Atomic Heart - Review, A Slow But Fiery Burn!
1Atomic Heart is a first person shooter with light RPG elements set in an alternate 1950s Soviet Union where a robotic utopia spirals into chaos. You play as Major P-3, a soldier sent to investigate a facility after its AI and robotic workers turn hostile. The game mixes gunplay, melee combat, crafting, and light exploration with a mix of linear missions and semi open world zones.
-Steam Curator: store.steampowered.com/curator/36307721-Healthy-Criticism/
The graphics are stunning. The overall fidelity is excellent and the color palette is rich and vibrant without ever feeling artificial. Large set pieces like towering buildings and laboratories are breath-taking, especially in the opening hours. Scenes of destruction and chaos look both beautiful and terrifying, giving the world a striking atmosphere that feels alive even when everything is falling apart.
The music deserves special mention. Certain fights and encounters feature remixed classical music turned into energetic, upbeat melodies that perfectly match the thrill of smashing rogue robots. It adds a unique personality to the combat and gives the game a rhythm that is hard to forget.
The weapon upgrades, crafting system, and character progression are well thought out, especially for a first entry in a series. I appreciate that the game does not punish experimentation. You can fully refund all upgrades and crafted items and recover every resource, allowing you to rework your build or try a new approach to a difficult encounter without penalty.
Not everything works as well. The puzzles can be unintuitive to the point of frustration. Often you need to trigger a distant switch or match a set of statues to specific poses to unlock a door, but the game gives little indication of how those actions are connected. The map is another weak spot. Scrolling is painfully slow and you cannot use keyboard inputs to move it, forcing you to drag it with the mouse at a crawl.
Exploring the open world can also be exhausting. Robots are constantly repaired by flying drones that deploy automatically whenever you destroy an enemy. From what I can tell there is no way to permanently disable the repair hives, only to overload them for a short time. It fits the story about the unstoppable Soviet army being decimated by machine, but makes free exploration feel like a war of attrition.
One last annoyance is the inability to skip cutscenes. In a game this long it is frustrating to sit through dialogue again when retrying a section.
Despite these issues, Atomic Heart is a great game. It may not justify a full price purchase this far after release, but the crisp 17 schmeckles I paid were absolutely worth it. If you enjoy stylish shooters with striking visuals, creative combat, and a world that blends beauty with chaos, this is a journey worth taking.
00:00 Intro
00:22 Settings
05:25 Saves/ Crafting/ Upgrading
11:15 Dog peed in wife's office
11:25 Continuing with crafting
11:39 Character upgrades
13:34 gameplay (no combat)
20:40 [Short] Boss fight
23:33 Open world gameplay (combat)
39:13 Closing thoughts/ recap