Atomic Heart has plenty going for it when booted up: a unique premise, a strong setting, and an interesting player character. At its core, Atomic Heart has a promising story and several design elements that make it stand out, but as it progresses players will realize that the game stretches out its best and worst parts until nothing good remains.
A simple playthrough of Atomic Heart will take players around 25 hours to beat, which is a solid playtime generally. This gives the game plenty of time to set up its story, delve into its most interesting parts, and back it up with fun mechanics and gameplay. But it doesn't do that. Of that playtime, less than half of it involves something interesting or fun, while the rest is nothing but frustrating bloat, resulting in a game that can be best summarized as an incongruent mess.
Atomic Heart's story has its moments. Players step into the shoes of Major Sergei Nechaev, who is also referred to in-game by his callsign P-3. A special assignments officer assigned to USSR hero Dmitry Sechenov, Nechaev wears an AI-controlled glove named Charles that gives Nechaev someone to talk to and unlocks some special abilities throughout the game. Essentially, Charles is nearly identical to Cuff in Forspoken, which may be Charles' best point of comparison on all fronts. Sechenov is preparing for the launch of something called Kollective 2.0, and P-3 must discover and end a conspiracy that would prevent said launch. Along the way, a variety of secrets and relationships are unearthed, and there are a few exciting moments created out of the chaos. But chaos is woven into everything else related to its story.
P-3 is pulled in every possible direction, and every character in the game is manipulating him, or so it would seem. Everyone wants him to accept some truth, but none of them are upfront with the truth. This, in turn, creates some seriously confusing dialogue, as P-3 will find himself playing both sides. The back and forth between him and Charles flips so much in every passing hour that it's impossible to ascertain what P-3 or Charles believes. Perhaps the best way to describe this is that Atomic Heart's entire story is predicated on a choice between two evils, one that is bad and one that is worse, and players are incessantly shuffled between the two. That is an interesting setup, but by the end of Atomic Heart, none of it pays off.
Atomic Heart's combat and gameplay, on paper, should be more than enough to overcome its distracting story. There are some survival and stealth elements, the need to find blueprints and resources, an open world sandbox behind Atomic Heart's Facility 3826 setting, a unique "polymerization" of the world, mechanical and mutant threats, a wide variety of weapons and combat abilities, and more - all of which prove Atomic Heart is ambitious. But in trying to achieve so much, the game ends up adding an equal amount of filler. For example, there are a few interesting things to do in the open world like finding new weapon blueprints and an activity called Training Grounds, but they are so infrequent that it eventually becomes uninteresting to pursue them.
With glove abilities, a variety of guns and element mods, and a plethora of enemies, the combat in Atomic Heart should have been engaging at the very least, but it isn't. Whether it's a SHOK ability, a simple shotgun, or something explosive, there is no strength behind any attack. Sometimes enemies will get knocked back, but most robots are capable of shaking it off and advancing undeterred. Players just have to whack away until the enemy, seemingly arbitrarily, falls to the ground.
Meanwhile, the game introduces plenty of bosses that seem interesting at first, but by the second or third, players are going to realize that they all essentially use the same abilities and reward the same style of combat. There is no variety, and every boss encounter in Atomic Heart feels just like the last one. It doesn't matter the size, location, or type of boss; once players have done one, they've done them all.
The game's crafting mechanic is memorable, but for the worst reason. It's not the guns players can make, the resource collection, or the blueprints, but how the glove abilities are accessed or upgraded. It's that the crafting mechanic is tied to a strange, red refrigerator-looking bot, who upon the first few encounters, violently grabs the player, makes obnoxious and sexual remarks, and frequently harasses them. At some point, the crafting machine just stops and doesn't do it again with no explanation, and that strange event feels like a fever dream that never happened in the first place. Tonally speaking, Atomic Heart's most bizarre gameplay never gets this strange again, and it's a wonder it made it past the cutting room floor—it is that abrasive.
Players will essentially move through the open-world facilities which essentially act as dungeons in Atomic Heart, but the problem is that each dungeon carries so many layers to it that it's easy to forget why players are even there. Puzzles are arbitrarily scattered around and, instead of adding to the experience, just elongate otherwise simple tasks. Nearly every major door has a puzzle that makes no sense. For example, when players are tasked with leaving one of the dungeons, they must find two objects that will open the door. This requires backtracking through the area to find these two objects, and upon using them, it turns out they do little more than simply power the door. Then, they are tasked with finding four other random objects, which become entire quest-length tasks themselves, and by the end of it, players will no longer remember what they are supposed to do after leaving.
The same thing happens with nearly every dungeon and removing this bloat from Atomic Heart would easily reduce its playtime to about 10–12 hours, and it would be a much better game as a result. Indeed, someone might play Atomic Heart for twelve hours in a single day, and it would feel like they made about 3-4 hours of progress. Shorter sessions of gameplay ensure that the game proceeds at a snail's pace on all fronts.
And, to make matters worse, Atomic Heart is absolutely riddled with performance issues and bugs on Xbox Series X. Hardly an hour passed where we didn't have to reload an old save, oftentimes losing tons of progress as a result. There were a few hard crashes, too, but the biggest problem is the reload and save system. Sometimes doors would not open, objectives would disappear, or the game would act as if we were still completing an objective we did hours before, but reloading the game would fix it each time. However, Atomic Heart's particular and sporadic automatic save and checkpoint system saw us losing twenty minutes to two hours of gameplay from time to time or being locked into a combat encounter that came out of nowhere. Entire questlines and sections had to be completed again or checkpoints trigger right as the player makes a mistake. As a result, death or bugs were extremely punishing from a technical standpoint.
P-3 will spend a lot of time questioning why doors are so hard to open or why he's even doing a given task, and players will be too. It feels like P-3 and the player are getting double-crossed at every turn. Atomic Heart's story, gameplay, and world design have promise, but the payoff is lacking across the board.
Atomic Heart releases on February 21 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Game ZXC was provided an Xbox Series X code for the purposes of this review.
Atomic Heart
Atomic Heart is an upcoming, highly anticipated first-person shooter from developer Mundfish. The game, which is planned to release in 2023, incorporates FPS action, RPG elements, a harrowing story, and light survival mechanics.
