When it boots up, Atomic Heart has a lot going for it: an intriguing player character, a powerful environment, and a novel idea. Atomic Heart features a compelling plot and unique design components at its heart, but as the game goes on, players will come to understand that the best and worst aspects of the game are stretched out until nothing is left.
It takes about 25 hours to complete a basic Atomic Heart playthrough, which is a respectable amount of playtime. This allows the game plenty of time to establish its narrative, explore its most captivating sections, and support it with entertaining gameplay and mechanics. But that’s not what it does. Less than half of that playtime is devoted to engaging or enjoyable activities, while the remaining portion is essentially frustrating filler. The overall effect is a game that is best described as an inconsistent jumble.
The tale of Atomic Heart has its moments. In-game, Major Sergei Nechaev, better known by his callsign P-3, is assumed by players. Nechaev is a special assignments officer who works with USSR hero Dmitry Sechenov. Throughout the game, Nechaev can communicate with Charles, an AI-controlled glove, and can also use Charles to obtain special skills. Charles’ best point of reference on all fronts may be that he is basically the same as Cuff in Forspoken. Sechenov is getting ready to unleash something dubbed Kollective 2.0, and P-3 needs to find and expose a plot to stop it. Many relationships and secrets are revealed along the road, and some thrilling moments are born out of the mayhem. However, chaos is entwined with every other aspect of its narrative.
It appears as though P-3 is being manipulated by every character in the game, pulling him in every way. None of them tells him the truth directly, but they all want him to embrace some truth. Thus, P-3 finds himself playing both sides, which leads to some very perplexing dialogue. It is impossible to determine what P-3 or Charles believes because of the constant back and forth between them that occurs every hour. The best way to put this could be to say that players are constantly switched between two evils throughout Atomic Heart’s tale, which is based on a choice between two that are both terrible and worse. Although Atomic Heart ends with an intriguing premise, none of it is resolved.
On paper, Atomic Heart’s fighting and gameplay ought to be more than sufficient to compensate for its convoluted plot. An open world sandbox behind Atomic Heart’s Facility 3826 setting, a distinct “polymerization” of the world, mechanical and mutant threats, a variety of weapons and combat abilities, some survival and stealth elements, the need to find blueprints and resources, and more all demonstrate Atomic Heart’s ambitious nature. However, in an attempt to accomplish so much, the game ends up with just as much filler. For instance, there are a few engaging activities in the open world, such as discovering new weapon blueprints and engaging in Training Grounds, but they are so limited that pursuing them soon loses their appeal.
Atomic Heart’s combat should have been interesting at the very least because of glove abilities, a wide range of weapons and element mods, and an abundance of foes, but it isn’t. There is no strength behind any attack, not even whether it involves an explosive device, a basic shotgun, or a SHOK ability. While opponents may occasionally be knocked back, most robots are resilient enough to move on and continue forward unfazed. All players have to do is keep hitting the adversary until it appears to randomly fall to the ground.
In the meantime, the game presents a large number of bosses that initially look intriguing, but after facing them for the second or third time, players will come to understand that they all fundamentally employ the same skills and reward the same kind of fighting technique. In Atomic Heart, there is no variation and each boss fight feels exactly the same as the previous one. Whatever the boss’s size, location, or kind, once a player defeats one, they’ve defeated them all.
The crafting system in the game is memorable, but not in a good way. The way the glove abilities are accessed or upgraded is more important than the blueprints, the weaponry that players can build, or even the resource gathering. The issue is that the crafting mechanic is linked to an odd red refrigerator-looking bot that, in the player’s initial interactions, aggressively grabs them, makes offensive and lewd comments, and harasses them on a regular basis. The crafting machine eventually abruptly stops working without giving any reason, and the odd occurrence seems to have been a fever dream that never materialized in the first place. To put it mildly, Atomic Heart’s most unusual gameplay never gets this weird again; in fact, it’s so harsh that it’s surprising it survived the cutting room floor.
In Atomic Heart, players will essentially navigate around open-world locations that serve as dungeons. The issue is that each dungeon has so many layers that it might be simple to lose track of why players are there in the first place. There are haphazardly placed puzzles that prolong relatively easy activities rather than contributing to the experience. There’s an incomprehensible conundrum behind almost every significant door. For instance, in order to exit a dungeon, players have to locate two artifacts that will open the entrance. Finding these two items necessitates going back through the region, and when you use them, you realize they only really power the door. After that, players must locate four more random objects, which turn into quest-length activities in and of themselves. By the time they’re done, players won’t know what to do after they leave.
Atomic Heart’s gameplay could be easily trimmed down to around 10–12 hours if this bloat were removed. The same thing happens with almost every dungeon. As a result, the game would be lot better. It is true that even if a player spends twelve hours a day playing Atomic Heart, they will only feel as though they have advanced by three to four hours. The game moves slowly on all fronts since gameplay sessions are shorter.
To make matters worse, Atomic Heart on the Xbox Series X is rife with bugs and performance problems. We seldom had an hour without having to reload a previous save, which frequently resulted in us losing a ton of progress. Although there were a few major crashes as well, the reload and save mechanism is the main issue. Reloading the game would always resolve issues where doors would occasionally not open, objectives would vanish, or the game would pretend that we were still working on an objective that we had completed hours earlier. But because of Atomic Heart’s unique and inconsistent automatic save and checkpoint mechanism, we occasionally lost twenty to two hours of playtime or found ourselves unexpectedly locked into a combat battle. Checkpoints would activate as soon as the player committed an error, necessitating the completion of entire questlines and parts again. Death or bugs were therefore quite severe from a technical point of view.
P-3 and players alike will find themselves wondering why certain doors are so difficult to unlock or why they are even assigned a duty in the first place. Every time a round comes around, the gamer feels like they are being betrayed twice. Although the setting architecture, gameplay, and plot of Atomic Heart hold potential, the whole experience is unsatisfactory.
On February 21, Atomic Heart will be available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. An Xbox Series X code was given to Game Rant in exchange for this review.
