Even a week after release Atomic Heart I can’t believe she exists. The feeling of disbelief arose already at the stage of the first trailers of the game. An ambitious AAA project from a domestic studio, incorporating the best of such games as BioShock And Fallout , and even with a charming setting of an alternative USSR – this is definitely our reality?
The game couldn’t help but interest me. Therefore, I deliberately stopped watching trailers after the gameplay demonstration, because I firmly decided: no matter what happens, I will pass Atomic Heart. And I passed. The best way to describe the experience is this phrase about mice: “The mice cried, injected themselves, but continued to eat the cactus.”. And it’s not clear: either the cactus is so tasty, or I’m a mouse with masochistic tendencies.
What is it all about and what kind of pies did it turn out for me? Atomic Heart – I’ll try to figure it out today.
Great start
If they showed me the credits after the introduction, I would be delighted. First 30 minutes Atomic Heart is an involuntary and ongoing aesthetic orgasm.
As a person who never lived under the USSR and is not a fan of this period, I held my jaw and died of delight. A walk through Chelomey – the city where the game begins – is something incredible. Red banners, familiar houses, music from the times of my parents, “Well, wait a minute!», soda and the same ice cream that “used to taste better”.
The architecture of the Soviet period along with high-tech machines and complexes is fascinating. Happy faces are visible everywhere, casual conversations are heard. Everything looks like a utopia.
The most obvious comparison is arriving in Colombia from Bioshock Infinite. There they also showed us a utopian American city. The only difference is that in Atomic Heart everything is original.
I wonder what Americans felt when they saw Colombia for the first time? Were these feelings similar to those our players experienced when they saw Chelomey?
Having received valuable instructions from his superiors, the main character – Major Nechaev with the call sign "P-3" – goes to the enterprise to deal with the problem that has arisen there. You will have to go there in a flying car. I’m not good at the car industry, but the car looked 1v1 like "Black Lightning". Despite expectations, the car does not fly on its own. The transport robot “Bumblebee” was sent to us to move it. When it turns out that the city we were visiting is actually hanging in the air, firstly: again, you involuntarily remember Colombia, and secondly: you get goosebumps from the breathtaking trip. The descent from heaven to earth is one of the best you will see in this game.
After landing, it is discovered that the robots have a malfunction and they are enthusiastically chopping up the entire staff of the enterprise. We are supposed to find and eradicate the problem. At this point, the delicious, crispy pie dough ends and cactus needles begin to fall onto your tongue.
I’ll let you know right away so I don’t have to come back to this in the future. The game looks just awesome. I could swear on the site, I would swear at how cool she looks. The design stands out without exception. He is truly unique. The brutalist buildings and futuristic premises of the 3826 complex delight from the first to the last minute. Each scientific department differs from each other as much as “hot” differs from “cold”. If the game had a photo mode, I would fill all the free space on the console with screenshots. I liked absolutely EVERYTHING. And the gray tunnels of scientific laboratories, and monumental buildings, and huge monuments praising the achievements of the USSR, and even monotonous wooden houses, taken as if from your grandmother’s village.
The beauty of the game is in all its diversity
The design of the robots also leaves no one indifferent. When necessary, they look threatening, in other situations they look cute, and in some cases they look sexy.
This is the best Soviet Union in the history of video games. And in order not to interfere with my feelings from the game with interesting facts, I wrote a separate blog about it. And now I want to concentrate on the conflicting emotions that arose during my passage. Everything I write next is bewilderment, not hate. Because I really liked the game, but! I’ll tell you about this nasty “But” now.
Gameplay and world
I beat the game twice: the first https://casino-madslots.uk/ time on normal difficulty, and the second time on hardcore. And, by and large, the sensations from the passage were practically the same. At the beginning, when the player is in Vavilov, the game punishes on any difficulty. Whether on “normal” or “hard”, a couple of Vovchiks will famously kick you if you don’t constantly move and frantically hit them with an ax until they fall apart. But as soon as the player gets to the surface – that’s it, the game turns into a sandbox in which you can die only due to your stupidity.
On my first playthrough, I pumped up mass telekinesis, which solved all my problems for the rest of the game. The ability is ultimate, and in combination with a pumped up club or an EMP pulse from an electric pistol, it will pick apart anyone in 2 approaches.
When fully loaded, you can lift ANY opponents into the air, and then slam them on the floor. I also forgot to mention the damage they take while they are in flight. Working name of the ability – "Antipchel"
The game has a fairly large pool of opponents with various skills, abilities, weaknesses, and most importantly – design. At first I wanted to beat up robots just to look at them. But when by the middle of the game you have already seen all the ordinary robots, you rush through them, because there is no point in beating them. You have to want to beat them. And this is one of the key problems of the game that I encountered during the passage.
To do something, you have to want it. Because if you don’t want to, the game won’t change at all. I didn’t understand why there were several abilities in the game if polymer snot + shock + telekinesis is all you need to win. I didn’t find any vulnerabilities in robots to certain abilities, and at the same time, there was no point in them. I tried everything, but they turned out to be much more boring than mine, and I just threw them in the trash.
Same problem with guns. The game has a voluminous arsenal, which is also promised to be increased in DLC. It’s a pleasure to shoot from, robots react effectively to the blows of bladed weapons and willingly discard parts of their mechanisms. But why is there so much of it??
I was interested in opening each gun to see how it behaved. I thought that the later the trunk opens, the more ultimatum it should be. As it turns out, no. Halfway through the passage, I opened the sword – “Pate”, I had a fully upgraded electronic pistol and in my bosom there was a “Kalash”, if it gets boring. This set lasted me the entire game.
Unfortunately, all the enemies, even the bosses, turned out to be very simple. So that you understand: starting with “Natasha” in the theater, I stupidly chopped every boss and mini-boss into cabbage with a sword. This, of course, is my opinion, but when you can easily kill the final bosses in hand-to-hand combat without much loss, then something is wrong in the game. And I didn’t even open the rocket launcher! And don’t think I’m not a hardcore player. Most often I complete games on medium difficulty, and in souls-like games I sometimes fly away from the average homeless person.
The game also offers you to explore the world only if you have the desire. Before VDNKh I vacuumed every corner, and then I started to take care of that too. Having reached a large complex of buildings, I decided to stop with the thought that the game itself would lead me here, and then I would explore everything. No, it won’t.
And this happens more than once or twice. I understand if such locations were small villages or other small buildings, but these are entire cities and factories!
So I completed the game for the first time without visiting half of the locations and testing grounds. I only caught up on the second playthrough. By the way, about polygons.
The first three made me delighted. Even if they were out of the rhythm of the game, they refreshed the gameplay well. The theme music and puzzles were fun. Only “Lutyagin” was a little confusing, he looked very foreign.
I explored one test site, explored a second, a third, and little by little I began to think: why am I doing this?? The riddles began to repeat themselves, and the loot was no longer useful, because by that time I had already collected my set and did not need new guns. And after one of my polygons broke, I abandoned them completely. The “Candle” energy ball simply got stuck on an invisible wall and did not allow me to solve the puzzle. Neither restarting the game nor entering or exiting the training ground helped, even rolling back the save didn’t fix the situation.
And the game also has the most useless consumables. Somewhere in the first steps I skipped training on cassette players, and you know how many times I used them? Zero! There just haven’t been situations where I’ve needed them. Do you know how many times I drank vodka, ate condensed milk or threw a grenade?? One. Just because: “Oh, what can you use?”?».
The game has a really weird tutorial system. You simply catch the “brick” of the text in person, and most often also with made-up terminology, and read it. As a rule, such “bricks” arrive at the initial stages of the game, when you are captivated by the world, gameplay, emotions, and the last thing you want at this moment is to read. Therefore, I conveniently forgot everything that the game told me, and then rediscovered the mechanics in the process. Or didn’t open it.
The game also has a problem with icons. They are not intuitive. There were situations when I couldn’t figure out which skill I had enabled right now. Or maybe I’m not intuitive 🙂
OK. I can live with that. Perhaps I just discovered a broken build, and with other guns and abilities the game blossoms with new colors. I’ll try to beat the game a second time with something I haven’t tried with. And you know what? Nothing! Ten minutes of getting used to the new barrel, adjusting the tempo – and the game works exactly the same. And I also opened a rocket launcher! So the bosses began to fly away twice as fast. Has the difficulty increased?? Well, maybe just a little.
Plot and characters
Now let’s talk about what you can’t put up with. I was able to understand the plot only after reading the art book. You will say that I am stupid. And I’ll tell you – no. The lion’s share of the plot in this game is revealed through dialogues. And it turns out that sometimes the game simply doesn’t understand when these dialogues need to be inserted. Let me give you an example: in the VDNKh complex we need to visit several floors of the atrium in sequence, and on each floor they will dump out a piece of history for us. Dialogues between the main character and his smart glove can begin right at the moment of a fierce fight. You will be surrounded by 5 cars, and the main character will talk with a calm intonation about some terminology and hierarchy in the government, along the way inserting a curse word after the damage arrived. It’s simply impossible to listen because you’re distracted by the battle. I even ran away a couple of times so as not to miss important information.
But should a dialogue arise while driving in a car, God forbid someone gets in your way, better slow down and listen. Because my KHRAZ could talk about something important, see a robot and shout: “Beware, comrade major!». ALL! In 90% of cases he did not continue to say what he had said before. I missed two or three dialogues. So we had to figure everything out as we went along.
The main character is actually a song. Of course, I understand that he is a typical soldier and is not endowed with strong emotions, but he takes every news as a fucking given. One gets the feeling that he already knows everything about what is being told to him, and very often finishes the thought for others. I won’t say anything at all about his manner of communication, everything has already been said before me. I’d rather talk about how playing with his reactions masterfully breaks immersion.
Our hero can react to things happening around him, but very often it happens that the logic of his reactions is completely broken. Most likely the problem is in the scripts, and this should be fixed with patches, but such errors were also encountered on the second playthrough, after several updates.
They may present you with a new robot, specifically in my case – “Rotorobot”, the main feature of which is razor-sharp blades. The glove advises to stay away from them, to which the major yells in response: “Why didn’t you say it before, I’m wondering why it hurts me so much.”!». Although at that time I was shooting at them with a machine gun, and not one of them even came close to me.
Or another example. At the end of one of the training grounds, the player is attacked by two large Belyasha robots. The hero silently kills them without any comments. After 10 minutes in the story, I arrive at the theater, where one “Belyash” will stage-attack me. And how the main character dumped himself in his pants, how he colorfully commented on the fight. While I (frog-faced) looked at the screen and thought: how can I believe this?.
I can still get to the bottom of the unconvincing voice acting of the characters, but this can be fixed by replacing the voice acting. Although, it would seem, why should I play a game from domestic developers, the actions of which take place in Russian-speaking territory, in English?. That’s why I threw up in Russian
Results
Atomic Heart not ideal. There is something to scold her for. And she can be forgiven a lot. Perhaps it would have been treated much more strictly if it had not been a game from our developers. Atomic Heart has a huge pile of roughness, in places it pricks like needles from a cactus. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying it. Perhaps, based on what I read, you can’t say that I liked the game, because I focused mainly on its shortcomings. But I’m sincerely glad that the game came out, and I’m happy for its developers. It gives an experience unique in its atmosphere. I believe that in Mundfish will take into account all the shortcomings and in the DLC with a continuation they will show us that their game can be even cooler.
I played the Game Pass version on Xbox, but bought the art book to support the developers.
Thank you very much for reading, I will be glad to hear your emotions from completing Atomic Heart in the comments.