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Sex bots and mutants are the least of my problems - Atomic Heart Review

25K View2023-03-01

Atomic Heart is undoubtedly the strangest blend of shooter, RPG, and adventure game that I’ve played in a long time. Maybe it’s because of the retro-futuristic 1950s USSR setting, the talking dead folk, the mutants, or the horny robot named Nora, who alternated between wanting to kill me and wanting to jump my bones. But it’s precisely this uniqueness that kept me invested in the narrative—even as poor pacing and rough dialogue kept it from earning a lasting place in my heart.

Atomic Heart imagines an alternate history 1950s USSR where technology has created a truly idealistic society for its inhabitants. People are free to live their lives while robots do all the heavy lifting, catering to humanity’s every need.

It’s not difficult to see how this idealized scenario soon turns to shit. Taking control of P-3, Atomic Heart’s protagonist, I was charged with finding the traitor responsible for turning the robots against humanity. Some exciting twists kept the all-too-familiar robot revolt narrative fresh and exciting as I progressed through the story.

The fantastic visuals were the first thing to catch my eye when I started the game. The world of Atomic Heart pulled me in with top-notch visuals and design that had me almost buying into the game’s satirical propaganda. More than once, I caught myself thinking, “Yes! Let’s all move to the utopian Facility 3826 for the glory of the Soviet Union... Oh right... Never mind.”

Atomic Heart spent nearly twenty minutes on the introduction alone—no combat, just enveloping me in this amazing world. I got to witness a parade, check out the cars of this era, and take in the attention to detail in even tiny things, like accessories on a desk, leaves in a tree, or a running in-game TV show. I was also introduced to Charles, an AI-powered glove with a strong personality of his own.

Despite the great setup and intriguing setting, Atomic Heart’s script and characters were all over the place. For every moment of brilliance, I was struck by something that had me scratching my head in confusion. I got a kick out of some of the cool side characters like Granny Zina, but P-3, the character I actually had to control, is, well, dense. He blindly follows orders for most of the game. I get it—it’s 1950s Soviet Union, and this a shooter hero we’re talking about—but it still annoyed me being forced to play as such a dummy.

Then there’s Nora, a hypersexualized bot I had to visit to upgrade P-3’s gear and abilities. Nora’s dialogue is so full of sexual innuendo that I found myself wondering if someone who worked on the game had a robot fetish. And for as much work as the developers at Mundfish did to immerse me in this strange world, I got pulled out just as quickly when I encountered the script’s regular use of modern expressions and phrases that felt totally out of place in this ’50s setting.

That setting is presented as an open world full of plenty to see and do. The world is truly vast. Testing stations are scattered throughout where you can find blueprints to make cool new weapons, and cool details like a giant submarine in the middle of the road really encouraged me to take in the scenery. Unfortunately, that map size comes at a cost: Everything was so sprawled out that I had to hope to find a vehicle I could take to new locations, because going on foot quickly became tedious. The game’s roads are filled with enemies, and any attempted exploration was quickly met with the pressure of getting killed.

Even worse, the game’s very structure forced me to hoof it back and forth across the map far too often. P-3 is thrown into a series of fetch quests that quickly became tedious. Even when I made my way indoors, I was often running back and forth across a laboratory to find this game’s equivalent of keys to open up doors. I’m fascinated by the world of Atomic Heart; I just wish I would have been given more leeway to take in the sights and more interesting things to do here.

I could have totally forgiven bad dialogue, the underwhelming protagonist, and even the poorly implemented open world if the moment-to-moment gameplay delivered. However, Atomic Heart is just as hit-and-miss in that respect.

Atomic Heart’s biggest sin is its hard-to-pin-down difficulty. I’m fairly skilled with first-person shooters, yet there were times when the normal difficulty was too challenging. And no, it wasn’t because I just sucked! Levels are bizarrely paced in a way where the difficulty bounces all over the place.

At one point, I fought through a series of rooms with one or two robots each, only to enter an entire zone filled to the brim with cameras, robots, and traps, and then went back to twenty minutes of mild threats. I found that I had to focus on building out P-3’s combat skill tree as early as possible just to give myself a fighting chance when the game randomly decided to balloon in difficulty.

The lack of balance is especially frustrating, because removed from the sometimes aggravating scenarios Atomic Heart placed me in, I actually liked the combat. In addition to traditional melee attacks and ranged gunplay, I was able to use Charles (the aforementioned glove) to perform special skills. Powers such as mass telekinesis, where I could lift multiple enemies off the ground, made me feel like I was using the force.

The guns in Atomic Heart go for more of a stylistic feel versus the realism of something like Call of Duty. That meant I wielded weapons like Electro, an energy gun that fires electric pulses rather than bullets, and Swede, my trusty axe and one of my new all-time favorite video game melee weapons. I was able to mix and match upgrades between these weapons.

Modifications like the reverse medical inductor restored a bit of health after every kill with my axe, while the EMP generator created an electrical field that could damage multiple enemies in an area. This freedom to experiment is important, as different enemies have different weaknesses. Testing out different gun upgrades and figuring out what worked best in an area was the closest that everything in Atomic Heart came to clicking together for me, and it showed the spark of what Mundfish could be capable of with a little more time and polish.

With a campaign that took me around twenty hours to finish, Atomic Heart’s imaginative, dystopian sci-fi world kept me hooked. The game’s script, difficulty, and open-world design all feature some big flaws that kept me from completely falling in love. Still, if you’re a fan of shooters and unique virtual worlds, it’s likely worth giving Atomic Heart a shot.

SCORE: 3 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Bioshock. With its retro-future style, deep narrative, and addition of RPG and stealth elements, Atomic Heart definitely takes inspiration from Irrational Games’s classic. If you’re a Bioshock fan, give this one a try.

• First-person shooters. If you're a fan of running around and shooting things, you’ll probably get a kick out of upgrading your arsenal and firing on a bunch of unruly robots.

• Sci-fi. Alternate histories, futuristic tech, robots, mutants, and scientific intrigue make for an enjoyable science fiction tale in Atomic Heart.

💬 Will you play Atomic Heart, or are you skipping this one? And what’s your favorite sci-fi game? Let me know in the comment section, and we can continue the conversation.

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