Atomic Heart Review
Alternative names include SoviShock, CommuShock, and RoboShock.
Atomic Heart is a Russian-developed first person semi-open world ImSim-like originally listed on Steam about five years ago. I saw a few screenshots for it all the way back then and, thinking it was the Russian equivalent of Fallout--'atomic' being the giveaway--added it to my wishlist. Every few months since I've seen it there, languishing without a release date, wondering if it would ever come out...or if it would prove to be Eurojank vaporware.
Its ultimate release sneaked up on me. I received an email from Steam telling me A GAME ON YOUR WISHLIST IS NOW AVAILABLE! And there it was, Atomic Heart, released on the one year anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, finally for sale. I'd seen no gameplay, read no reviews, and had no idea what it was actually about. I decided to find out for myself.
Atomic Fart
In Atomic Heart, you play Agent P-3, an amnesiac hitman for Dr. I'mDefinitelyNotABadGuy, sent into an underground lab complex to locate and eliminate an escaped prisoner. The place: the USSR. The date: 1950something, except it's also THE FUTURE and there are robots everywhere. Your tools are a special magical glove hooked into your brain, referred to by codename I-DEFINTLY-WONT-BTRAI-U ("Charlie" for short), and an arsenal of craftable melee and ranged weapons. Upgrade yourself with loot from enemies to improve your Plasmids--I mean to enhance Charlie's powers--and use money--I mean materials--to buy more ammo at the shops. I mean the NORAs.
You might be surprised to learn that Dr. I'mDefinitelyNotABadGuy has been controlling you this entire time, and Charlie isn't all he seems to be. The ending will sure be a twist!
Does this all sound familiar?
Atomic Heart is BioShock (the first one). In essence, it's a narrative-driven FPS, with an emphasis on crafting, using magical glove powers, and shooting splicers. I mean robots. It has BioShock's story. It has BioShock's gameplay. It has the Russian equivalent of BioShock's setting. It also has narrative elements extracted from Prey (2017) and Wolfenstein: The New Order.
The first third or so of the game sees P-3 explore an underground facility highly reminiscent of a boring version of Rapture. The rest takes place on a Fallout-meets-Far Cry overworld, but even then every mission brings you back into some other underground facility, and every side mission also takes place in underground labs.
I bought Atomic Heart thinking it would be more of a Fallout-style open world RPG (or, more fittingly, be overpriced Eurojank like STALKER, which are games I have a soft spot for). But in effect it's trying to be an Immersive Sim-like. This is more apparent through crushingly on-the-nose thematic parallels to BioShock and Prey, two much better games, than it is through actual game design philosophy; but I'm pleased to report that as an ImSim, Atomic Heart isn't terrible. Its first section is very strong, and held back only by poor narrative. You can crouch and sneak around, unlike BioShock, and there are plenty of audiologs to find. Shooting is enjoyable and expertly animated, which elevates what could be a slog into an enjoyable ~20 hour long singleplayer action game.
But holy shit, the narrative is bad.
But First...
It shouldn't be made to sound like I altogether disliked Atomic Heart. I found it infuriating, for reasons soon to be elucidated, but I enjoyed many of its individual parts--particularly in gameplay. Let's dwell on them momentarily.
P-3 has powers and weapons, just like BioShock. Powers are upgraded through "neuropolymer," AKA definitely not neuromods, which is harvested from fallen enemies. Weapons are upgraded with various materials collected through the environment, with special reagents also found on dead bodies.
All looting is done with Charlie, the magic gravity glove. P-3 effectively vacuum cleans entire rooms and tears the intestines out of robots, then shoves it all in his quantum transportation bag. Weapon schematics are locked behind sidequests, but all powers are available from the start: so long as you can find the neuropolymer, you can buy them. Looting is satisfying if tedious, and would be improved to excellence by removing Charlie's vacuum time-out after not hitting any more loot for one or two seconds.
It's fairly standard ImSim-like faire. You can upgrade your energy reserve for power-based weapons, increase your inventory size, learn to dodge faster or run more, and then purchase and upgrade the game's real powers. They are few: Make Cold, Make Glood, Make Levitate, Make Shocked, and Shield. Make Shocked is always available by default and you can only use two others are a time, so this selection is disappointingly limited. They all more or less do the same things. The Gloo-reminiscent power slows and damages enemies; the icebeam power slows and makes it easier to damage enemies; the levitate power incapacitates enemies; and the shield is, presumably, a shield, and is as exciting as that would suggest.
Excellent animations make using these powers always fun. I'm particularly impressed by weapon handling, which changes dynamically if P-3's other hand is occupied. Using a pump shotgun while spraying jets of ice with your left hand? You've gotta pump it with your right, and that's not going to be fast.
But I still found the lack of variety underwhelming. There's nothing like Blink or Possession available in this game. There isn't even a token stealth power.
I was similarly disappointed by the lack of jump height mods. All good ImSims allow you to upgrade your jump height--it's a staple of the genre, to allow access to the inaccessible and to fuck with the level designers. But not here. Here you can jump about five inches, and only where your commissars have allowed you to.
All this aside, what I do particularly like about Atomic Heart's weapon and upgrade systems are that they've all been ludonarratively justified. Neuropolymers are just XP. They serve an identical function to XP in any other game. But by tying them into a loot item, the designers have justified the existence of XP in the world and the story. It's interwoven even deeper than that, too, because the whole story revolves around "polymerization." Someone at Mundfish really knew what he was doing.
His name was probably Oleg. If he ever reads this, I want him to know that he's cool--but I doubt he can speak English.
Unfortunately this example of ludonarrative consonance was not, in the end, auspicious. The rest of the game's designers could have learned a thing or two from Oleg. But more on that later.
So Atomic Heart isn't really living up to its obvious ImSim pretentions, but as a first person shooter it succeeds better than either of the good BioShock games, and rivals most any other game on the market. The weapons are fun and powerful. Upgrades make significant changes to effect and appearance, and each feels like it has its niche. Best of all are the animations, which are realistic and highly detailed. Reloads look right for each weapon, vary depending on if the mag is empty or full, and even include a one-in-the-chamber system as a bonus. Handling in general is visually appealing and adds a satisfying extra layer to the gunplay.
The balance is somewhat off. The Kalash feels hideously underpowered except when dealing with the rare plant zombies, and the RPG kills the final bosses in five or six hits (which takes about 30 seconds). I similarly found the railgun and Dominator to be nearly worthless, as both take up more power than the energy pistol while doing less damage overall. But this problem is far better than the alternative of bullet sponginess, a la Borderlands; here the enemies die right on time, and even the less impressive weapons are satisfying and reasonably effective.
Both materials invested into weapons and neuropolymer spent on Charlie's abilities can be refunded at any point, without any loss whatsoever. There are no sunk costs in Atomic Heart, nor any stupid respec tokens. I suspect Oleg came up with this, too, because it's a boon. Allowing me to swap out my upgraded AK for a new railgun encouraged experimentation and kept the game fresh.
So at its core, Atomic Heart is a good action game. The problems arise when it refuses to let itself be an action game.
The Quest
Once he reaches the surface, P-3 must traipse around a relatively small and empty environment, doing whatever the random voices in his head tell him to do like a deranged schizophrenic who has recently escaped from his underground psych ward. There's almost nothing to do in the overworld except "Polygon" side missions and the main story, which does make one wonder what the point of an open world was to begin with.
The Polygons are a collection of underground labyrinths that must be completed to unlock new upgrades. Some involve combat challenges, others are based around puzzles, and the vast majority are platforming-centric (with puzzle elements). There are no other side quests. There are no side quests to clear out towns full of robots, no NPCs to interact with or exterminate, no towns to explore beyond rural vaguely Russian-y countryside. If you want more for your buck than the main story, Polygons are the place to go.
At first I enjoyed them, too. But their charm wears off. Foremost you'll notice that Atomic Heart does not have sufficiently tight movement mechanics to support platforming. Maneuverability in the air is non-existent, walking is imprecise, and P-3 has a habit of rolling off of platforms when you land on them. Jumping is floaty and ledge-grabbing works about 70% of the time.
More pressingly, the puzzles and solutions to the various challenges are comically obtuse. I would sooner use clown shoes as a level than try solving some of these Polygons without the help of guides. Despite their endless blabbering, P-3 and Charlie never have any insight into the solutions of Polygon puzzles, and there's no quest log or objective marker to help you figure out what obscure things the level designers want you to do to proceed.
There's one Polygon where you have to go on an entire underground adventure just to unlock the front door. Sounds decent enough, except there's no possible way for you to know this by going to the location in question. I managed to work out that I couldn't open the locks because the local area network was down, and I also noticed that the LAN was covered in strange barb-like shit coming from underground.
Okay, clear out the barbs, right? I tried shooting them. I tried freezing them. I tried electrifying them. I tried chopping them.
That didn't work.
I figured at this point I had missed something. I spent another twenty minutes wandering around this town before I decided to go look up what I had to do.
It turned out that you have to go underground and clear out the infestation of mutant plants in order to free the LAN flyer. How do you get underground? Through a submerged entrance, or a manhole cover hidden in the bushes on the outskirts.
Forgive me if I didn't make the connection between "some random shit growing out of the ground" and "there must be explorable sewers in the vicinity where I can descend and set things on fire to clear this shit on the ground out" on my own. Had the placement been better I would've been able to find the sewers on my own quickly enough, but they're hidden to the point of absurdity. Even with a guide I found them hard to locate. I never, in a dozen hours, would have stumbled onto them on my own.
This is not what I look for in ImSim level design.
While the main quest is largely devoid of this level of idiocy, I'm sorry to say that most every Polygon has something similar. The same is true of puzzles game-wide. The solutions might as well be written in Cyrillic: they're impossible to divine without Google.
That wouldn't be so bad if the puzzles were as abundant as civilian-owned cars in the actual USSR, but unfortunately they're placed more like obesity in the USA. Puzzles, puzzles everywhere, and not a drop to shoot. Most are confined to the lockpicking minigames, but plenty more abound, especially in Polygons but also in the main quest. Atomic Heart is positively packed with pitiful, perplexing, and painful puzzles. One mission even makes you play Snake.
While ImSims are well-known for their shitty minigames, and Atomic Heart does not disappoint on shitty minigames, I fucking hate puzzles. I don't just dislike puzzles in the abstract because they make me feel stupid (they do), but I dislike puzzles in this game in particular. They do not belong.
A puzzle in an Immersive Sim should be: how do I use my abilities in a creative way to kill these enemies? How do I bypass the security cameras between here and there? How will I plan my escape route? How will I reach the objective without being seen? These are the central "puzzles" of any good non-linear game. The point is that there are an infinite number of solutions, and whatever solution you choose, you choose it--not a designer.
A puzzle is just the opposite. Puzzles are utterly linear. Puzzles are the enemy of the Immersive Sim. There is only one solution to a puzzle, and it's whatever obtuse, stupid, boring, obnoxious thing some Russian drunk on vodka arbitrarily decided for it to be.
I hate puzzles. Fuck puzzles. Atomic Heart is nearly ruined by puzzles. The puzzles in this game are bad, and there are way too many of them.
It may be actually ruined by minigames. There are three and a half: a lockpicking minigame, a color-matching minigame, a timing minigame, and a semi-minigame for inputting passwords that are already known. All are simply alterations on lockpicking, and nothing ever needs to be lockpicked except doors between rooms.
The most excruciating of these, the color-matching, is also the most common. Some levels seem to have one color-matching lock on every single door. Some doors later on have multiple minigames per lock, just in case you weren't having fun yet.
There's a time and a place for lockpicking minigames. Dying Light is the best example of lockpicking done right, because in Dying Light there's always the pressure of time: the zombies will be upon you soon. Lockpicking is just a small dexterity challenge to complete under the pressure of time.
It's all about pressure.
In other ImSims, lockpicking minigames are usually about mechanizing skill upgrades and providing an alternate gameplay style. It could be that unlocking the next level of Scientist simply makes it so you automatically open any locked door of equivalent difficulty, but turning it into a simple challenge makes it feel ludonarratively justified.
There is no reason for Atomic Heart to have so many lockpicking minigames. There are no upgrades associated with them. Nothing interesting is ever hidden behind them. There is no time pressure. Most are mandatory anyway. None of them are hard, and all of them will be accomplished after mashing your keyboard in sufficiently random and volatile ways for a sufficiently long duration.
Atomic Heart would be a good but severely flawed action game were it just for these considerations alone. While bad level design and excessive minigaming is frustrating, it isn't fatal.
But the narrative may yet be.
The Narrative
Atomic Heart suffers from Fallout 2-itis. This serious disease is often terminal if not caught early on in the development cycle. It is characterized primarily through excessive amounts of comedy, much of which is zany and low-brow, and may also include overlong scenes of exposition, ludicrously contrived subplots, and uninteresting NPCs.
Yes. Like Fallout 2, nothing in Atomic Heart can take itself seriously. Agent P-3 is like an adderalled-up Zoomer Twitch addict who talks endlessly; Charlie is a Jeeves stock character who dumps endless exposition; the world is filled with things that make no sense except to serve as raw comedy.
I realize it might seem strange to criticize a game that has taken the internet by memestorm for its CommieMommie robots as being too unserious, but I'm afraid that's just the point. The comedy in the good Fallout games comes from taking the absurd world seriously. The joke of Liberty Prime is that he actually seems realistic in-setting--and isn't that farcical? That's why he's funny. That's why we laugh at the Kings. That's why we still remember that the Tunnel Snakes rule.
The world of Atomic Heart is obviously ridiculous. The funniest thing the writers could have done was to take it seriously. To P-3, two sexy killer Communist gymnast robots should be legitimately terrifying. Instead everyone jokes about them. Everyone jokes about everything. Every line is a quip. No one except Dr. I'mDefinitelyNotABadGuy can take anything seriously. P-3's go-to exclamation is, "Crispy critters!" which is, of course, a source of mirth between him and Charlie, despite having nothing obvious to do with Russia, Communism, or things that are actually funny.
While it's revealed at the end why there might be a diegetic reason for P-3 to act like such a retard, the fact remains that he spends the vast majority of the game like someone...who comes from a comedy game about sexy killer Communist gymnast robots. He never once sounds like the character he's supposed to be. He doesn't use any Russian phrases or reflect any bit of Russian national character, aside from saying "comrade" occasionally so we don't forget he's a pinko. None of the characters do. They don't feel remotely Soviet. In fact, a few hammers and sickles aside, nothing about this game feels Soviet. The robots have Stalin mustaches--but they don't really look like Stalin. They aren't bathed in red. Communism factors into the plot, but the world itself isn't realized in any real way that forms a Soviet pastiche. Even in the beginning, which is the strongest part of the game aesthetically, it doesn't really feel Russian. Where's the hideous Communist architecture? Where's the brutal totalitarianism?
This is the exact opposite of BioShock, which expertly forms a pastiche of Americana through use of music, art, and iconography. Fallout is similar. And as someone with a minor in Soviet studies, this may be the only topic on this blog I'm actually qualified to opine on.
What is there about the enemies in this game that is characteristically Soviet? They don't blare the Soviet anthem while trying to kill me. They don't wield AKs or PPShs. They don't go around shouting "DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM IS NON-NEGOTIABLE," or ranting about workers' rights, or anything even remotely similar to what we might see in BioShock Infinite.
That may be because they're robots, and robots are not very interesting.
The humor falls flat because it doesn't rely heavily enough on the pulpy setting, and the pulpy setting fails because it doesn't seem to have any real vision beyond, "What if we did Fallout x BioShock but made it Wolfenstein, then set it in the USSR?"
That's a great premise. I can see why it was funded. But it wasn't handled well.
As a comedy game Atomic Heart falls utterly flat. It isn't funny. The dialogue throughout is excruciating. Many Steam reviews will point to bad voice acting, but I would instead suggest that it's the script. And we all know that failed humor isn't just not-funny--it's torture.
Whether or not it's better in the original Russian, I can't say. It doesn't appear that Mundfish writes their games originally in English, as CD Projekt does, so bad translators could account for much of the horrendous dialogue. But it can't account for its brutal interminability.
Storyline?
The story itself is a straight BioShock imitation. It isn't awful up to the ending, except for the ending itself (which is awful, but then that's a tradition), but it is colossally overwritten. It's as if Stalin himself commissioned the script. Like with the Volga Hydroelectric Station, the writers were concerned not with quality, but with the enormous scale of their effort--for that is what will truly put the fear in the hearts of capitalists worldwide. Not efficiency, but size.
Atomic Heart certainly achieves scale. The amount of writing and voice acting in this game is dazzling. But that's about the best thing I can say about it.
You enter a puzzle arena. You need to explore to find a thing, then unlock a door, then kill some robots, then do a platforming puzzle. All the while Charlie and P-3 will be talking. And talking. And talking.
You won't be listening, because you have a game to play. But they'll talk on regardless. Usually they're discussing exposition, often in the least deftly written ways, but sometimes they broach other topics, too.
You will notice that on the positively endless elevator rides, there is no conversation to fill the literal-minutes of dead air. But on any main mission quest? A muzzle wouldn't stop P-3's ramblings.
As said above, the dialogue itself is excruciating. P-3 is without question the least charismatic video game protagonist since Abby. I honestly don't know who I like less between the two. His mannerisms have no bearing on who he should be as a killer Soviet spy, and his sense of humor is torture.
But you'll have to sit through it, because it never stops. When he isn't talking to Charlie, it'll be a ticket vendor, or a repair machine. Want to upgrade your AK? I hope you don't mind being sexually harassed by the BDSMbot. Look! It's a robot who's obsessed with sex! It's a sexy lady robot! LOL!!!!!!
I advise you turn off your speakers.
But despite being mostly terrible, I didn't feel compelled to mute the game entirely--as I did with Hogwarts Legacy the first time an NPC 'theyed' me to my face--until the third act. The final straw was not, in fact, the terrible comedy, because games like this are still unique enough to be interesting (unlike boring open world games), but the cutscenes.
So many cutscenes, so unskippable.
Do you like watching the CommieMommies load a dead body into a crate? I hope so, because there's a 75-minute long unskippable cutscene of them doing just that. Do you like watching P-3 fight, and of course lose, to basic enemies when control is taken away from you? Or how about having to see P-3's hideous face and Hitler Youth haircut from third person while he stares at random NPCs? Because all this, and far more, awaits you in Atomic Heart.
The cutscenes absolutely killed me. They're so long and so boring. They're all way longer than they need to be, and in the end they tell the story of BioShock, so there's nothing original there anyway. Many could be patched out and replaced with gameplay sequences and nothing would change (except my blood pressure).
Not that narrative-focused gameplay sequences are much better, mind you. There's one section where you have to accompany a robot during her tour of a science facility. She then humorously explains each exhibit to you, one at a time, and if you fall behind or run ahead, she'll wait for you to come back!
This goes on for about ten minutes. And that is not an exaggeration. It's actual torture. It would be torture if it were good, but it's not good. It's very bad. That makes it so vile that even Stalin would consider it cruel and unusual.
I did not like Atomic Heart's narrative.
Should you but it, though?
I really liked the first third or so of Atomic Heart. I kind of liked the second third. I hated the last third. It's a game that left me deeply frustrated, and not for dumb bullshit reasons like the NPCs on Reddit.
So I don't know what my final takeaway is. If you haven't played BioShock, you might not mind the story, or find it quite so drearily predictable. But if you haven't played BioShock, you should probably go do that instead, because it's much better than this Russian knock-off.
My opinion of Atomic Heart would have been much higher if cutscenes were skippable, and if I had speedrun past the Polygons. As it is I did all of them, and they made me homicidal. The overlong pointless cutscenes, many of which contain no story relevant information, also drove me insane. Much shouting at my monitor has taken place over the last week. These two things together took a solid 8/10 (loosely speaking) down to about 6. When the horrible bad comedy dialogue is then added to the mix, the number drops even lower.
I'm not a clinical retard, so I don't rate games with arbitrary scores. But I wouldn't give Atomic Heart a very strong recommendation. It isn't terrible, and it's only minorly buggy (more than I can say for Hogwarts: Legacy), but its issues are large enough to leave a bad taste in the mouth. Like stale bread-line sandwiches. ImSim fans might want to check it out despite all these issues, but more casual gamers should wait for a sale.
On sale, I do think Atomic Heart would be worth it. It's worth playing. Just not before you've played all of the games it's shamelessly ripping off.
I played Atomic Heart on PC, normal difficulty, with a copy purchased from Steam. Total playtime: about 20 hours, although I was offline and Steam didn't keep an accurate record. Check it out here.