so grossly uninspired and disappointingly a waste of talent. the art style, enemy designs, and music (for the most part) sit atop a mound of rotting garbage bags housed in a dumpster painted to look like fallout 4 and bioshock infinite. i shit you not, theres a part in the game where youre in an elevator, and outside its glass, you see an underwater facility to which the protag makes a bioshock reference by saying, "this is some kinda rapture!" plus the music sounds so similar to the bioshock rapture reveal lol. incessantly grabbing onto every bit of incomprehensibly mundane litter to craft upgrades is mind-numbing which then gets exacerbated by its lifeless open world. exploration is something you want to avoid. empty rooms, ongoing hordes of enemies, pathetic traversal, major hallmarks of terrible open world design. halfway through the game, i didnt know you could drive cars and that joyful discovery was immediately soured by enemy corpses bringing my car to an instant trudge. the loot doesnt even justify the poor exploration. i did some of the "polygon" facility dungeon things and decided i didnt want to waste my time anymore with them after the third or fourth one. even though these dungeons, and the majority of story missions, have the best level design to offer in atomic heart, they are still just so boring. especially with a story so sporadic, so schizophrenic, there is almost nothing to get invested in. it's supposed to be this sorta story where the protagonist is being gaslighted by everybody he meets. it's supposed to make the player think about their mysterious origin and who may actually be the villain. in reality i just had no fucking idea what was going on. not sure if it was just a misfortunately poorly translated english script, but so much shit felt redundant, out of left field, or the equivalent of water going up your nose. combat is almost okay. melee is suprisingly alright, gunplay is nice, enemies are annoying as fuck though. especially that red nerve monster guy, pusschy or whatever. the enemies just jump all over the place and knock you down sometimes. manageable in small numbers, annoying when theres like 4 of them and then you get stuck on a prop or geometry.

just such a fucking sad experience more than anything. i honestly wished this was a fake video game instead of actually being playable. i think the one moment that mightve broken me the most was when the song "The Alien" from the soundtrack of Annihilation (2018) began playing in a 'pivotal' moment, and chickens began spawning around me. ironically, the positive with this game is that it's so bad that it's helping me love video games again because i dont want anybody to ever make something like this again.