Atomic Heart Reviews

I have bought this game at the summer sale after hearing a lot of good things about it and I was also very interested in the game since a sequel and even more games from Mundfish were announced. The game itself looks amazing, the guns are okay, looting is fine but it quickly gets boring to hold a button and spin around in a room to suck up the loot. I was having a decent time at first and after ~5 hours I was able to leave the first complex and got introduced to the 'open world'. A few minutes after that I lost all the drive to keep playing the game. Now why is that? It's very simple. The game introduces repair bots that undo all the killing you have done in the last few minutes by resurrecting everything around you. For me this killed the satisfaction of fighting and killing enemies, because it feels like you're wasting bullets and most importantly, your time. I was also having a much harder time exploring the area because of this. This is probably one of the worst mechanics I have ever experienced in an open world RPG game. Maybe if the enemies respawned after you left the area or after a few minutes, that would've been acceptable. Or how about being able to destroy the robot nests that spews out these reapir bots? I don't care about people who will shout 'skill issue' at me because of my opinion. I bought this game to have fun and because I wanted a laidback, chill experience. This was ruined by this one mechanic which could've been easily fixed. I took my time to explore the first area (complex) and because of that, it took me around 5 hours to reach the 'open world'. Naturally I have asked for a refund, but it was denied because I have played for more than 2 hours. Very disappointing.

The prologue of this game is great, it made me feel like playing a newer version of Bioshock... was having a blast. Then the open world portion starts and everything falls apart, the game went from great to trash, I tried but it really sucks once its open world, they should have kept it linear. Cannot recommend and I ain't gonna touch the 2nd installment.

This game caused me pretty severe motion sickness after about 30 minutes of game time, something I've never experienced from a game before. After trying to look up alternate settings to try to alleviate the problem (turning motion blur off, reducing head bobbing, ETC.) nothing seemed to help and from an online search, it seems quite a few other people are having similar issues. A real shame as the game otherwise runs pretty well. just wish I could have gotten further along.

Soviet flavored Bioshock 4 with lots of love poured in. And comRAIDs, lots of comRAIDs.

I really like the game overall to the point I am in the story, gameplay and all, but just because of this hell of optimization, if you can even call it that, any ounce of good faith is gone. You look in the wrong direction too fast? FPS drops to 8. You look in the weapon upgrade menu? FPS drops to 4 You wanna craft a weapon? FPS drops to 1 frame per once in awhile. You DARE open the map? The game completely crashes with no save. You climb a ledge inside a building? Your head clips right through the wall every time without fail. You DARE jump, by mistake near a rail or anything with even an inch of space between it and the wall? Yeah, you might get stuck there with your last save being either 3 mins ago or 40 mins ago, depends on your luck. You alt-tabbed once by mistake? Yeah, the game just runs like crap now for no reason. It's really a shame what happend with this game, since I've heard these problems were present day one and it's been 2 years. I'll try to finish the game, and when I do, no matter how good the story or gameplay will be, my review will still be a thumbs down, what a waste.

Atomic Heart is an alternate history story that takes place in the USSR in 1950's, and a city in the clouds... (city in the clouds) sound familiar? You are P-3, an agent of the Soviet Union and the Soviet scientists have made many MANY robots to do the menial jobs that most people would find boring and mundane. However, the robots get hacked and start killing every single person they see and it's your job to stop the chaos. Pros: Good graphics Very good animations Descent controls Good combat mechanics Open world Puzzles to solve Cons: Several game bugs Pixel hunting Some missions require a lot of back and forth. Game tends to glitch at inconvenient times Some puzzles will not be solved without help Both endings are unsatisfactory NPC move much to slow The limbo sequences were terrible No manual save I liked the combat in this game, it was reminiscent to Bioshock which the developers obviously based their game off of. There were several puzzles to solve which is a big plus in my opinion and the puzzles were all logical, however, a few puzzles were insanely hard. But the graphics looked very nice and the voice acting was excellent. As far as the rest of the game, you can keep it. I didn't enjoy this game that much. The story is so-so, the limbo sequences just sucked, the glitches made me go back to the beginning of my save and start again, and the NCP's slowed the pace of the game to a crawl. At least 7 times I had to stop the game in mid fight or walk because I became stuck on something, a wall, rocks, or what have you and since there's no manual save, I had to start over from my last save which really ticked me off. In addition, there were two times were I fell through the map into infinity. However, the worst part of this game are the NCP's. At one point, you need follow a robot to a room where her companion is and find the missing pieces of her body. It's a fairly long hall with exhibits on both sides. She moves as a snails pace then stops at each exhibit and gives a speech. It was majorly p*ssing me off. At the time of this review, Atomic Heart was selling for $59.99. Not worth it by a long shot. If you feel that you really need to play this, wait for a sale.

Ok where do I start... Pros: - The world is good, similar to wolfenstein the USSR aesthetic is amazing and the world feels like a fallout / futuristic world - The characters were varied, and I didn't mind most of the dialogue even if it was really simplistic. - The game definitely has some duke nuke'm vibes in terms of it's storytelling which wasn't too bad most of the time. - The graphics were fairly good, and the world felt rather cool to explore. - The introduction of flesh enemies was a change I did not expect, and how they added them was rather interesting. Cons: - Ok, so to start I would mark this game as utter false advertisement. Maybe I didn't look deep enough and should have watched more trailers or gameplay, but goodness I did not think this was going to be a puzzle game more than a shooter. - The combat is bad. I know some say it's passable, but I felt it started to become tedious and utterly dog water before I even got out of the first section. This in part is because for whatever reason the developers had Doom's combat with what feels you playing as the geriatric you meet at the beginning. If you want enemies to move fast and stun me for getting a hit in, that fine. But please for the sake of everyone's sanity add a parry or make me faster so I can actually dodge or at the minimum let me block with my melee weapons. - On the topic of combat, the enemies love to stun lock you, ALL...THE...TIME. And generally I would say this is a. "get good" type thing, but even after playing for a little while you notice very quickly that every enemy like to basically stun lock you into oblivion while shoving you in a corner as you frantically fire everything as more come into dog pile you. - I would love to explore the world... if the developers also didn't decide to have the enemies infinitely spawn in within seconds without any ability to delay or stop them in any significant way. I know there is a lore reason, but making it impossible to enjoy a run and gun play style in a game that's modelled like doom with a fairly slow and garbage stealth system destroyed the fun between the puzzles. Additionally, it also didn't help that despite levelling the character to the max, I still felt like I was a soft, slow, and weak no matter how much or what I upgraded. - And goodness the puzzles, I've never played a game with such bad pacing before. One minute your fighting a tough boss and finally making some progress before... "Alright Major, go grab the thingy do hickey from thingle bopper." "Ok, I will go do that." "Wait before you go, follow this excruciatingly slow robot as it goes on about random nonsense, then let it send you on yet another fetch quest split into multiple sections, each with random drawn out puzzles filled with un-fun stun locking enemies in each small room along the way." "Can't I just go grab the thing?" "No, In fact I will now spew a random unfunny joke about why this is tedious, enjoy beep boop." - The guns are horrendous, I know they were going for some elemental system but frankly it really just didn't work. As even with all the elemental damage cranked to the max it still felt like all I was doing was tickling them while spending the tiny amount of ammo I had left. (Not to mention that the robot would just instant re spawn so I was literally just pissing ammo into the wind) - The puzzles themselves were sometimes interesting, but like the combat quickly got repetitive. (Also didn't help that they were often not well explained, the instructions would get cut off by other dialogue, the puzzle just wouldn't make sense at all unless you looked it up, or my favourite: put a puzzle that is always on a wall, on the floor, hidden amongst the floor tiles so the player is basically humping and shooting everything to find out how to open a simple door to yet another puzzle) - Small thing, but the characters had every accent except a slavic one... ( And yes I checked and there isn't a way to turn on slavic audio with english subtitles) In conclusion, would I recommend this game, HELL NO. I know the developers probably put a lot of work into this, and reading some of the other comments it seems like it's a rather good crew and I would not want to discourage them from taking risks like they clearly did with this game. But unfortunately, while I'd usually say, "buy it on sale". I did (at a rather deep discount too) and I totally regret buying it, as it's basically one long puzzle game mixed with a way more garbage version of doom.

This is a bit of a mixed bag overall; With it's Bioshock-esque story, design and action crossed with a "sort of open-world" non-linear approach. In regards to the former it's an enjoyable experience with responsive combat and a decent amount of options to how you engage enemies. You get a good mixture of types of guns and paranormal skills in battle, and it feels great to play in the focused areas. When it comes to the latter is where it falls apart just a little bit. The outdoors environment is big enough that you'll want to find a car to get around, but it also isn't quite making the best use of all of that space. This isn't Elder Scrolls with immense quests and secrets to find in every nook and cranny, and its noticeable that none of your weapons are ever of a long enough range to make sniping viable. The stealth aspects are fairly basic whether you're in a contained area or not, but it's most apparent when you're outside as encounters come down to brawn rather than brains. The immersive elements tend to feel a bit limited compared to other games. With it all boiling down to more up close and personal shooty-shooty-bang-bang it doesn't justify having a more expansive area with more expansive game-play. Something I played before this was Ghost Of Tsushima and this feels a bit bare-bones when compared to how involving every aspect of that title was. Similarly this doesn't stand up when compared to the likes of Dishonored or Deus Ex. There's a certain level of scale to an environment where it rewards experimentation and Atomic Heart doesn't quite find the right balance between its tool-set and locations. It's nice to have the choice when it comes to how you proceed, and it always has been just that little bit more rewarding when you're not being ferried along from point A to B to C in a linear fashion. Yet there's something lacking here that's difficult to pin down. On the one hand you have side-missions where you can get extra equipment that proves useful in combat, as it changes how weapons function or provides boosts to your abilities. To find these items requires solving a modest puzzle and then doing a further platforming / puzzle challenge that can be rewarding. On the other hand these challenges might require certain skills you haven't unlocked yet, and so there is a tendency to do that towards the end of the game when you have the means. Doing one after the other did get a bit boring despite their design being solid; there's no fast travel across the map to get to them, combat encounters along the way can be a mild slog and they don't mix up the game-play during these missions. These "quests" tend to be short areas solely orientated around puzzles and platforming, and as a consequence feel a bit bitty. The reward for your effort is worth it and the process can be enjoyable by itself, it's just getting there that can be a smidge tedious and it leaves this "open world" feeling a tad hollow. I get why they designed it this way, as it is a "fresh" (somewhat) element that widens the scope and player agency. But in this case it's not as compelling as something like Fallout for narrative or choices, and it doesn't have quite the same level of depth to its stealth mechanics as Far Cry, or the variety of Dishonored or Prey in how you approach it. When it's good, its great. Those sequences that are linear work well, and if they just stuck to that element it would be up there with Bioshock or the Metro games for enjoyable first-person action and set-pieces. There's an excellent flow to these encounters and the boss-battles are quite nicely designed and challenging. It's just...underdeveloped(?), or pales slightly by comparison to other titles, when it comes to the non-linear stuff. The spectacle of the world-building is there and its impressive technically, but the substance is slightly lacking. The remaining nit-pick is some quite crass story-telling on occasion that takes away from an otherwise reasonably mature plot. To be fair it can also be quite funny whilst still at the same level of immaturity, so its swings and roundabouts as to whether you'll chuckle or cringe. If this is the developers first game then overall I'd have to say its quite decent despite my gripes with it, and I would have said it's a promising sign for a follow-up. Going by this title it seemed like they could have matched the trajectory of the Metro games and for me that's fairly high praise. With a few stumbles to be addressed but overall a pretty strong foundation to improve upon. However...the sequel has been shown and it's bigger and even crazier. Perhaps they needed to focus on refining the building blocks before being even more ambitious, though only time will tell on that. For now this is a flawed release that comes very close to being awesome, but doesn't quite quite get everything right.

never have i been given so little time to breathe in a game, if only any of the dialog was actually funny

This game is like waking up in a Soviet utopia, only to be chased by robots gone rogue and yelled at by your talking glove who thinks it's smarter than you (it is). The plot is chaotic, confusing, and completely unhinged, just like Mother Russia intended. It’s like BioShock got drunk on vodka, punched Cyberpunk in the face, and then tried to juggle philosophy, communism, and slapstick horror—all while ballet dancing on hardbass. Thus, BLYATPUNK !! 10/10 would flirt with the fridge again.