjointed when connected. The sound engineering was pretty good with every shot or robotic creak sounding very elegant and distinct, while the soundtrack absolutely rocked. Hardstyle, metal, and Russian folk music are the best possible descriptions of the OST; these are incredible when fused. However, it just doesn't align. The soundtrack was never in the right place at the right time, acting like a puzzle piece too large to fit into the rest of the board. It wouldn't boost the adrenaline of the fight currently ongoing or add depth to the severity of the scene, it simply tagged along for the ride.

The art style is in a similar vein. The gorgeous art direction of this robotic influence on simple Russian infrastructure, with a progressively more twisted and creative response to the horrific testing facilities, was close to immaculate. So many visual cues and ideas circulated throughout the game and while that does add vibrancy and versatility to the way the player sees the world, it does create a certain disconnect between each area. Going from room to room felt so inconsistent, as if I was in multiple different areas at once and they never made any sense, almost as if they were placed there in a "videogame-y" fashion. The only time this wasn't an issue was in the Theatre level which stayed mostly true to that aesthetic, and when it did diverge, it did so sensibly. Additionally, the cinematography of many of the scenes was so jarring to watch, but whether it was the powerful colour palette, the effective graphical performance, or because of its weird charm, this direction worked oddly but wonderfully well.

The technical performance was mostly optimised to a good state. While there were audio issues of dialogue overlapping or cutting each other off or loading issues like the screen occasionally freezing or the loading screens (especially in the elevators) taking an egregious amount of time, they didn't dampen my experience to a significant state.

Story - 3.5/10

Gameplay - 4.5/10

Bossfights - 4/10

Characters - 2/10

Atmosphere - 6.5/10

SUBPAR

'Atomic Heart' is filled with great ideas, however, they're all clustered and stuck together in a way that makes for a more disorganised experience than a spectacular one.