Atomic Heart Reviews

A game with pretty nice graphics even though I just experienced it in 2025, the linear gameplay is quite similar to some games like GOW,... But in terms of music, maybe because of cultural differences, I personally don't find it very suitable. However, this is also a pretty good game to experience.

Atomic Heart.. it's a Shooter RPG that doesn't know what it wants to be. While the story itself is somewhat interesting and can keep you engaged for multiple hours, there are literal bucket full of bugs still in the game. Bugs the dev clearly has no intention on fixing anymore. The basegame: It's pretty alright. Aside from the annoying protagonist who always seems to flip flop between sides, because he has only a handful of braincells, the gameplay loop and the worldbuilding is pretty alright. There are puzzles on the doors which are a bit of a show stopper as well as tons of QTE elements. A big caveat I want to point out, however: This game has a sh!tload of collectibles, at least half of which locked behind progression barriers. Meaning if you missed something, you're going to have to load an older save. Which is further hindered by the fact that the game only gives you 10 saves to play with. So if that save has already been overwritten, you're going to have to start over. That's what happened to me. Now, roughly 1/3 of the game's collectibles are in the overworld. You know what else is in the overworld? Endlessly respawning repair robots. The devs essentially want you to rummage around looking for tiny blips on the scanner while being endlessly chased by robots. You destroy everything, do one lap around the complex and suddenly everything is back to how it was and attacking you again. It's quite annoying, really. Another gripe from a leftie: You inept devs... you can't tell me it's that hard to set up a keybinding system. You can use the arrow keys for moving, but you can't set forward and backward on the car. Also QTE elements CANNOT be rebound. You will be forced into the default config, no matter what. For simplicity's sake, I'll rate stuff separately and then give it a "combined rating" at the end. The basegame itself, I'm giving a 6/10. It's not bad, but it's not great either. None of the bugs in the basegame were "gamebreaking". Though one thing.. god dammit you idiots.. if you put loot somewhere, make sure it's actually pickupable... there were so many tiny blips on the scanner where I tried for a minute, interacting with the object from every possible angle, only to fail miserably and feel stupid for trying. Now for DLC 1: It's... eh. The basegame has 2 endings, a canon one and a not-so canon one. DLC 1 basically continues the story at the non-canon ending. I won't spoil anything, but basically your priority shifts and you help a different scientist reach their goal. It's short, the map is tiny, however it does introduce a few new concepts. For that, I'm giving DLC 1 a 6/10. On to DLC 2: In the game, the protagonist has these "episodes" where he slips into a dream-state coma and has to find some way to get out again. This DLC is this dream-state all the time. As far as I understand, the protag is a soldier from Spec Ops. So why then is this dream-state (the game says, it's influenced by a person's mind) all about candy? As for the gameplay.. this is where more of the confusion comes in. It's literally 3 mobile games packed into this game's engine. None of which I'd consider worth playing. The 3 components are: Sliding (going downhill), Climbing (going uphill) and.. I can't put this any nicer... Subway Surfer: Goose Edition. Also this entire DLC was designed to be one big pain in the a... I mean collect-a-thon. There are SO MANY collectibles in this DLC alone. And there's multiple achievements tied to them. That really puts a damper on things. So for DLC 2, I'm handing out a 4/10. Also screw your unskippable cutscenes. And the last, DLC 3: I really enjoyed that one, even though it's basically a direct ripoff of Bioshock. This DLC continues the "canon ending" from the basegame and has you going for a dive in a big lake. Again, new enemies and new game mechanics.. good.. however there were just as many "empty rooms" I felt were out of place. Or to put it better.. it's as if they forgot something or had to cut corners. Also fuck your crab boss enemy. That thing is literally just a bullet sponge, nothing more. I'm giving the 3rd and final DLC a 7/10. Which brings the total for this game to (6+6+4+7/40) a 5.7/10. I can recommend the gameplay and the story. However I cannot in good faith, recommend the collectibles. They were incredibly annoying and probably made up around 40 hours of my 60 hour playtime.

Oh, [i]"Atomic Heart"[/i], you are making it difficult for me! I really want to love this game, but frustratingly a number of factors lead me to recommend against the game in its current state, unless you are very tolerant of annoyances and technical glitches! Here's why I have been struggling: TLDR; Great setting, story, and aesthetics, severely hampered by an annoying protagonist, technical issues with story, gameplay, and tech. The setting is amazing, as everyone has been saying; the attention to detail, the futuristic retro-tech, the bombast of a world that could have been, the interesting characters - it all makes for a very colourful and compelling world to explore. Spending time with P-3 - Sergey Alekseyevich - is far from pleasant; the (excessive) level of verbal aggression he engages in with robot NPCs, incl. the AI companion CHAR-les, gets annoying very quickly. The level of annoyance he feels at the tasks he needs to do to progress in the story actually highlight how annoying some of these tasks actually are - almost to becoming a fourth-wall breaking meme in itself. This is made worse by odd technical issues that have dialogue and commentary interrupt itself, or triggered after the events they are about have already happened. Several times I was greeted by a stressed P-3/CHAR-les dialogue complaining about the number of enemies awaiting in a room, except that I had already sniped/killed those enemies from the doorway or corridor and was already looting them. Speaking of the combat: I started the game on medium difficulty (Local Failure) and tried to get to grips with the combat; I failed, and failed again. I tried playing with keyboard & mouse, briefly with a controller, and then eventually lowered the difficulty to easy (Peaceful Atom). The difference in difficulty is staggering, but there is also something about the movement and dodging in combat that feels a off and spongy. The game demands precision in its dodge timing that the controls do not deliver. At least on easy difficulty the penalty for screwing up is far more forgiving. Unfortunately, on easy difficulty the otherwise interesting weapon upgrade and customisation system feels a lot less impactful, which is a shame. Still, there is plenty to fiddle with and change to make the weapons behave differently and adapt it to different styles of game-play. What seemed unchanged in difficulty were the QTEs. With the controls in combat being fidgety, I struggled to deal with these a lot. Thankfully the game comes with a comprehensive set of accessibility options that allows you to turn off the QTEs, puzzles, etc. Well done on these! Movement through the buildings and world can be problematic. Whilst you are underground and in buildings, it's fine - but over longer distances the lack of a run/sprint is noticeable, especially when moving between locations. You can drive cars, but the controls for those are (realistically) terrible. Movement was also an issue during the various climbing sections and puzzles, where the character would suddenly refuse to grip a handhold, move onward, or I would have to move back and away from a handhold, in order to be able to jump to it. ... until those handholds disappear altogether, along with other items and objects in the game world. On multiple occasions I had to restart the game because objects just were not there. This included handholds I needed to climb, but also parts of, or the entire save-point, weapon repair machine, and other things. This started right at the beginning of the game with the default weapon (Swede axe) disappearing/being invisible until it just reappeared in the character's hands as part of the cutscene. Judging by comments from other users, these are known issues. And unfortunately these were not the only technical difficulties I encountered: as mentioned above there were audio queue issues, as well as general jankiness and performance issues, freezes and frame rates below 5 fps when using the map or interacting with cameras, as well as several crash-to-desktop errors. The whole experience leaves me frustrated: I want to experience the world, the story, the surreal humour and drama, but aspects of the gameplay and technical problems make this difficult. I hope that Mundfish still spends some time on ironing out more kinks, even though they are working on [i]"Atomic Heart 2"[/i] and [i]"The Cube"[/i] - and I hope both of those projects revisit some of the decisions from this game and improve on them.

Atomic Heart is tied with Bioshock Inifinite as my favorite shooter of all time. Base game was great then dlc 1 was even better then dlc 2 and 3 were phenomenal and one of the best soundtracks of any video game in my opinion.

Gameplay is like a mix of the worst from Bioshock and Dead Island games inter-spaced by boring and annoying mini-games on locked doors (and there are a ton of em!!). Lots of reused assets that remind me I'm playing a videogame and not exploring a world, it feels like the whole thing was just "put together" by various assets to fluff it out. I often experienced bugs that forced me to restart the game, now there are generous checkpoints in the game, but still annoying having to restart the game. Overall not worth your time, just check out the mediocre story and cutscenes out on youtube if you are curious. I really thought this game was better, guess I was tricked by the trailers and internet bots. I admit the ballerina robots are pretty cool though, but again, just check it out on youtube and save your money and time...

The game has an incredible setting and premise, but the execution is awful. The game is boring as heck: constant fetch quests and locks that stop your progression on the spot and make you feel like you are not advancing the story. Annoying platforming. Clunky combat. Annoying constant dialogues. It's just not a fun time. I love shock-like games, but this is not a good one.

Refunded. What a horribly slow and boring opening sequence, marred further by a deeply unlikable player character and a worse-than-borderlands attempt at humor.

Pretty nice game if you love the taste of bioshock and and the smell of russia Soundtracks slaps and nice story telling hope the fourth dlc comes this year

Just not very fun unfortunately. The LONG intro was just boring. When I got to the open world part, I thought to myself "yes this is when it gets good!" I was very wrong. Cameras and robots EVERYWHERE mixed with the worst stealth mechanics I've ever seen. It's like playing gta and trying to get through the story with a 5 star wanted level that doesn't go away. Oh and the platforming fucking sucks. I just felt like I was playing the worlds worst puzzle game with shooting being an afterthought. Good idea, bad execution. I probably played it too long for a refund too because I wanted to give it a fair chance.

---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☑ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☑ Good (Open world sucks) ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☑ Very good ☐ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☐ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☐ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☐ Potato ☐ Decent ☑ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Game Size }--- ☐ Floppy Disk ☐ Old Fashioned ☐ Workable ☑ Big ☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive ☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it ☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☐ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☑ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☐ Some lore ☐ Average ☑ Good (With DLCs of course) ☐ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☑ Average ☐ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☐ Worth the price ☑ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☐ Never heard of ☑ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ 8 / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☑ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10