![]() ![]() When it doesn’t, though, the gap between what Atomic Heart gets right and what it gets wrong looks wider than Russia itself. Like I say, it’s ambitious, and a lot of the time it all works quite well. Horror turns to open-ended action, which turns to puzzling, which turns to corridor shooting, which turns to psychological drama, and so on. But there’s more than a hint of Half-Life 2 here as well, in the way that Atomic Heart gives each chapter a certain flavour before dropping it and moving on to the next. The stonking spectacle of Facility 3826, as the mountainous base is known, is a match for some of the best views throughout Rapture and Columbia, and the first few hours in particular lean into a similar survival horror feel to the original BioShock’s early stages. ![]() This one’s suffering from a combined robot uprising/zombifying plantlife outbreak that the brass would rather keep quiet, and they’ve deemed one bloke with some guns, improvised melee weapons and Plasmid-like glove powers enough to quell it. After a gorgeous intro aboard a flying city, the first of many BioShock series influences, irritable special agent P-3 (that’s you) and his snarking AI-powered glove (that’s your hand) are deposited into one of the massive science complexes that made this USSR even more of powerhouse than it was in reality. ![]() It’s the debut game of just one, Mundfish, and as a first attempt it’s impressively ambitious. Of course, Atomic Heart was not made by several teams. For a shooter set within an alternate history Soviet Union, it could perhaps have used some more central planning. It’s a fascinatingly chaotic medley of ideas, and a rare FPS that lacks even the slightest whiff of battle pass-peddling live serfdom, but those ideas so often fail to gel that it can feel like a game made by several different dev teams. I’ve played a lot of strange games, but never one that lurches between greatness and bafflement as hard or as fast as Atomic Heart. A Soviet sci-fi adventure with arresting visuals and occasionally excellent shooting, marred by uneven balancing, undercooked ideas, and an unlikeable protagonist. ![]()
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