Evaluating Atomic Heart was not an easy task. This “indie” from Mundfish has been attracting attention since 2017, when they launched the first teaser. With only one game under his belt, Soviet Lunapark VR, would this Russian developer be able to deliver a game at the level of hype created? For the following trailers only added fuel to the fire. But the truth is that, unfortunately, Atomic Heart offers an experience that starts off very well and quickly loses its luster, stumbling over its own ideas at every turn.
Before breaking down the game completely, here’s a summary of the story: you embody Major Nechaev, an experienced soldier also called P-3, who doesn’t hit the head very well. While strolling through the beautiful Tchelomey Complex on a modern pedal boat, the protagonist converses with the artificial intelligence of his new glove, called Char-les. A gift from Dr. Sechenov, from whom he follows orders.
On the way to find him, floating by an unconventional means of transport, he witnesses the change in the robots’ behavior, being attacked and knocked down. After surviving the fall, Dr. Sechenov informs P-3 that a traitor named Viktor Petrov has hacked the Kollektiv headquarters and caused the civilian robots to attack. Petrov has the central access codes, being the only way to stop the attacks. His objective is to find him and bring him alive to Dr. Sechenov.
mix of influences
Atomic Heart is the result of mixing concepts borrowed from several famous games. It has a strong influence from Bioshock Infinite, with floating cities, retro technology and elemental abilities. It also borrows the style of Fallout’s cartoon animations, although it doesn’t use them as didactic material. It has the “Batman vision” (scan that goes through walls), a bit of Doom gameplay (dash in the air, the weapon wheel that opens in slow motion), among other minor influences.
Coolly evaluating, the game does not have any gameplay features that are unprecedented or that, at least, are used in a new way. With the glove you can move objects, open drawers and chests to get loot and shoot an electrical charge that is used to activate mechanisms from a distance, in addition to attacking enemies. The P-3 upgrades are done on a (naughty) machine called Nora, which looks like an old refrigerator whose artificial intelligence was programmed by a pervert. By the way, the first meeting yields good laughs.
Nora consumes the resources and neuropolymers you gather throughout the campaign. With it you can also create, improve or disassemble your equipment, unlocked as you find the blueprints. The problem begins when interacting with this “store”, which always has two options to choose from: touching the weapons or the glove. Why not bring a unified interface, to browse the options through tabs? The look of the arsenal list doesn’t help either, with boxes that take up too much space on the screen and increase scrolling.
A magnet for boring things
Believe me, the above sentence is said by the protagonist himself at a certain point in the adventure. P-3’s humorous lines end up expressing a real boredom that takes over the game, largely due to the excess of puzzles. At first the puzzles are pretty cool and creative, requiring timing, memorization and reasoning. But there comes a time when you can’t stand unlocking doors to move forward. Fortunately, some of the puzzles are unique, like a large model that you manipulate to roll a small metal ball through a maze and into a hole.
Atomic Heart starts exciting, with a wide area to explore freely, to an hour later confine you in a bunker where you’ll spend more than 3 hours putting together several canisters to open a damn gate – and this is repeated in another area, with parts of a disassembled robot. Okay, there’s a lot of combat, including new enemies like a mutant with a plant on its head (similar to the clickers in The Last of Us). But guess what you’ll be doing most of the time? Yes, puzzles.
Combat doesn’t help either: ammo is scarce and you’ll spend most of your time using melee weapons like a pile driver. The first enemy presented, a laboratory technician robot that uses a mustache, appears in large numbers and then with variations, such as one that opens its head to shoot a laser beam, a more resistant black one and another that uses a shield and an electric sword. They’re a lot of work, so one of two things: destroy them with the glove coming silently from behind or run!
smoked carrion
This catchphrase is triggered multiple times by P-3. It doesn’t make sense to us, but the PT-BR translation and dubbing are to be congratulated, with popular adaptations of our language. The dialogues between the protagonist and the glove provide a very welcome comic relief, in addition to contributing to the understanding of the story. If it weren’t for that, lore would boil down to accessing terminals to read messages exchanged between employees, as well as talking to corpses whose neural device is still active and with their last memories. Crazy talk, question options and everything.
“Smoked carrion” ends up working as a criticism of the graphics, which suffer from inconsistencies at all times. One moment it’s as beautiful as juicy red meat, the next it’s ugly as burnt meat. It’s true that Unreal Engine 4 is getting dated, but it’s hard to see a job well done in an entire area to leave it and enter another one that doesn’t match the same quality standard. The difference is stark.
There are level design decisions that you can’t understand, like the open world map itself. It serves to see your current location and access security cameras to look at it from different angles, nothing more. The breakout rooms (save) are THE SAME everywhere. Not even the library of objects escapes repetition, applied exhaustively in several places, breaking the immersion. Dead people on the floor? All the same model, a red-haired man who changes only his clothes. Rarely do you see a woman or other male model. And right there you find bodies in poses that defy the laws of gravity.
problematic performance
In terms of performance, the game remains unstable even after a major update that came out on the 18th, before launch. In closed areas, it runs very well and with rare stutters. Already in the open world it’s very difficult to keep at 60 FPS or more. I tested it with a GeForce RTX 3060 in the “Atomic” setting at 2K, with DLSS 2.0 turned on in “Balance”, and even so I saw the game struggle to stay above 30-40 FPS. Accessing the messaging terminal causes performance to drop to 10 FPS or less, go figure. I also tested lower settings and saw no significant difference. And look, for now, there is no ray tracing option to weigh so much in processing, hey!
If graphics performance isn’t well optimized on PC, imagine on consoles. I encountered many bugs and suffered from glitches that stuck me in some corner of the scenario, forcing me to load the last saved game. And I suffered two random crashes, cooling my excitement with the game – which in itself is already tiring with the comings and goings from “point A to B” and the break in pace with the puzzles.
Atomic Heart at least gets other things right. Starting with the bosses, who are very creative and deliver a differentiated combat. It’s too cool to see the operation of a bigger robot, with neat animations that make sense. Every robot has an interesting quirk, like the Rotorrobot (conceived to be a lawn mower). The game also gets it right in the design of the weapons – very different from what you see in the first trailers – and especially in the soundtrack, which alternates between electronic, rock and Russian music.
I would really like the reality to be different, but Atomic Heart lacks in so many factors that it is impossible to defend it. The hype only made everything worse, in addition to the marketing selling another product image: a frantic FPS, with cutting-edge graphics. It’s not frantic, much less has cutting-edge graphics. It’s that trailer com o ator Jensen Ackles (Soldier Boy, from The Boys series), why put a child in it? Isn’t it a violent game? Or is anything goes with regard to the target audience? Apparently, they already knew that Atomic Heart wouldn’t deliver enough. And at this point no update will save the game.
** This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the UAI Portal.
