Review of the long-awaited Atomic Heart. Great Russian game that sometimes infuriates

Studio Mundfish has released the long-awaited game Atomic Heart.

The game has come a long way from skeptical opinions about its reality to the actual release. For a long time I didn’t perceive the novelty in any way, but due to the fact that the developers began to take more and more of the gameplay, due to which the novelty turned into one of the most popular projects of our time.

Every day the excitement around her grew by leaps and bounds. And if she failed to overtake Hogwarts Legacy in terms of hype performance, then the designers still managed to grab their piece of the pie. And quite good – the peak online on Steam showed 38,469 people.

How much did a major Russian game eventually turn out to be? Did she live up to the expectation? We understand.

Welcome to the alternative USSR

The game starts in 1955. Scientist Dmitry Sechenov has discovered a new substance called a polymer that is sweeping the Soviet Union through a technological revolution.

Thanks to the polymer, already in these years, fantastic robots are being quickly created that are very similar to people. The same substance is used in other scientific research, from microbiology to artificial intelligence. It even allows you to heal wounds or create artificial food. And I’m not talking about space exploration and preparations for the colonization of the Moon and Mars.

So, 1955. We are assigned the role of Major Sergei Nechaev. We are arriving for a celebration in honor of the imminent launch of the global Collective 2.0 system. It allows you to control the thoughts of robots.

At the same time, a malfunction occurs at the secret Enterprise 3826, due to which the robots massively rebel against people and begin to kill them. Sechenov is sure that this is a sabotage, therefore he instructs Nechaev to release him from responsibility and correct the situation.

Why to him? Because Sechenov personally saved Nechaev after his terrorist attack and literally assembled it piece by piece, at the same time improving the work of the special forces organ and giving a smart glove with the name HRAZ. The major impeccably trusts the professor and considers him almost a father.

The plot itself is quite simple and difficult. linear. But I can’t say it’s boring. It has its own sudden turns of events (really unexpected, that’s true). At the very beginning of the game, she can find it boring in parts of observation, but the beginning from the second act opens up from other angles and becomes extremely interesting.

Particularly pleased with the study of all visible faces. I am speaking not only of the main chapter, but of all manifestations in general. Nechaev mindlessly follows Sechenov’s orders, each of them has his own motives and opinions about the developing phenomena, the protagonists and the legendary Baba Zina from the trailers also have goals that they are tested.

Each of them has own character and some kind of backstory, which is actually not required here. Actions performed, reasoning, events – all this helps to feel the manifestations well. They are not bobbleheads for tedious moving the plot forward. They are this plot, the main elements of the story.

Nechaev and HRAZ constantly communicate throughout the game. They are literally impossible to shut up. They emphasize any stages of the story, surround each fragment and even comment on the game music, somewhere in the distance. I remember reading in foreign reviews that it gets boring over time. Personally, I have not encountered this, they always speak to the point and drag out the universe of the game.

You won’t get bored with such a companion, that’s the truth. Not necessarily a game and humor associated with the two main characters.

But these are not all jokes that dilute the fruits. Eleanor, who in any convenient situation reminds that she wants to seduce Nechaev. The player constantly interacts with it, because it happened with the leveling of the gamer. More on this later.

Surprisingly well collected the mood of the players. This can be seen through the dialogue between Nechaev and HRAZ. I didn’t catch myself thinking how cool something looks, but something incredibly infuriates. For example, the same crawling through forced ventilation.

Nechaev literally voiced my thoughts at exactly the same moments. What happens in the censored form, in the game? a lot of mat (voice in English). He teaches competently, does not look superfluous, but only fulfills the colorfulness of the main point.

Leveling, crafting and that’s it

Let’s talk about gameplay. This is still the main part of the game, the developers have made a great emphasis on it.

And in that part, he’s kind of, overall, good. But there is Some questions.

The gameplay videos showed a strikingly different loot system from the one used. Gathering natural things happens all the time, because he has developed the abilities of your gloves and weapons.

In trailers, the “vacuum cleaner” is expected to be absolute. You literally suck up all the found objects into the glove by simply holding one part and turning the camera. On the one hand, this is a useful solution that greatly speeds up the gameplay, and you almost never stand still when collecting vital questions.

On the other hand, in places this system begins to blunt. The button often has to be returned to some glove objects and to exclude the absence of a reaction. Perhaps this will be fixed with patches. But so far, the system looks a bit unfinished.

Pumping, as I said above, takes place in a special terminal, Eleanor. Usually he stands in some safe zones, but sometimes he can also be found in the expanses of a semi-open world. In the same building there is also a stand for the collection of progress. Speaking of him.

The game has two systems: manual and quick. The second occurs at checkpoints and not always conveniently located. It often happened that I drove through locations, cleared a bunch of things, but there was no autosave yet. Bam, got out again. Arrives collects everything and kills everyone again.

So the advice is use manual canning as often as possible. This will help a lot in complex hostels. In this case, you will be severely slowed down and run the same actions again, again and again (is this crazy?).

We return to Eleanor. Inside, you can improve the abilities of gloves and upgrade / craft weapons. Crafting inevitably requires blueprints. They are scattered all over the world, sometimes falling out of the environment. They can be used to collect gunshotas well as weapons melee. The arsenal of GG is quite mandatory. Each gun is different from the other, the same with cold use. Some faster attack, some stronger defeat, and so on.

By collecting “garbage” in the game world, you can improve your application by changing elements or adding new ones. For example, cassette players can be added to all weapons. These are special modules that allow you to deal elemental damage.

I advise you to put these modules in the first place, the cassette players themselves will find as they go through, or they can craft themselves. You can change them right during the battle, adjusting to the impact of the hearth.

As for abilities, in fact there are only five of them:

• cold: freezes enemies

• Shock: Unleashes a constantly evolving discharge, required for solving puzzles and attacking opponents

• Mass telekinesis: raises obstacles in the air, can deal damage

• polymer cast: douses the demands of a liquid that can be ignited, frozen, or electrified

• Polymer Shield: extinguishes the defeat that opponents inflict on you

Each element can be pumped, strengthening those or third-party ones. For example, with mass telekinesis, you can add damage to it while the enemies are in the waterfall.

Personally, I use the first receptive faculties with the acquisition of periodicity. The other two did not like at all and were useless. It is much more effective to combine cassette players and cold with shock, sometimes delaying crowds against telekinesis.

Combat system looks impressive and plays dynamically. Although, of course, it quickly becomes boring. The main character does not know how to block, he only dodges opponents.

It all boils down to a constant duration because ammo isn’t always available on medium or hard difficulty.

To this we add the fact that robot-bees fly around in a semi-open world, which resurrect defeated enemies. As soon as you cleared the location, and after 5 minutes they are back in the ranks. You can, of course, destroy the bees and after a while they will stop coming. But that’s only delay the repair of dead robots.

Try not to spend money on bees. Use the Electro pistol. It charges from your physical attacks and fires loads. In fact, he has an almost infinite ammo capacity.

Bosses are few, but they are memorable

We’ve all seen it in gameplay trailers. This is the very first major boss, with toolkits that we come across. And the weakest of all (which is logical).

All of them follows each other in combat tactics. Everyone has their combinations and sides. With augmented reality, you can quickly learn the features and select individual participants for them.

True, there are very few bosses themselves. There are less than 10 of them. But I would not call this a disadvantage. They are laid out competently and organically in their zones.

However, from 6-7 simple robots you feel more danger than from another fat boss with a large health bar. A mob of robots can kill you in seconds, and even incredible dodge skills will not help here. And the endless spawn of obstacles somewhere nearby is even more unnerving and even infuriating, sometimes even discouraging any desire to continue the game. Developers should change the balance.

If the alarm level reaches the second, and there are already a couple of three robots around you, and suddenly Ivy will be added to them, he can seriously declare conservation – you will not survive.

There’s only one car you can drive

In the end, it turns out that the gameplay of Atomic Heart both fuels additional interest and brings joy. annoys in micronutrients.

But to Europe battles are made music. It’s just amazing: from hard rock to hardcore electronica. I can’t say exactly how many songs were written by the legendary Mikk Gordon, who wrote soundtracks for DOOM, but specifically his motives are described from the first note. The sound design epicly fits into the gameplay and stays with us until the very last minutes of the game.

Optimization suddenly on the level

Recently, we often see projects that are written raw at their own start.

In the case of Atomic Heart, everything turned out differently. The game is optimized just fine. There are rare bugs in it, but personally I saw only a couple in 20 hours.

The game works well even on old hardware. I tested the novelty on two video cards: GTX 1070 Ti and RTX 3060.

With the RTX 3060 on ultra settings in Full HD, there were stable 60+ FPS everywhere. With the GTX 1070 Ti, which also originated with 2.5K detection indoors (half of the game) – 60 FPS, in the semi-open world the frame rate hovered between 30 and 45 FPS.

It can be seen that the manufacturers really open the release for a reason. They really polished the game to a high level.

As for consoles, the situation is a little worse. On Xbox Series X performance sometimes falls heavilyand there are no answers. It remains only to wait for patches.

If there is gameplay between consoles and PC, then personally I would make a delivery to the latter. With a keyboard and mouse, Atomic Heart is much more convenient to play than with a gamepad. And not for the reason that this is a shooter, but because the designers could not properly adjust the sensitivity of the sticks – they move at high speed, even if you twisted to a minimum.

must be taken

This is a modern analogue of Bioshock, which manifests itself prominently when the game appears. There are also elements from other projects, like Watch Dogs. a lot of combined ideas and came up with something of their own. Add to this an incredibly elaborate setting and an influential game independent of Russian creators.

Yes, it has some disadvantages, critical, like the endless respawn of enemies. Yes, and the enemies do not always shine with the mind. However, she has something to offer.

Atomic Heart is available on Windows PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. In Russia, you can buy it on VK Play for 2499 rubles. Or you can go the other way and grab the new Xbox Game Pass for free.