Atomic Heart Review – A Disappointing And Frustrating Experience

When Atomic Heart is activated, it shows a lot of promise due to its unique premise, well-developed world, and engaging protagonist. At first, there’s promise in Atomic Heart’s story and a few of the game’s design choices, but as the game progresses, players will notice that the game drags out its best and worst moments until nothing worthwhile remains.

On the easiest difficulty setting, the game takes about 25 hours to complete, which is a reasonable amount of time for a game like Atomic Heart. This allows the game to establish its world, explore its most intriguing aspects, and back these up with enjoyable gameplay mechanics. That, however, is not the case. Less than half of that time is interesting or enjoyable, and the rest is just frustrating bloat, resulting in a game that is best described as an incoherent mess.

The plot of Atomic Heart contains some intriguing elements. In-game, players take on the role of Major Sergei Nechaev, also known as P-3. Nechaev is a special operations officer who works with USSR hero Dmitry Sechenov. His AI-controlled glove, Charles, serves as a companion and grants him access to unique abilities. Cuff from Forspoken is Charles’ best possible point of comparison across the board, with whom he shares many similarities. To prevent Sechenov’s planned launch of Kollective 2.0 from failing, P-3 must uncover and destroy a conspiracy. Several relationships and secrets are revealed, and some exciting moments emerge from the chaos. However, the theme of disorder pervades every other aspect of its backstory.

Everyone in the game, as far as P-3 can tell, is trying to get a rise out of him. Everyone wants him to accept some truth, but no one is telling him the truth. As a result, P-3 will find himself in the middle of an extremely perplexing conversation. It’s impossible to tell what P-3 or Charles thinks because their perspectives shift with each passing hour. The best way to put it is that Atomic Heart’s entire plot revolves around a player constantly being forced to choose between two equally bad options. Despite setting up an intriguing scenario, Atomic Heart accomplishes nothing by the end of the film.

On paper, Atomic Heart’s combat and gameplay should compensate for the game’s muddled narrative. In many ways, Atomic Heart is ambitious: it includes survival and stealth gameplay, the need to find blueprints and resources, an open world sandbox hidden behind the game’s Facility 3826 setting, a novel “polymerization” of the world, mechanical and mutant threats, a wide variety of weapons and combat abilities, and much more. However, the game’s lofty objectives result in an equal amount of unnecessary padding. The open world, for example, has a few fun features, such as discovering new weapon blueprints and a feature called Training Grounds, but these features are so rare that pursuing them becomes tedious.

Although Atomic Heart has a large number of enemies, a diverse range of guns and element mods, and special abilities for the player’s gloves, the combat is rarely engaging. All attacks are weak, whether they use a SHOK ability, a regular shotgun, or an explosive device. While robots can be temporarily slowed when hit, they usually recover quickly and continue on their way. Players must simply bash away until the enemy collapses to the ground at random.

Meanwhile, the game introduces a slew of bosses who appear to be unique at first but end up employing the same abilities and rewarding the same play style after the second or third encounter. Atomic Heart lacks variety, with each boss fight feeling the same. When players defeat one boss, they have defeated all of them, regardless of size, location, or type.

The crafting system in the game will stick with you for all the wrong reasons. Players’ access to and progression in glove abilities is more important than their ability to make guns, collect resources, or unlock blueprints. It’s that the crafting system is inextricably linked to a strange robot that resembles a red refrigerator and, upon the player’s first few encounters with it, violently grabs them, makes obscene and sexual comments, and constantly harasses them. The crafting machine abruptly ceases to function and refuses to restart; this strange occurrence is never addressed and is treated as if it never occurred. It’s a wonder that this section of gameplay survived the chopping block in Atomic Heart, given how jarring it is.

The open-world facilities in Atomic Heart serve as dungeons, and players will move through them, but the problem is that each dungeon has so many layers that it’s easy to lose sight of the game’s overall goal. The puzzles appear to be placed at random, and instead of improving the experience, they only serve to prolong the completion of routine tasks. Almost every significant door has a perplexing puzzle. To exit one of the dungeons, for example, players must find two items that, when combined, open a special door. Finding these two items necessitates returning to the area, and once there, you’ll discover that they don’t do much more than power the door. The players are then given the goalless task of locating four more objects, each of which grows into its own mini-quest; by the end of this, the players will have forgotten the quest’s ultimate goal and will be unable to proceed.

It’s the same story in almost every dungeon; if this extraneous material were removed from Atomic Heart, the game’s length could be cut in half to about 10 or 12 hours, and the experience would be far superior. In fact, a person could spend an entire day playing Atomic Heart and only feel like they’ve made three or four hours of progress. When sessions are cut short, progress in all aspects of the game is slowed.

Unfortunately, Atomic Heart’s performance and bug count on Xbox One S are both extremely low. We seemed to lose a lot of progress every time we had to reload an old save, which seemed to happen about every hour. There were some serious crashes as well, but the inability to reload your game is the most serious issue. Reloading the game resolved every problem, whether it was a door that wouldn’t open or an objective that vanished after we’d completed it hours before. Unfortunately, we occasionally lost twenty minutes to two hours of gameplay or became stuck in an unexpected battle due to the strange and inconsistent nature of Atomic Heart’s automatic save and checkpoint system. When a mistake was made by the player, the entire questline or section had to be redone. As a result, death or bugs were technically extremely punishing.

Players, such as P-3, will spend a significant amount of time perplexed as to why they are performing certain tasks or why doors are so difficult to open. P-3 and the player appear to be betrayed at every turn. Atomic Heart’s stories, gameplay, and environments all show promise, but the game ultimately falls short.

Atomic Heart will be released on February 21 for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Game Rant received a free Xbox One S for the purposes of this review.

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