Atomic Heart Review

You gotta give it up to Atomic Heart, it certainly bowls you over in its opening minutes. A gentle boat ride upstream on a bright summery day, where androids play host to the technological centrepiece that is the Chalomey Complex, guiding tourists with a history of this metropolitan miracle, whilst visitors bask in the sights, sounds and festivities. Elderly visitors take pews and doze off on benches, gather in crowds to gaze at pageantry, and taking photo snaps on this glorious day, the birthday of The Kollectiv. This stunning and arresting opening will make you feel like you are about to embark on one truly captivating jamboree mired in spectacle and elegance-transcending expectations for a fleeting twenty-minutes or so.

Alas, once those opening minutes fade away, the deflatingly disappointing reality sets in. Atomic Heart capriciously throws away the tranquillity of its carefully-layered opening, replacing it with a sweary shooter, dressed up in the false pretences of sophistication, plodding you into unengaging combat encounters against mindless swarms of robots that look suspiciously similar to the human robot from the film Euro Trip. 

Shoehorning you into a narrative where you’re saddled into the body of a  melee-mouthed miscreant named Sergey Nechaev codenamed P-3, you’re tasked with sorting out a mess involving robots that have gone rogue thanks to an engineer called Viktor Petrov, who is responsible for turning the thriving futuristic Kollectiv initiative into a hellhole.

What makes Atomic Heart stand apart is through its alternate-history stylistics. As well as overt callbacks to Bioshock, there is a wafting stench of Wolfenstein swimming around in Atomic Heart’s polymer flumes, especially the emphasis on robotics and the manipulation of A.I technologies by the powers that be. The political intrigue is propelled by the post-WWII alt-history setting, making Atomic Heart rich with historical depth through its fiction. Regrettably though, the smarts echoed by Atomic Heart’s context is juxtaposed woefully by it stupidity elsewhere.  

P-3 is a cuss-slinging special agent, whose personality squats between unflappable cocksure protagonist de jure, and an argumentative nuisance who complains about performing tedious rudimentary tasks, but does nothing but jaw-jack about it the whole time. There’s a putrid stink of Duke Nukem in Nechaev’s verbal defiance, but at least Duke threw excrement around a lavatory: Nechaev meanwhile grumps and groans about the nuisances inherent within the missions he undertakes, reusing the same wearisome vernacular over and over until your senses drown it out. Forget badass, Nechaev is more of a bitch-ass.

Worse still, after enduring the feckless drivel of Nechaev and his palm-of-hand-sidekick Char-Les, you will be pining for the return of the silent protagonist. The banter between the two is dire, mirroring a worrying and discerning trend games are peaking into, where not only is the protagonist you play as an unlikable irritant, your sidekick is as well. Char-Les is meant to guide you through the game as a trusty earpiece, but comes across as an intolerable and insufferable vat of dumbass as well, repeating information Nechaev is already well-aware of, becoming more of a hindrance rather than a help most of the time.

If the opening didn’t rustle your suspicions enough, the gameplay will definitely make you believe that Atomic Heart salvaged many of its greatest aspects from the Bioshock series, like the latter was a toy play chest to be liberally cribbed from. The truth is though, whilst there are certainly similarities Atomic Heart Shares with Irrational Games’ finest, Atomic Heart’s weapons and abilities don’t carry the same level of zing or excitement.

You start out with a measly axe called Swede as well as a shotgun, but as you progress, your arsenal will expand to include various melee weapons, firearms and psychic abilities. Every weapon can be upgraded at NORA vending machines, but try not to be put off by this fruity fridge as it shares a dreadfully cheesy sense of humour that could dissuade you from using it to buy upgrades.

Be warned also that many of the abilities aren’t unlockable until you escape the underground confines and reach the surface – meaning that Atomic Heart opens up its toolkit as it plonks you into the open to explore in a less restrictive manner.

Highlights pertaining to armed combat include The Dominator – a polymer empowered blitzkrieg of a weapon that packs a devastating and accurate bolt-induced punch, the Railgun, packing in a hulking electromagnetic surge of unbridled eviscerating power, and the Zvezdochka-a monster of a melee option with circular saws that will serrate and bloodily rip up the body of anyone unfortunate enough to come into contact with it – it’s got chains and is a truly untamed beast.

In relation to psychic abilities, you gain access to Shok early on, which is handy to frazzle robots where they stand, disable surveillance cameras, and will prove useful in solving some of Atomic Heart’s puzzles. Frostbite is similar, as you can utilize it to aptly freeze foes in place like they were the Silver Surfer in a state of rigor mortis. Mass Telekinesis can help you manipulate and dispatch enemies by tossing them away like frisbees when they surround you.

Despite the utter maliciousness of the weaponry and the various psychic powers you have at your disposal, Atomic Heart doesn’t quite stick the landing when it comes to making you feel like a badass-and that’s not in relation to P-3’s whining. There’s no distinctive je ne sais quois to your armoury, there’s an emphasis on destruction, but no signature bite that could distinguish it from other games of its ilk. 

The toothless theme extends to the A.I behaviour, as they tend to swarm you in bunches, especially if you are caught by the security cameras. If you stay silent and sensible, there is an option to come up from behind and take them out, but this forces some instant button jamming that doesn’t pay off-you’re better off sticking to the all-action approach.

The boss fights you contend with at least give you something big and brazen to your empty your ammo clips and empty your abilities towards. They’ll surely harken you back to days of playing modern DOOM and Wolfenstein games, just without the creativity and memorability of boss encounters in those games. 

Also not helping are the myriad of frustrations inherent within Atomic Heart’s very design. Puzzles for example, are disparagingly workmanlike for what they are. There’s a section where you need to use Frostbite to guide a ball into boilers, and while it works well enough, trying to guide an orb in a tube is slow and mundane.

The timing-based locks are a hassle too. You need to tap the face button as soon as you see a light appear on a tiny bulb of the lock, but if you don’t time your inputs correctly, you’ll need to redo the blasted lock again. Digit-less combinations may also leave you dumbfounded. Golly-gee does Atomic Heart have some unwelcomingly unorthodox lock puzzles!

 Backtracking tedium can easily perturb as well. There’s an entire section devoted to finding canisters where you enter an area, overcome all the hindrances in your way, locate the canister, and return to the main complex to insert the canister. After this the next area opens up, so you can’t go to any of the areas you choose – forcing you to traipse through all the game’s rigmarole on its own terms and not on yours.

All told, the parade of tedium that Atomic Heart subjects you makes it hard to put up with. Comparisons have been made between Atomic Heart and Bioshock, but Bioshock never put you through so much busywork and moderately-designed combat, as it was too busy immersing you and swallowing you up into its masterfully dystopian maw.

Technically, Atomic Heart is all over the place. As you can tell by gazing at its pristine opening, Atomic Heart does have a tendency to look astonishing. However, too often it drags you into dreary and uninspired environments. Even when you reach the surface, it doesn’t captivate and it never makes you feel attached to the grounds of Facility 3826.

Talking of attachment, the scenery does at times likes to attach itself to P-3. You’ll be trudging mindlessly inside closed spaces, then oh what’s this? A piece of furniture? P-3 didn’t seem like the type to take souvenirs with him, but the game’s technical performance can beg to the contrary at times.

Conclusion

Disjointed is the lingering feeling once all is set and done with Atomic Heart. The articulate opening and the immense effort made to craft an absorbing alternate-history World War II Russia is certainly appreciable and admirable. Dishearteningly though, the FPS experience is weighed down by an awful lot of busywork and obnoxiously annoying characters that it’s hard to feel wholly immersed. As an FPS it certainly has some aplomb going for it, but it gets lost in the shades of comparison with greater games. If Atomic Heart was able to carry the brilliance of its opening twenty minutes it would be an excellent game, but sadly we’re stuck with an entertaining enough but bland and by the numbers shooter.

Conclusion