![]() On top of your arsenal of various weapons, you can utilise a series of polymer-based abilities like a shock attack, freeze attack, and gravity manipulation. Many of the songs combine elements of classical or Soviet-era tunes with modern metal, electronic, or even hip-hop music, making for a unique soundtrack that only immersed me further in the world that Atomic Heart built. It's also worth mentioning the excellent Mick Gordon soundtrack here, which elevates many of the boss fights and more carefully designed encounters to another level. With the way progression works, combat begins as a more deliberate affair, but as more deadly enemies are introduced and the game feels more comfortable locking you in a room with a dozen of them, it becomes more frantic and fast-paced. The combat itself has a lot of weight behind it, consistently making for one of the strongest parts of the game. You'll soon get access to more weapons and upgrades though, letting you even the playing field and hold your own against the robot masses and mutant hordes. Atomic Heart isn't a traditional FPS, and the way progression works is more akin to an action RPG as you slowly build up your prowess and combat effectiveness.Īt the start of the game, Atomic Heart feels like a straight-up survival horror as each enemy presents a significant threat and tanks a lot of damage, and you're scouring for resources and supplies to make it through each room. ![]() What P-3 lacks in character and likeability, he makes up for in combat ability. At several points in the story, your AI companion will explain that maybe your boss and the USSR have some sinister ulterior motives based on the information you learn, and he cannot wrap his head around it, denying it up until the final credits. However, the worst qualities are how aggressively naive and stupid he is. Even during the best hours of Atomic Heart, he delivers snarky quips and juvenile jokes that are frequently unfunny and actively harm the atmosphere. P-3 is also one of the worst protagonists I've had the displeasure to play as for a while, with awful dialogue and zero meaningful character development. There's no "a man chooses, a slave obeys"-type revelation to present a meaningful conclusion, and due to how often the story wants to try and subvert people's expectations of its direction, it loses the narrative focus that allows it to actually say anything worthwhile. There's never any satisfying resolution to this, though. It becomes confusing in its attempts to subvert expectations and shock the audience, and the protagonist is bewilderingly terrible, even lacking a character arc to help centre the narrative.įree will is central to Atomic Heart's narrative, exploring the concept by contrasting humans and robots, and asking the player why they are doing this. There are a few reasons that Atomic Heart's narrative doesn't hit with the weight it should: it fails to capitalise on the themes and ideas it presents, instead becoming derivative of its biggest inspiration. But as the mystery opens up and the story becomes a lot more predictable, it loses steam massively. ![]() These opening hours are perhaps the most consistently great stretch of Atomic Heart, as you're still figuring out this world and its quirks, and wondering what exactly caused everything to go wrong. Armed with just an axe, you're ordered to try and fix things before they spiral further and the wider world catches on to what's happening. It's a classic setup where the utopia isn't all it's made to be. Fast-forward a bit, and you take a nice scenic trip back toward the Earth below to a special scientific research facility where things have gone awry in a robot/mutant outbreak that sees almost everyone murdered horribly. and to report to his mentor and boss, Sechenov. Your avatar for this unique world is P-3, a spec-ops soldier who's arrived in one of the aforementioned flying cities to receive a tune-up for his special glove and AI companion Charles. Atomic Heart takes place in an alternative universe where the USSR became the dominant force of the world, ousting the Pax Americana with a series of incredible scientific achievements that saw it create flying cities, a robot labour force, and a worldwide network to connect them, all by the 1950s.
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