Atomic Heart

 

I'm always up for playing single player FPS game. Atomic Heart was on my radar for awhile, and without knowing too much about it beyond the Steam page and trailer I finally picked it up.

The games premise is about a futuristic version of the Soviet Union where they have achieved insane technological advancement, where at first glance it may look like they've achieved some kind of utopia but of course its actually a dystopia in disguise. This slowly reveals its self over the games massive hour long intro. You start up the game, and its this fantastical exposition showcasing wondrous visuals, you briefly get to walk around these city streets, although its more like a hallway its so linear, where you can talk to various NPC's and overall just get a vibe of everything. It's a fascinating opening, and the setting is interesting, how technology is so advanced you can learn anything you want just by uploading it into your brain, like if you want to learn piano, or become a scientist, or learn any language, its a click of a button away, then you have lots of cutscenes further slowly unraveling the setup. While it is interesting, it kinda starts to wear out its welcome because by the 40 minute mark I was just looking down at my watch wondering when the actual game would begin, worried this is all just style over substance.

Unfortunately it kinda was. The game is very frontloaded. By that I mean puts all the most interesting and grand spectacles only in the beginning of the game. It tries to impress and woo you with all these amazing introduction scenes, it tries to set you up thinking youre in for this crazy journey, when in reality just a few hours into the game it becomes mundane and nothing like that very rapidly. After the grandiose opening, you quickly are shoved inside some relatively dull factories and laboratories. Never again really in the game do you feel that same sense of wonder and spectacle.

The games a kind of mix between Half Life and Fallout. You have these elaborate bunkers you navigate around, constantly solving puzzles, but also you're looting desks and cabinets constantly, picking up resources for crafting and RPG mechanics. You just hold E and he takes his glove out and starts siphoning all the resources out of the room. You have these saferooms scattered around the levels, with this red locker that talks to you with a female voice being all sexual, which got pretty cringy fast, where you can then upgrade various skill trees and your arsenal. There are also some outdoors segments where you can kind of freeroam, but theyre few and far between with not really much to do anyways. The graphics can be nice to look at, vibrant colors, and the open map segments do look good, but most of the game is spent in underground bunkers and labs with not much to look at, besides soviet decorations.

On paper it sounds like it could be fun, but unfortunately it didn't take long for me to realize Atomic Heart is mostly style over substance, with some really dull design choices and gameplay systems.


First of all the game is very slow to get going. When youre finally playing, you only get a melee weapon, and still youll only play for 40 seconds then get another barrage of cutscenes and dialogue. While it can be interesting, at a certain point its just like, "I wanna start playing" , you know? Finally youre actually playing, and you just have this melee weapon and not much else. The way you unlock other weapons is by randomly finding blueprints for them inside storage boxes. At first I think some weapons are guranteed, like the pistol and shotgun maybe, but past that it seems to be random. Theres an AK, Rocket launcher, Rail gun, Electric pistol, Electric rifle, and a handful of other melee weapons. I didn't even unlock the AK until more than halfway through the game, despite getting AK bullets for hours before that. I was confused by it that I eventually looked up how to get the AK and I found many people saying they beat the entire game and didnt even unlock the AK because its just random. Its dumb. I only unlocked a few weapons in the entire game, AK, Shotgun, Pistol, Electric pistol, and a couple melee weapons. Well I don't really want to play melee that much, its an RPG right? I should be able to pick my playstyle.

Beyond that, the game initially gives you barely any ammo. So you play the first few hours of the game using melee weapons like a fireaxe or eventually I unlocked this machete. Youre just going around fighting these unarmed robots with mustaches that just sprint at you and punch you. Over and over. Past the initial novelty they get dull pretty fast. Like what kind of FPS game just has enemies that punch you and not much else? Some of them have lazer eyes but thats it. The melee is just whatever, you have a charged attack and you can upgrade for more damage and small things like this. Theres an upgrade to give it a spin attack but I found it just worse than the charged one.

You only get enough ammo to kill one or two enemies then youre empty again, at least initially. At first I kind of liked it, had a real resource management vibe. Really caring about your resources. But that feeling soon goes out the window to where it doesnt matter and youre swimming in ammo anyway once you can start crafting ammo. So its like the design is all over the place. The beginniing of the game was mostly boring and slow, and then by the mid point the pacing changes to where you have hundreds of bullets but youre still just fighting mostly the same unarmed enemies it barely makes sense.

The games enemy variety is mostly dull. Like I said you have the unarmed robots, then you have a bunch of flying drone robots, theres a zombie type enemy, that shoots goo across the screen at you, constantly knocking you down on your ass which SUCKS and is terrible design, there are other turrets that can walk around and shoot at you, and then theres another couple robot enemies like this saw blade one and a few more. Thats it. They arent memorable or fun to fight, like shooting metallic objects isnt the most satisfying feeling in an FPS game but even still the enemies here are just boring.

But more than anything, the worst problem with this game is its god awful pacing. Its basically not even a FPS game, its first and foremost a puzzle game. A terrible one at that. Everytime you make an inch of progress, theres another bad puzzle to solve. You finally do some combat and kill 3 enemies, and immediately after is another puzzle. You walk down a new hallway, puzzle. You open a door, puzzle. You try to open a door, puzzle. Seriously its like 50% of this game is copy pasted puzzle solving, 35% is cutscenes or dialogue, and the last 15% is combat. I don't hate puzzles in games, I like puzzles sometimes. I even like full blown puzzle games. But here in Atomic Heart its just bad. Almost every single door you open has this stupid puzzle involving different colored dots that you have to spin around and match them up , like it would be fine a few times, but its like dozens of times you have to do this. Its just exhausting and annoying. Then you constantly have these puzzles with lazer grids where you have to once again spin things around until they match the right color. Then you have other segments where you have to shoot electircal pulses at these batteries on the walls to change platforms around or change bits of the enviornment around, it just goes on and on. Its not even uncommon to have puzzles ONTOP of puzzle. Like you finally open the door and then right inside the next room is another one. Or youre inside a puzzle room shooting the electrical pulses changing the room around and theres another grid puzzle ontop of it. I just got fucking SICK of it and wanted it to stop, but it never did. Very often youll have to open a door, but its gated behind one of these colored dot puzzles, and if an enemy hits you it knocks you off resetting it, which got very annoying.

Even the main character comments about how tedious and repetitive it is, like even the devs know it sucks, so why the fuck is there so many of them? Did they first put them in the game and do the voice acting later, and they realized they kinda screwed up so they at least had to make the main charater acknoweldge it? ITs just baffling design. Who the hell thinks this is fun?


Most of the time its the same copy pasted puzzle with a slightly different solution. The few times you get some unique one-off puzzles they're also quite bad, the first bit of the game youre just going around in this boring looking factory collecting canisters and moving this glowing yellow ball around to different sockets, theres a really stupid puzzle later on with musical tubes where its so unintutiive what youre supposed to do mechanically, turns out youre supposed to grab the object and then push it around while moving your characer around, that was NOT obvious at all because the damn thing looked like a static thing built into the enviornment, theres only like, one or two puzzles in the entire game that was not miserable, maybe the one with the farm animals was okay matching up them with the screens, and the other physics based one where youre spinning this mini landblock around guiding a ball to the hole. At one point in the game theres a door that needs a code and theres dead bodies laying around that can talk, and they try to tell you hints to decipher what to do, but by this point I was just sick of the constant riddles and puzzles, it was just one after another for hours, I just looked the damn solution up, I'm not doing it anymore.  The pacing just sucks. It feels like they knew their combat wasn't that great, and they had to put in something else to pad out the games length so they put in all these copy pasted puzzles. Its again, badly designed.


So the main gameplay loop is going around some indoors bunker, collecting canisters , or objects to progress through to the next room, killing a couple enemies then doing a puzzle, finding these safe rooms where you can upgrade, and rinse and repeat until you finally arrive to one of the open world segments. The open world segments are pretty underwhelming. It looks decent enough, but theres no real incentive to do anything in it. The only things to do is these optional bunkers that just will unlock some weapon attachment, that seemed to be pretty much all there is to it. But the game barely has combat anyway so not like I was hurting for more weapon attachments. You can even get in these red cars and drive, but the driving is quite annoying because its not like a true open world game, the roads are tiny and tight, with clutter all over them, so you can hardly drive without constantly smacking into barriers and the world is small anyway, its not like a Far Cry or GTA game, you can traverse the whole map in like 90 seconds, its just whatever. You only get to interact with the open world segments like, 3 times in the entire game anyway. You go through the objectives and only a few times do you arrive back at the surface. It feels like a linear game, with a few moments of slightly opening up, but its kinda pointless when it happens anyway. Its another weird design choice. Its like they couldnt decide what they wanted to be so they just tried to do everything, and half-ass everything.


As for the games RPG mechanics and upgrades, they're okay. Its not like a game with tons of player freedom and builds and variety, its not like a Fallout game. You can unlock everything in one playthrough and even by halfway through the game youve already maxed out all the things you care about anyway. First youre going around collecting resources by siphoning things with your glove, you hold the button and it automatically does it for yuo when youre near lootable containers. This quickly turns iinto just holding down the button anytime you enter a room and mindlessly collecting everything in it, without really even looking at what youre picking up. It all becomes meaningless and trivial fast. Metal parts, sillicon, electronic parts, organic stuff, its all whatever, you never really care about individual pieces since you get so much of it anyway you just end up crafting and then when you have no resources you go back and start mindlessly collecting stuff again. It feels half baked. Sure theres something satisfying about collecting all sorts of random junk, seeing your screen filled with popups, but the novelty wears off fast and turns into just going through the motions. Its not like you can ever loot any unique items or equipment, theres nothing you can really equip, its all random crafting components.

Then, at the red upgrade machinees you have two options, player perks and weapons.  Your weapons have different attachments, with different levels for each one, some offer more accuracy, faster reload, etc. Some attachments are only unlocked through doing open world stuff like I mentiond earlier. Mostly I just got the attachments that increase damage, you can also get these cannister attachment to add elemental damage to your gun like fire, ice, etc, these were okay but make your guns look a bit stupid with the can hanging off it. Its a small nitpick, but as soon as you start upgrading your weapon they start to look ugly...

There is also a straoge and inventory management component, you can only carry so much stuff with you, health items, ammo, weapons, all take different amounts of storage slots which I thought was neat. Like shotgun shells for example come in bundles of 18 , so you have a real choice when you try to carry lots of ammo with you. Still it falls flat and doesnt amount to end up mattering much because its not like youre gonna carry with you much besides health and ammo anyway. You eventually upgrade your storage space so much that it further doesnt matter. Again, its like they cant decide what kind of game theyre going for. You can dismantle items to turn them into components, which I did mostly to craft ammo. At a certain point you just dismantle basically anything that isnt health or ammo, even other types of ammo youre not using, to then craft ammo for the gun you want to use. It then became incredibly easy to consistently make myself hundreds of bullets for whatever gun I want. For example using the Shotgun, well why do I want weak pistol bullets? So instead of carrying a pistol with me, I'd just dismantle all pistol bullets to then turn them into more shotgun bullets. This meant that at some point I was just carrying with me one gun at a time and a melee weapon, because any other weapon I'd rather just dismantle its ammo into a different kind of ammo I'd rather use. It almost encourages you to only use one weapon. Another awkward design that didnt end up working out so well. There is another type of weapon that uses electricity, that slowly recharges, and I used this for a bit when my ammo was low, but its a pretty lame playstyle that I didnt love and only used it when I had to.

As for health, well the entire game I'd always have at least 10 full heals on me at any given time, the entire combat started off resource starved resorting to clunky melee, but then it quickly became incredibly trivial where I had almost infinite health and healing items, as well as an almost unlimited amount of ammo. Its not like these saferoom crafting rooms are rare either, you find them nonstop. Again, clumsy design all over the place. The balancing is non-existent.

Then the other branch of the upgrades is the character perks. Here you have various different trees. These cost a different resource, that you get by killing enemies mostly I believe. Theres the character tree which has passive overall bufs, like movement speed, increased health, take less damage, more inventory space, stuff like that. I rapidly maxed out this whole tree. Seemed like a no brainer. The other trees are for your various glove abilities. Stuff like shooting a freeze pulse out of your glove, or shooting these white globs out of your glove that coats the enemies that allows them to take more elemental damage, theres a telekenesis ability that lets you pickup enemies and slam them down, stuff like that. I toyed around with these for a bit, but like the combat was already so mindless and easy just blasting everything with either my shotgun or eventually AK that these didnt really add much for me. The freeze one felt pretty underwhelming, the glob ability felt like a novelty gimmick, and the other stuff was similarly not too enticing. Theres another tree that gives you more energy generation for those energy weapons, but really its overall bland and nothing innovative or memorable.

At least the writing and overall plot of the game IS interesting enough to save it from being a complete slog. The narrative is engaging enough, you have this talking glove for the whole game and its like this humanoid AI thing trapped inside of it that becomes your friendly companion, you have this Granny Zina that sometimes pops up which is kinda goofy but amusing, you have these cutscene segments with powerful officials and this tension back and forth about Communism and improving humanity using super technology and making everyone complacent unified slaves,living in like a dream-simulation virtual reality world like the matrix, sure it was fun enough to watch. But thats what I mean again. The coolest parts of the game have nothing to do with...the actual game, its all style over substance. Its not like the plot is amazing or anything, its just relativiely the most interesting part of the whole experience. You have these sexualized female robots, like the ones in the games promo art, but they kinda only appear like, two or three times in the whole game, there is of course a puzzle involving them, making them pose in different ways to match up with a shadow, theres a weird but neat cutscene with them how they turn some body into a weird goo monster, theres a boss fight with them and thats about it. The narrative takes twists and turns, with some betrayal, espionage, and mystery surrounding your main character and how his memory was wiped, I mean its kinda typical and generic but it works okay enough. Mostly the world is the most engaging part, but unfortunately you dont really get to interact with many aspects of the actual world, most of the game is , like I said, spent indoors.

But the writing has problems too, like the main character. He's this weird mix of this like macho sounding American, but also being a complacent lapdog for his master. His writing is often kinda cringy too. Like why does he keep saying "Crispy critters" . What? Were the devs sitting around at some like, corporate office round table trying to brainstorm some quirky catchphrase and the best they could come up with is "Crispy critters" constantly. I don't get it. It comes off as force and corny. He swears constantly and it also comes off as a bit forced and wacky, trying to make him seem gruff and badass or whatever. I don't know, the game really is just a lot of hit and miss design.


There's really not much more to the game. There's not too many actually amazing gameplay segments. There's a sort of amusing part where you need to get on a train but the robot butler says you need a ticket which had some amusing dialogue. Mostly what comes to mind after the fact is annoying puzzles. This big segment involving a tram car switching the railroads around, or the handful of pretty awful platforming segments, the platforming is of course jank and half cooked, theres a handful of random dream sequences where youre suddenly roaming around collecting apples in some fantasy land like an arcade game, or other goofy whimsical dream segments where youre in some fuzzy suit, just wacky stuff. Sure it broke up some of the monotony but its really just more filler. Theres this one horrible segment inside this facility with battery shit on the walls you need to constantly shock and shift the room around doing constant puzzles, just a terrible slog.

The game has a couple boss fights, and yeah they're bad. What makes them bad is suddenly theyre massively immune to certain types of damage. Mostly anything ranged. What this means, is for the whole game youve spent upgrading your ranged weapons, and suddenly you get to a boss and its like Nope, you NEED to used some shitty melee weapon and tediously run in circles charging up your attack over, and over, and over, taking off tiny chunks of his health for like 20 minutes. It becomes repetitive, boring, and tedious, rather than some exciting boss fight. Every single boss was like this. I understand they have strengths and weaknesses, you can hold Alt to analyze them, but it always just amounted to using some shitty melee weapon and doing this stuff. Even when the game should be fun, they somehow manage to fuck it up. How is this game so poorly designed? I don't understand how people playtested this and signed off on it being enjoyable. I guess the coolest boss in the game is the one in the whale arena, but again, it turned into this tedious melee romp. They even repeat some of these bosses multiple times, like the Plyusch, after I defeated him i was like phew, so glad thats over with. He came back as a regular enemy multiple more times which was equally as tedious and exhausting each time.

At least at a certain point I could craft so much ammo for my AK like 1000 bullets that I could just hold down the mouse button and whittle down some of the bosses health anyway, still took ages. The last area has you talking to the granny and make a decision to turn on your leader or not, I chose to turn on him cause it was obvious he was trying to turn the whole world into a blue pilled simulation kind of thing, then the last boss is these two lady robots, it wasnt a terrible fight, probably the best boss in the game, but maybe thats just because by this point I had so much bullets I could ignore their resistance just not use the bad melee. Beat the last boss on my first try, end credits, seemed like the bad ending, but whatever.

After the end credits if you press Continue it takes you back to the last boss. But you can free roam if you press Return to Facility. But what are you gonna do? Roam around and unlock weapon attachments? Why? Doesnt really make sense.

There is amusingly a New Game +, no thanks.

Thats Atomic Heart. On the surface it looks like it could be a good game, but unfortunately its all style over substance, with nonstop crappy puzzles, medicore combat and rpg mechanics, and hit and miss writing. At least the game is short, I beat it in only 10 hours. Its not an absolutely terrible game, but its not a good one either. Mostly saved by some of its interesting world design and some entertaining cutscenes.

5/10