Soviet Shock

Atomic Heart is an alternate reality first-person shooter based in Russia that borrows heavily from Bioshock, Half-life and even Portal. Is it some weird mishmash? Read on to find out

Atomic Heart, at its core, is a classic single-player first-person shooter. The kind that lets you jump down a rabbit hole of carnage and gore. You play Sergey Nechaev, a special forces guy with a potty mouth, who is visiting Facility 3826, a sort of robotic universe where bots take care of almost every function. The city is based in an alternate future of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), so it’s the past but enhanced with scientific progress. It has Bioshock’s whole steampunk vibe and even looks similar in some places. There have been some online campaigns to blacklist this game given the current scenario, but to no avail.

Nechaev or P-3 is inadvertently caught in a robot uprising, and has to now hack and slash his way out of Facility 3826. Your only compatriot during this ordeal is your talking glove, which goes by the name Charles. Charles can be upgraded to do a whole lot of cool things  such as shooting electricity and ice, acting like a shield, throwing stuff, giving P-3 X-Ray vision and levitating enemies. Also, somehow, Charles is resistant to the robotic uprising and only serves you. Along with the story, the voice acting and dialogue writing, especially for P-3, are atrocious. I am unsure if the Russian dialogues are any better, but the English ones are pretty bad.

The story is cookie-cutter as they come, but the gameplay is actually a lot of fun. There is a good variety of robots to fight, each with their unique skills, many puzzles and hidden areas to discover, and nice side-quests that enhance the length of the game, offering some cool loot in return. There are also, at times, an overwhelming number of enemies and things can get really dicey even at the lowest difficulty. It should also be mentioned that unlike all modern games, Atomic Heart doesn’t have a pay-to-play component, and it feels refreshing to actually see that in a game.

Graphically, the game won’t win any awards but it looks really nice. Everything is crafted well, and special attention is given to the design of the robots. The environment—particularly the dark sections of the maps—are done particularly well. You also get a nice bunch of interactive cutscenes where you get to basically view the entirety of Facility 3826 before it turns into a nightmarish hell hole. I should mention here that the robot voices in this game are excellent—they aren’t made to sound like humans and neither do they sound like robots from TV shows. Instead, they went for a nasally AI-type voice which sounds old and new at the same time.

The game also suffers from inconsistency. For example, you can chop human bodies into neat little segments, but try to do the same with the animal cadavars, and it isn’t possible. There are also ridiculous objects that you can’t destroy, such as the balloons. There are regular frame drop on the Xbox Series S, and once in a while, you will have to reload a saved game because it broke in some way. The writing ,especially the dialogues for the lead and even the end of the story arch, are not the great.

There is a reason Atomic Heart has gotten so popular, despite being from a relatively unknown studio. It is just simple, pure fun, the story doesn’t matter, and neither do the crappy dialogues and run-of-the-mill voice-acting. At the end of the day, the game is fun to play from the beginning to the end, and sometimes that is all that matters. If you are a fan of adrenaline-fuelled first-person shooters, this one is a no-brainer. If you happen to have a Microsoft Game Pass, you don’t even have to pay for it. Regardless of how you acquire it, you need to play this game.

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Atomic Heart
Rating: 3/5
Developer: Mundfish
Publisher: Focus Entertainment
Platform: Xbox, PC
Price: Rs 2,699

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