There’s a lot to be said for single-player games like Atomic Heart. Its entire focus is on creating complex worlds to explore and discover on your own. An eye-catching blend of super-strong shooting and first-person puzzles, this is a long, tough, and good-looking shooter, bathed in the blood and gear of elaborately designed enemies, both biological and robotic. and dispatch them. An impressive set of combat options.Admittedly, I’m not as smart as I think when dealing with melee combat or typical fetch quests, nor is the story very Stick with that landing, but the journey from point A to point B is spectacular.
Atomic Heart is an alternate history shooter cut from the same fabric as BioShock and MachineGames’ Wolfenstein series. It’s a kind of retro-futuristic runaway into an imaginary past perverted by ridiculously advanced technology. A world where science makes the supernatural real and robots are rampant. These aren’t the only shooters Atomic Heart isn’t afraid to crib. The riddles of Half-Life and Portal were also clear inspirations, as was Arkane’s attempt to sprinkle in on Arkane’s successful brand of first-person stealth.
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However, despite such recognizable building blocks, it would be unfair to call Atomic Heart entirely derivative. Sure, the idea of a peaceful utopia torn to pieces thanks to technology aimed at ambitious masters isn’t new, but the developer’s Mundfish still works in a confident and compelling way. building that vision.
mechanical mystery tour
The most notable element here is the excellent visual design, especially the well-crafted appearance of the enemies. Its robotic range is particularly strong, from sleek, ominous mustachioed Terminators, to ones that lunge at us without looking away, to mouth tubes that seem to be sucking on invisible jacket drawstrings. There are even pot-bellied parking meters with That featureless ballerina his bot and leggy battle ball are equally impressive. The latter is perhaps best described as an Eastern bloc knockoff that scaled back what failed to kill Mr. Incredible. There are even some that look like Baymax cosplaying as a tank.
Atomic Heart’s outstanding aesthetic extends to various partially abandoned laboratories, facilities, and transportation hubs. Each one is filled with long, meandering globules of liquid polymer that propel this fantastical progression of his 1950s. That said, there’s a distinct “look, don’t touch” feel to these places (there’s a distinct lack of destructibility; a balloon resistant to an ax swing is probably the worst offense ), but the overall level of detail is surprisingly good.
Atomic Heart has some very thoughtful little touches in particular. For example, how the reload animation for an unused and empty magazine is different. The latter is knocked off and the former is grabbed with the same hand. Slide new stuff in. It’s fun to watch them play. It was a bit of a hassle…from a recent save. I also experienced uneven quality when it came to graphical glitches when playing on Xbox Series X. At worst, it produces a terrible stroboscopic effect on fast-moving robots scurrying in circuits around a large room, but fortunately it seems mostly isolated to these bot breeds. With similarly agile (and often much larger) bosses, I had no such issues.
Unsurprisingly, Atomic Heart is all about the Soviet-era iconography you’d expect from a land tucked away deep inside the Iron Curtain in the mid-1950s. Today in 2023, it looks little different than when it was announced, first unveiled in 2018. Of course, I grew up geographically isolated and politically irrelevant in the Southern Hemisphere. IV – My reading of such an overtly Russian background is guaranteed to be markedly different from someone with Eastern European roots. As you peel away, the background fades significantly. At this stage, Facility 3826 and the Russian countryside don’t look much different than BioShock’s Rapture itself. That is, a place that is more or less cut off from the outside world and where something is deeply, deeply wrong.
to explore precisely what What has gone wrong is the work of our character, Special Forces veteran Major Sergey Nechaev, or the P-3 he’s been dubbed the whole time. He has appeared as the cookie-cutter American lead in every second shooter ever made. increase.
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However, it’s the script that really does him a lot of damage. I’ll gladly admit that swear words are virtually my second language, but P-3 finds every curse word a teenage boy has recently learned in such a fun way that he tests it twice a sentence. spit it out. It’s a bit tiring, and the presence of a lot of modern tropes doesn’t exactly help anchor the overall experience to the 1950s.
Of course, perhaps I’m being hypocritical in demanding consistency there: the headbanger-packed, regularly ruthless soundtrack courtesy of Doom and Wolfenstein composer Mick Gordon is a sonic return to the days of doo-wop. Not even a journey.As far as I’m concerned, the music is pitch perfect. Anyway, there is a Russian/English subtitle option for the purists, but I simply preferred the English script, which was more tailored to the setting and the era.
We have over 20 hours of playtime here in the main story thread alone, with even more playable in the side objectives. Some of them are very important if you really want the best weapons. Some of it is padded, but overall it’s a good length and fits nicely inside the Goldilocks zone, which isn’t too short or too long, and is an excellent solo shooter. There are also two endings you can get based solely on the story, but after watching both, I found the first anti-climactic, and I don’t think the second ending is worth reloading.
all you need is gloves
But while P-3 is a disappointingly rough-hewn character, he’s still very capable and fun to play. This is largely thanks to my talkative partner, Charles. Okay, that’s a bit reductive – rather, Charles is basically an intelligent system embedded in his P-3 that can grant him seemingly supernatural abilities, like the Left Hand. This includes enabling an X-ray style view of your surroundings, throwing certain small objects like Half-Life 2’s iconic gravity guns, as well as firing bolts of electricity and ice. , Also includes the ability to shoot enemies by floating them in the air. He can slam into the ground or even summon a temporary shield.
Similar to BioShock’s Plasmids, these abilities add a significant layer of more interesting combat on top of Atomic Heart’s fairly typical blasting and somewhat awkward melee combat. Hitting a bot with an ax on its brain feels like a lot of weight – gouges appearing all over its body in real time are a nice touch – but if you swarm over too many enemies, your weapon swings too slow and can become frustrating. Okay. At the same time.
The juggling act of taking down dense hordes of robots and the constant swooping and magical resurrection of blender-sized hovering repair bots is a bit exhausting, especially on the ground. Atomic Heart’s linear underground sequence is linked by a decently sized slab of open world, free to explore and fight wherever you want. Provides convenient upgrades. However, their long sightlines and overwhelming numbers often caused them to flee or walk away from battle rather than diving in before attacking or trying to gain the upper hand with stealth. Many times. Be patient, there’s a way to fry every enemy in the zone for a while, and as P-3 and his weapons get stronger throughout the story, the hordes of robots get a little less intimidating, but it takes time .time.
Unlocking and upgrading these abilities requires a steady supply of resources. Levels and defeated enemies are usually jam-packed, even if collecting them becomes a bit of a pain. It’s wise to keep this process fast by doing so, but finding the same set of desks and cabinets in slightly different arrangements can be a bit tedious. A hundred or so different rooms.
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Far too boring is Atomic Heart’s overly ambitious attempt to avoid the responsibility of relying on a very banal fetch quest. Cynically complaining and complaining to the protagonist about collecting four canisters for an inexplicably unintuitive door lock mechanism that never gets past a sensible building commission makes it It’s not a free pass to advance. The main character who is frustrated for the same reasons as me is not cute, that’s no excuse for weak game design.
Atomic Heart’s basement feels like a golden opportunity and is otherwise so good that it’s a shame there wasn’t a better context baked around these occasional fetch quests. Shattered into fanged ikebana and corpses communicating via the chaotic ramblings of decaying brain implants. While it relies heavily on repeating the same handful of door-lock minigames that serve no real purpose other than to arbitrarily slow progress from room to room, I’ve had bespoke platforming puzzle chambers and one time I love all the brain teasers – especially the puzzles you encounter later in your journey to a glamorous theater filled with clever visual robot performers.
