There are well over 20-odd hours of play here in the main story thread alone, with many more available in the side objectives – some of which border on crucial if you actually want the best weapons. He comes off as the cookie-cutter American lead of every second shooter ever made. The foul-mouthed and amnestic P-3 is admittedly a bit of a relic of games gone by – and his default English-language voiceover doesn’t exactly do him a lot of favours. That is, a place more or less cut off from the outside world and where something has gone deeply, deeply wrong.Įxploring exactly what’s gone wrong is the job of our character, special forces veteran Major Sergey Nechaev, or P-3 as he’s dubbed throughout. At this stage, Facility 3826 and the countryside of rural Russia isn’t much different to the likes of BioShock’s Rapture itself. For its part, however, the background does largely fade away as Atomic Heart peels back the layers of its false utopia. Of course, having grown up geographically isolated and politically irrelevant in the southern hemisphere – largely detached from Cold War concerns and raised on Bond movies, Stripes, and Rocky IV – my read on such an overtly Russian backdrop is guaranteed to be markedly different to someone with roots in Eastern Europe. I’ve had no such problems with similarly nimble (and often much larger) bosses.Ītomic Heart is, naturally, all tinted with the Soviet-era iconography you’d probably expect from a land tucked away deep behind the Iron Curtain in the mid-1950s, and admittedly the lens through which you may view all this Soviet symbolism is a little different today in 2023 than it was upon its announcement and first reveal back in 2018. The worst is a terrible strobing effect on some fast-moving robots running circuits around a large room, but fortunately it seems mostly isolated to these bot types.
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I’ve also experienced some uneven quality when it comes to graphical glitches as I’ve played on Xbox Series X. Watching them play out is a pleasure, which is why it was a bit annoying that my HUD was sometimes cluttered up with pick-up notifications and health bars for minibosses no longer in the area that froze onscreen until I reloaded from a recent save. There are some especially tiny touches in Atomic Heart that smack of a great deal of consideration, like the way there are different reload animations for unspent magazines compared to empty ones – the latter of which are flicked away while the former are grasped by the same hand sliding a fresh one in.
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That said, there is a distinct feeling of ‘look, don’t touch’ in these places (there’s definitely a lack of destructibility balloons immune to axe swings are probably the worst offenders) but the level of detail overall is strikingly good. There’s even one that looks like Baymax cosplaying as a tank.Ītomic Heart’s outstanding aesthetic also extends to its large range of partially ruined labs, facilities, and transportation hubs – each filled with long, snaking globules of the liquid polymer that powers the advancements of this fantastical 1950s. Its featureless ballerina bots and spindly-legged battle balls are equally memorable – the latter of which are probably best described as scaled-down, Eastern Bloc knock-offs of those things that couldn’t kill Mr. Its range of robots is particularly strong, from its sleek and sinister moustachioed terminators that charge at us without ever averting their gaze to its pot-bellied parking meters with mouth tubes that make them look like they’re sucking at the drawstring on an invisible jacket. The most remarkable element here is the superb visual design, especially the look of these well-crafted enemies. Certainly the idea of a peaceful utopia torn to pieces thanks to technology turning on its ambitious masters is nothing new, but developer Mundfish has still assembled its vision in a confident and compelling way – and the art team here well and truly understood the assignment. However, it’d be unfair to call Atomic Heart wholly derivative despite such recognisable building blocks.
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