“Atomic Heart” is a first-person shooter that wears its heart on its sleeve, but underneath its coat, it’s as soulless as the robots plaguing its world.
I knew I was in for a weird time when I was nearly violated by a flirtatious, fridge-shaped robot one hour in. That’s the best way to describe it: “weird”—not only because of its strangeness, but because of how all the entertainment value gradually drops off despite its awesome premise and gorgeous looks.
“Atomic Heart” takes place in 1950s USSR during a technological revolution. Russia had become a robot-run utopia until a saboteur attempted to mold it into a robot-infested dystopia. Luckily, Major Sergey Nechayev—also known as “P-3”—who was deployed by the corporate bigwigs into the Kazakh SSR, is here to solve the problem.
First off, this game is beautiful. Every inch of its environment is a spectacle to behold, especially in the grassy plains of rural Russia. Human character models are also rich in detail.
“Atomic Heart” takes an admirable approach to its first-person shooting, including building your arsenal from scratch. As you plunder rooms and mow down robots, you gather resources to craft weapons and upgrade them. Ammunition is also better crafted than found due to its scarcity, making you swap between melee weapons and firearms.
Unfortunately, tediously scrounging for resources is a big chunk of the gameplay. The majority of your findings are basic crafting components. You seldom find whole weapons, but it seems pointless to have an inventory system when there’s barely anything obtainable to care about besides your guns, ammo, and medkits.
While the shooting itself is fine, everything else “Atomic Heart” aspires to do with combat doesn’t hit the mark. Melee combat borders on being either too light or too slow; stealth is so boring that I wouldn’t even consider it an option. But the worst offense is how elemental attacks never feel like they change the pace of fights. If you shoot a robot with an electric bullet, you expect it to hinder its movements, right? Not here.
What made me bear it was my interest in what wackiness “Atomic Heart” would delve into next within the Motherland. Old granny with an AK-47? Check. Fighting a giant rolling robot in a huge garden? Check. Asking a bunch of talking corpses for a train ticket? Check.
However, if those are the high points, then what’s in between just feels like filler. Most objectives feel like nothing but fetch quests that are triumphed over by completing repetitive puzzles, platforming, or both.
Expect a lot of lockpicking as well. While the tumbler has a different minigame every time, they do get quite annoying when you realize there’s usually nothing worth seeing on the other side.
P-3 himself is not a very good protagonist. I found his backstory entertaining, but his English voice actor’s performance sounds too bad to even be considered campy at times. Even if his acting was good, his extremely negative attitude prevents his character from becoming likeable.
Luckily, he doesn’t spoil the narrative of “Atomic Heart” where everything keeps going wrong the closer you think you are to the solution. The story about damage control and figuring out who to blame is enthralling, and every other character is actually interesting.
The worldbuilding of this alternate era of the Soviet Union is very intricate, especially with the hidden amounts of lore.
It’s just unfortunate that there’s worldbuilding on paper, but not in front of you. The open world feels more lifeless than it should be. You’re able to drive around the Russian countryside in a car, which is fun to roadkill robots with for the first few minutes. However, there are no real side quests. The only reason to rummage through the land is to find blueprints for weapon modifications, and that’s a pretty poor motive to do so.
RATING:
“Atomic Heart” is what I call “disappointing.exe.” It’s a mediocre shooter whose appearance and style are full of communist spunk, but its gameplay doesn’t hit quite as hard as your bullets.