Crispy goddamn critters. If Atomic Heart does anything right, it lives up to the trailer's promise of being sensationally weird, but the downside of that is that it's essentially a car crash of ideas and thematic concepts. It has so much going on all the time and, in all honesty, none of it ever really works. However, in a way, I'm glad I played it, because it's definitely one of those "you have to see it to believe it" experiences. Like, yes, the game does centre around a built, no-nonsense army man whose catchphrase is unironically "crispy critters". Yes, it is sensationally sexist and depicts a lot of its female robots as sex slaves, to the point where the main vending machine you buy your weapons from is obsessed with sleeping with you and talks dirty to you while you upgrade guns. Yes, it's true, there's a whole scene where you turn into a massive cat and have to walk through a dream world collecting apples.
The fact this exists is baffling, but the worst thing about it is that it's a frankly miserable experience to play. Atomic Heart is just full of ideas that aggressively contradict each other and make the game tedious. It has such a focus on stealth, avoiding cameras and taking down enemies, but it has no mechanics to develop that. Enemies spot you from miles away, there's no alert meter, cameras will clock you through cover, environments are filled with randomly placed enemies so you can't sneak anywhere and destroying any machines will cause them to constantly respawn thanks to the endless repair robots in the area. You're better off running through every encounter as stealth is a pointless venture that simply doesn't work.
And that's just one example. The combat is meant to be fast-paced, with enemies attacking quickly, requiring pitch-perfect dodges and counter strikes. But the movement and shooting are slow and clunky, completely ruining the system. The game is about exploring this bizarre facility overrun with monsters, but it spends the first three hours just unsubtly cramming exposition down your throat, as the story is told ineffectively and the dialogue is truly diabolical (although the writing is about 70% of the reason this game is so unintentionally funny). Then there's the open world, which is filled with "Testing Grounds", which are small side objectives that could've taken you to see new experiments, but all revolve around shockingly simple (and dreadfully dull) puzzles based in the same beige corridors.
Oh, and then there's the mission structure, which is just constantly filled with meaningless fetch quests and busy work. There's one section about halfway through where you head to one of the island's premium facilities to activate a drill. To enter the facility, you have to manually lower a drone, climb it, and then zipline into the grounds. This is followed by an admittedly quite fun boss fight. You think, nice, now we'll activate the drill and move on. But no, after the battle, you walk towards the facility just to find the doors are locked, meaning you have to venture into a monotonous puzzle tunnel beneath the facility and spend an hour figuring out how to unlock them. When you finally return, it's time to activate the drill. You open the doors and walk to the reception, but wait, it turns out that the drill can only be started once the desk robot can confirm your human, meaning you need to find three random objects in nearby rooms. You bring them back and she goes, sweet, time to start the drill. Oh, actually, you know what, she can't start the drill without her friend. Looks like we need to find and rebuild her pal. This cues a THREE-HOUR LONG SEGMENT where you have to find all four of her body parts and bring them back to her corpse to reattach them. Only at that point do you finally activate the stupid drill.
My favourite part is that the game even starts acknowledging how frustrating its objectives are, with the main character being like, "lemme guess. I've got to do three more things in the area to access this because nothing can ever be easy...". I'm like, Mundfish... my guys... you can't make digs at YOUR OWN game design. You made the game??? Why are you turning to me like, bit monotonous and cliche this, isn't it? What annoys me the most about this format is that you have limitless potential with this world. It's basically Black Mirror on steroids, with tons of twisted sci-fi experiments and robotic monstrosities. How come we spend so long walking around the same areas, fighting the same enemies, and completing such mundane objectives?
Like, yes, I think visually, this is absolutely extraordinary. The opening sequence where you fly into Complex 3826 has to be one of the coolest visual experiences I've had in a game in years, especially because it feels Atomic Heart leans so heavily into its alternate-history soviet aesthetic. It's also a game that has some cool concepts. When it isn't plunging you into your seventy-third brown underground office corridor, there are some wonderful environments and areas that capitalise on the ethereal weirdness that made the teaser trailer for this so iconic. But the experience itself is an all-you-can-eat buffet of bizarre design choices, god-awful writing, boring game design and some really, really heinous bugs (I didn't get into it, but the bugs are terrible right now).
Somewhere in the back of my brain, I know this is going to become an ironic cult classic for just how weird it is, and if that appeals to you, give it a go. But I still think this is a bad game and falls into the steadily growing pile of hyped releases with interesting concepts that found viral success and subsequently buckled under the pressure, releasing a subpar product that feels rushed out of the door. I can tell you now though, I think this game would have been largely more successful if the developers had just decided to make P-3 a silent protagonist and let Charles do the talking. As BioShock clearly realised over a decade and a half ago, the iconic, mesmerising money shot where Jack finally descends to Rapture in the Biosphere would've been slightly less effective if he was screaming "GODDAMN CRISPY CRITTERS SHITTING COMMUNIST CRAP" throughout the whole thing.
The fact this exists is baffling, but the worst thing about it is that it's a frankly miserable experience to play. Atomic Heart is just full of ideas that aggressively contradict each other and make the game tedious. It has such a focus on stealth, avoiding cameras and taking down enemies, but it has no mechanics to develop that. Enemies spot you from miles away, there's no alert meter, cameras will clock you through cover, environments are filled with randomly placed enemies so you can't sneak anywhere and destroying any machines will cause them to constantly respawn thanks to the endless repair robots in the area. You're better off running through every encounter as stealth is a pointless venture that simply doesn't work.
And that's just one example. The combat is meant to be fast-paced, with enemies attacking quickly, requiring pitch-perfect dodges and counter strikes. But the movement and shooting are slow and clunky, completely ruining the system. The game is about exploring this bizarre facility overrun with monsters, but it spends the first three hours just unsubtly cramming exposition down your throat, as the story is told ineffectively and the dialogue is truly diabolical (although the writing is about 70% of the reason this game is so unintentionally funny). Then there's the open world, which is filled with "Testing Grounds", which are small side objectives that could've taken you to see new experiments, but all revolve around shockingly simple (and dreadfully dull) puzzles based in the same beige corridors.
Oh, and then there's the mission structure, which is just constantly filled with meaningless fetch quests and busy work. There's one section about halfway through where you head to one of the island's premium facilities to activate a drill. To enter the facility, you have to manually lower a drone, climb it, and then zipline into the grounds. This is followed by an admittedly quite fun boss fight. You think, nice, now we'll activate the drill and move on. But no, after the battle, you walk towards the facility just to find the doors are locked, meaning you have to venture into a monotonous puzzle tunnel beneath the facility and spend an hour figuring out how to unlock them. When you finally return, it's time to activate the drill. You open the doors and walk to the reception, but wait, it turns out that the drill can only be started once the desk robot can confirm your human, meaning you need to find three random objects in nearby rooms. You bring them back and she goes, sweet, time to start the drill. Oh, actually, you know what, she can't start the drill without her friend. Looks like we need to find and rebuild her pal. This cues a THREE-HOUR LONG SEGMENT where you have to find all four of her body parts and bring them back to her corpse to reattach them. Only at that point do you finally activate the stupid drill.
My favourite part is that the game even starts acknowledging how frustrating its objectives are, with the main character being like, "lemme guess. I've got to do three more things in the area to access this because nothing can ever be easy...". I'm like, Mundfish... my guys... you can't make digs at YOUR OWN game design. You made the game??? Why are you turning to me like, bit monotonous and cliche this, isn't it? What annoys me the most about this format is that you have limitless potential with this world. It's basically Black Mirror on steroids, with tons of twisted sci-fi experiments and robotic monstrosities. How come we spend so long walking around the same areas, fighting the same enemies, and completing such mundane objectives?
Like, yes, I think visually, this is absolutely extraordinary. The opening sequence where you fly into Complex 3826 has to be one of the coolest visual experiences I've had in a game in years, especially because it feels Atomic Heart leans so heavily into its alternate-history soviet aesthetic. It's also a game that has some cool concepts. When it isn't plunging you into your seventy-third brown underground office corridor, there are some wonderful environments and areas that capitalise on the ethereal weirdness that made the teaser trailer for this so iconic. But the experience itself is an all-you-can-eat buffet of bizarre design choices, god-awful writing, boring game design and some really, really heinous bugs (I didn't get into it, but the bugs are terrible right now).
Somewhere in the back of my brain, I know this is going to become an ironic cult classic for just how weird it is, and if that appeals to you, give it a go. But I still think this is a bad game and falls into the steadily growing pile of hyped releases with interesting concepts that found viral success and subsequently buckled under the pressure, releasing a subpar product that feels rushed out of the door. I can tell you now though, I think this game would have been largely more successful if the developers had just decided to make P-3 a silent protagonist and let Charles do the talking. As BioShock clearly realised over a decade and a half ago, the iconic, mesmerising money shot where Jack finally descends to Rapture in the Biosphere would've been slightly less effective if he was screaming "GODDAMN CRISPY CRITTERS SHITTING COMMUNIST CRAP" throughout the whole thing.