what game is this
Despite all the discussion on social networks that the game might be incomplete and different from what we were shown in the trailers, in fact, the first-person shooter from Russian studio Mundfish, Atomic Heart, does justice to the ads, works well on PC and is fun to play.
This is the first project of the developer, which immediately went bankrupt. The focus on sexual content in the trailers and the cheeky dialogue from the “female characters” point of view helped to engage and arouse the players’ interest. There are many of these moments in the game.
At the very beginning, the player in the personality of the main character, Major Sergei Nechaev, is literally harassed by the tentacle machine “Eleanor”, designed to purchase skills and weapons.
A version of the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s, when scientist Dmitry Sechenov, with the support of the Politburo, achieved impressive success in robotics and began supplying his robots to many countries of the world, was chosen for the subject.
Everything collapses when robots rebel against the business due to internal sabotage. By order of Sechenov, a certain Nechaev arrives on the scene to quickly resolve all issues. Nechaev is the actor himself, to whom Sechenov gives most of the orders in the story.
Meanwhile, Sechenov is trying to resolve the issue with the USSR officials, who are dissatisfied with him because of the robots’ uprising.
The Left and Right twin robots from the trailers are the bodyguards of an outstanding scientist, and the main enemies are Sechenov’s former colleagues.
Also on the territory of the enterprise is a woman Zina, a combat veteran who, when she first met us, used a Kalashnikov assault rifle against robotic enemies. She helps Nechaev, but why the old woman is so attached to the business remains a mystery for a long time.
It is worth noting that in the middle of the transition there will be less sexualization and the plot will begin to destroy the images of the characters we are used to in the first half of the game.
From the middle Atomic Heart gives a tragic story about the real relationships, actions of all the characters and forces players to rethink some of their decisions.
The game has indeed turned into a story of modern technologies that are being used for indecent purposes and become a nightmare for humanity instead of being good for it. At first glance, one such technology in Atomic Heart is robots going out of control at the enterprise. But there are other innovations that are designed to help humanity but carry a potential risk. For example, a polymer is a thick substance that looks like mercury and makes “Thoughts” work, a device worn on the head that lets you control robots.
professionals
Atomic Heart is fun to play. This is a first person shooter game built on two main pillars – using HRAZ talking glove or Loremaster skills and upgrading unusual weapons.
The shot feels good, and with the glove’s abilities the player can create a variety of interesting combos.
You can even purchase additional moves that deal more serious damage to enemies in hand-to-hand combat.
There are interesting finds in the project that have already appeared in other games, but they were developed here. For example, fun but not too difficult puzzles involving electricity. In addition, the system with locks on the doors is surprisingly heterogeneous. The developers have created not only one, but several variations for manually unlocking, and each of them requires not only reaction time, but also the ability to think.
Short cartoons in the Soviet style were created to explain the capabilities of the Mundfish glove. For example, you can shock a flying camera or freeze a working robot to finish off with a shotgun.
An equally interesting finding that creates a depressing atmosphere is communicating with dead characters using polymers.
The game explains that polymers store a person’s last memories, and in the best traditions of a gloomy environment, they can control their speech using the voice of the deceased. Polymers can even conduct a simple dialogue with Nechaev and answer his questions.
cons
For players not used to “harder” games, one of the biggest drawbacks can be Atomic Heart’s uneven difficulty. At the intermediate level, the game sets the bar up and down at first, allowing you to maneuver between enemies, but periodically there are fights that are much more difficult than their predecessors.
In such a case, the best solution is to temporarily change the difficulty level.
Another detail worth getting used to is the strange behavior of the characters at the beginning of the game. In addition to the already mentioned “Eleanor”, both Nechaev himself and his glove friend act ambiguously.
In both English and Russian voiceovers, there is a constant exchange of sarcasm between them, often with obscene expressions. Atomic Heart as a whole does not hesitate to swear, Nechaev can confidently write a curse on almost every sentence in the dialogue.
The major himself is not the main character who tries to speak little. More like Duke Nukem, caught in the world of Bioshock.
He almost doesn’t stop talking and has only been caught in some particularly violent conflicts by the constant discussion of what’s finally going on and another thorn against HRAZ. Some players may get bored of it.
The downsides include that Atomic Heart is trying to make a game in the open world in some places. However, the corridor for such a shooter is not at all a minus, but attempts to build an open world for research seem quite unnecessary.
Who Should Buy Now?
For those who missed the Bioshock series, Atomic Heart is definitely worth buying as soon as it comes out. The games have similar elements and do not hide the fact that it was mainly inspired by Bioshock Infinite. This is felt not only in the plot, but also in the gameplay elements of the game.
Also, the game is worth paying attention to for those who love shooters and do not take themselves too seriously, but want to play a project that requires certain shooting skills from the player. Those who don’t like shooters but are attracted to an interesting environment should buy the game and wait because the game places a serious emphasis on shooting rather than scouting.
Atomic Heart is also valuable because it will definitely give you the opportunity to hear Russian hits accompanied by fights with robots on foreign streams, bring back the feeling of watching GTA IV video clips and English-speaking bloggers accompanying Ranetki.
For the sake of this, they even added modern songs to the game instead of Soviet ones, for example, Nikolai Baskov’s Barrel Organ explains this phenomenon in a pseudo-scientific way.
Atomic Heart primarily wants to entertain the player and not make them think about the fate of the world. It will be possible to think about this in the second half of the game, when the plot starts to develop rapidly.
Many games are devoted to getting smarter, teaching players to “get better”, etc. The main thing is to first remove the elusive Soviet stronghold.