Atomic Heart Review

Postponements, rumors of studio problems, lawsuits with copyright holders, and press screenings around the world — these events attracted the audience to Atomic Heart. The editors of iXBT.Games were among the publishers who were given the chance to try the project in its full form, walk through the game from start to finish, and see what Mundfish had spent five years on. Spoiler: the result blew our minds — this has never been done by Russian developers. And it is unlikely that anyone will do in the future.
Atomic Heart — a linear story-based shooter in a semi-open world. The setting — an alternative Soviet Union in 1955, which is far ahead of the rest of the world in its development. Dmitry Sechenov, a brilliant scientist, invented the substance “Polymer” and the neural network “Collective” and created robots, which helped the USSR to get ahead in the technological race of states.

Soviet Utopia

The main character is Major Sergei Nechaev, call sign “P-3,” who serves personally as Dmitri Sechenov. On the day of the launch of Collective 2.0, a malfunction occurs at Enterprise 3826, the Soviet Union’s secret research base. The robots go into combat mode and the machines start killing everyone they can get their hands on. P-3 is instructed to find the traitor who arranged it and bring him personally to Sechenov alive. Of course, things don’t go according to plan again.

And that’s just the beginning of the Atomic Heart plot. The developers asked not to reveal any details of the story after the five-hour introduction — and at the end of the walkthrough, it’s clear why. What happens seems predictable, builds the player a specific mood and even attitude towards the characters — in order to give the person sitting behind the monitor a slap in the finale and destroy expectations. Exclusively in a good way.

Baba Zina, Petrov, Sechenov, Stockhausen, even the Twins are full-fledged, well-written characters with their own tragedies, characters, thoughts and goals. There are no secondary or unnecessary faces here — they are all, in one way or another, connected to each other and their interaction creates a coherent story with nothing superfluous.

The same goes for the Atomic Heart universe — every robot, message terminal, and audio diary creates the impression of a living and once-existing world. Major Nechaev’s communication with the KRAZ gauntlet, the “Guardian of Knowledge” neural network, reveals details about the developments of Enterprise 3826 that took place shortly before the disaster, and also provides an explanation for some story lines or details in the story. Don’t skip them and listen until the end, willingly participating in dialogues with CRAZ — and then questions regarding what’s going on will fall away.
Every corner of the Atomic Heart world is filled with lots of references and Soviet aesthetics. In the preservation rooms there is “Well, wait a minute!” on TV, from the loudspeakers playing hits of Soviet or Russian pop music — “Island of Bad Luck,” “Sera,” “Change,” “Komarovo” — you sometimes want to stop and enjoy the atmosphere. If Soviet aesthetics and era are alien — most likely, you won’t like the game as much as you might.

Proper Bioshock

Atomic Heart is a pure-blooded shooter, where the main character takes apart robots for parts with the help of weapons and abilities of the KRAZ glove. As much as the developers don’t want comparisons, Atomic Heart is proper Bioshock.

After an hour and a half of play at the press event, I was dreading seeing the gameplay of the final version. In the November screening, the complaints were about the huge number of robots per square meter of location and their high survivability. But the developers heard the feedback after the presentation and balanced the project as they should — it’s insanely fun to play Atomic Heart on “normal” difficulty level.
Three classes of weapons are available to the player — firearms, electric, and melee. Cold weapon attacks fill up the energy scale, which is spent using electric weapons. Firearms are effective against all enemies, but work worse against some machines — until the player pumps it up with special upgrades. Because of this synergy, there is a constant need to juggle weapons, to choose your own approach for each enemy and take into account their weaknesses — this brings variety to the battles.

To help in battle with robots and organic creatures will be cluster munchers — elemental improvements for weapons. They are finite, to use them you have to pump the ability to connect the cluster munchers to the weapon, but extremely useful. Robots suffer from bullets with electric damage, monsters suffer from fire, and you can freeze them both. This is equally useful for a short respite in combat or to cut off some enemies from the fray.

The latter is aided by the abilities of the CRAZ gloves. Only two at a time are allowed to set, and you can change them in Eleanor’s armory locker. Shock, Stun, Massive Telekinesis, Polymer Jet, Polymer Shield — there are five active skills and all are useful.

Shock is always available to the player and cannot be changed for another ability, but this is justified — it is almost the main tool of the player in combat. Stun robots, turn off cameras, knock out flying enemies — everything depends on the player’s imagination.
Stun freezes the enemies in combat. This ability works on both robots and organic creatures, and when pumped it will deal extra damage to frozen opponents and bring more trophies from those enemies that are scattered into small pieces of ice.
Mass telekinesis is a favorite of mine. Absolute control of the battlefield, dealing damage by hitting enemies on the ground and interrupting the attacks of an entire crowd. But the more enemies the player lifts into the air, the faster the ability starts to fade. If you pump it up, you can even lift bosses in the air!
Polymer jet — the most underrated ability in the beginning of the game. Its use covers the enemy and the ground gel-like slurry, which enhances the conductivity of elemental attacks. And it works, including on bosses, which makes it useful — standard abilities don’t work on them. Dousing an Ivy boss with a polymer jet and then freezing him with a Stooge or setting him on fire with a fire cassette player is an extremely useful feature.
The polymer shield stops bullets and missiles flying at the player, and protects against most types of damage. However, this ability has not been tested by me, but I feel that when re-passing on a high level of difficulty, the shield will take a place of honor in one of the two cells.
Major’s upgrade isn’t done “out of the box” either — there’s an expansion of the inventory, which allows you to carry a bunch of guns at once (up to six pieces), and increasing the speed of changing weapons, and leveling out the damage from the fall. This also includes the hero’s energy boost, which is responsible for the use of electric weapons.

The “Collective” system

Enterprise 3826 is a huge area, but not all of it is open for exploration. There are posts with lasers along the game’s borders, restricting passage.

Robots will oppose the player in the open world — and the further the player advances on the island, the more coordinated the opponents will start to act. If you don’t knock them out in time, the Collective neural network will begin to track the player and raise an alarm.
The first level of alarm will cause the camera to order the nearest robots to deal with the troublemaker. If they fail, the second level of alarm will go off and the Collective system will send reinforcements, which will be dropped on the player’s head by flying robots. And these robots fly from the nearest factory — they don’t just appear in the air, so there’s time to maneuver and try to escape from the battlefield. At the same time, “Bees” repair robots will fly out of the hives and begin repairing robots destroyed by the player.

The “Collective” system is a great rethinking of the standard, for open worlds, filling of locations. It has a strict construction and dependence of the elements on each other. Windmill provides energy “Vulture” — a generator flying in the sky, which can be turned off by the terminal. This will disrupt Enterprise 3826’s systems in the generator’s area of operation — the cameras will stop working, and the Bees will go to fix the Vulture’s malfunction. The factories that create reinforcements will also not function, and the enemies will not appear on the location for a while.

There are secret proving grounds in the Enterprise, which are catacombs with tests in which improvements to the weapons the player has found are stored. And each range is unique in its own way, because first you must find the entrance to these catacombs — to do this you must explore the environment and solve puzzles. Inside the catacombs the player awaits puzzles of varying degrees of ingenuity, but the further away, the more elements and mechanics will be used at the same time. At one of the ranges it was necessary to park on the coat of arms of the Soviet Union and cling to the surrounding elements — quite a challenge.
But to find the entrance to the range, you will have to use the “Collective” system. For example, with three cameras connected to different control nodes, turn on three generators, and only then enter the catacombs. And if the player disabled “Vulture” or destroyed the necessary cameras — you will have to wait for their restoration “Bees”. Therefore, disabling the system, for free movement around the location, is not always the best way out.

Lustful “Eleanor” and her surprises

By scouring the bodies, searching the crates and chests, the player will collect ammunition for weapons, resources, as well as find recipes. The latter are needed in order to craft and improve weapons, first-aid kits and ammo.

Crafting is done in Eleanor’s Weapon Locker, a lusty robot that will beg the protagonist to punish her, enter her menu, and pour more polymers into improving her gloves. Lusty Weapon Locker is the best character in Atomic Heart, winning my heart from his first appearance. That’s something I’ve never seen in a video game before.
There are probably a dozen or so combinations of upgrades for each weapon. A couple types of barrels or blades, a couple of buttstocks or grips, three types of sights and barrels, and several types of dispersal element for electric weapons — combinations of each element give a different effect.

The barrels in the firearms are designed both to hit organic targets and to do more damage to machines. A rocket launcher can be fitted with a revolver type barrel, which will allow you to fire three rockets before reloading, rather than one. The electric weapon “Dominator” changes the type of damage by discharges of the enemy — precise energy clots are replaced by electric waves swirling around the enemy. How the player’s weapon looks depends only on his preference.
And we want to praise the developers. Removing the improvement from the weapon and replacing it with a new one, the player gets all the resources spent on pumping the removed improvement. Spent on pumping neuropolymers can also be returned in full, if the ability did not like it or wanted to try something new. There are no penalties and restrictions — the player is free to experiment with the gameplay as he likes.

Technical surprise!

The level of detail in the world, the design of the villages and secret compounds, and the overall graphic design of Atomic Heart blow your mind. You would not expect such a performance from Russian game-development, even if it is sponsored by large companies.

On “high” graphics settings the game looks so good that the last Far Cry will take out a cigarette, step aside and smoke nervously. What kind of picture gives the preset “ultra” and enabled ray tracing, alas, could not check — the iron did not allow.

On i7–5960X, RTX 2060 and 32 GB of RAM the game ran at a stable 60 fps 90% of the time — with DLSS “Quality” mode enabled to smooth the picture. This is because TAA-smoothing in Full HD turns things into a mess — it’s better to use DLSS. Drops down to 45–50 frames occurred only in major battles with robots, when there was a spill of polymer everywhere, and the effects of explosions or elemental damage flew into the screen. Otherwise, the game did not cause any complaints about performance, although I expected worse.

But bugs did happen. After a continuous eight-hour session the textures of the concrete in the polygon began to be covered with colored artifacts — restarting the game corrected the problem and it no longer occurs during the entire passage. When exploring the story location “Theater” there was a crash, but it did not happen again in the same place, or in the rest of the game.
Of the critical gameplay bugs I noticed only one — when moving a melee weapon to the warehouse, all of the installed enhancements are removed. Resources are not returned to the player. The same bug is in the press version for PlayStation 5. With firearms and electric weapons this was not.

Came out and the little things, like locker drawers that drove into the texture of another locker or slightly gone into the pipe when the main character was crawling through it. In the dialogue with KRAZ, closer to the finale, the major kept raising and lowering his gloved hand after every phrase he said. Occasionally the robots would pause in combat for a second and then rush at Nechaev again. But these were rare little things, and they were, at most, unpleasant to look at. The overall impression of the project they did not affect.

This is not the level of the release Cyberpunk 2077 even close — the transfer from late 2022 to February 2023 went to Atomic Heart for good. I want to believe that the bugs described above have already been corrected in the final product — the same press played in the version of February 14, 2023.

Diagnosis

After 30 hours of passage I have not found anything for which I would like to scold the game, except a couple of bugs. The shooting and combat is so cool done that you rush into action as soon as the opportunity arises. Quality story is written and perfectly played in the Russian voice-over — going through what is happening. The semi-open world of Enterprise 3826 is explored not so much through gathering resources, but because you want to stay in Atomic Heart a little longer and explore the “Collective” system and look at its interaction with the location. Optimization, even on average computers, is great — that’s where the big surprise was.

Mundfish was able to set such a bar of quality for story-based shooters that the new Bioshock or Wolfenstein would have to work really hard to produce something like that. And I want to believe that the game will be a huge success, not only here, but all over the world — even if the Western player won’t understand half of the Atomic Heart’s flavor.