Atomic Heart Review – An Electrifying Journey Through An Atom Punk USSR

If there’s anything genuinely bomb-dropping about Atomic Heart it’s the game’s ambition. This FPS is the first game created by indie developer Mundfish over the course of seven years. Now that it’s finally here, I can say that while this Heart has a couple of missed beats, it overall shows a promising start.

Atomic Heart is a Bioshock-style action shooter taking place in an alternate future 1955 in the Soviet Union where a scientific breakthrough has allowed for robots to become part of everyday life. The game’s retro-futuristic USSR iconography and aesthetic make for a unique experience alongside a creative and engaging battle system. It’s not quite an immersive sim (as the director himself has said) but if you’re looking for something with similar vibes, this could be right for you.

Welcome To The USSR…

The game is set in an alternate version of the 1950s within facility 3826 in the Soviet Union. Here lies a top-secret military base that manufactures robots. When the great scientist Dmitry Sechenov made a breakthrough that will lead humanity to a more advanced civilization, his plan was sabotaged and resulted in a brutal disaster that turns the robots into dangerous killing machines.

You play as private agent P-3 aka Major Nechaev that works under Professor Sechenov himself and looks up to him like a father. His mission is to help end the robot massacre and while it’s a dangerous task, P-3 is accompanied by the talking Polymer Glove named Charles who acts as his main weapon and helpful advisor. Without spoiling anything, as the mission goes on more sinister intentions are slowly revealed from behind the scenes with one shocking truth after another.

The Journey Through The Facility

That’s a great setup although, in execution, Atomic Heart’s narrative may not be the easiest to get into. You’re instantly thrown into the base overrun by robots with no cutscenes or dialogue to really introduce the premise or what you’re doing there. The game in general doesn’t feature a lot of cutscenes or interaction between the characters which risks the plot feeling little barebones. The later reveals are exciting however they only truly occur right near the end of the game.

The first half has a lot of pacing issues, often feeling rather dragged out with long sequences between story beats making the game feel a little too aimless at times until you get another conversation between P-3 and Charles. Speaking of the two, it doesn’t help the writing that P-3 often comes off as pretty unlikeable. I get they’re going for the grizzled soldier with a dark past but it’s hard to route for someone who’s so needlessly dickish to everyone around him even when they’re doing their best to help him. In some ways, it reminds me of Forspoken’s bad dialogue just trade out the stock sassy teenager for a stock edgy soldier dude.

The game does however try to make up for this with some cool world-building. There’s a special device called “THOUGHT” that can store people’s consciousness before dying, allowing you to speak and interact with the dead. It’s really messed up, but it’s also a very clever way to integrate NPCs and add to the oppressive atmosphere of the facility. 

The Atomic Punk Age

The actual missions of Atomic Heart are very linear but the game also features a semi-open world, allowing you to go off the beaten path to explore the further depths. The world itself is visually stunning and very much lives up to the title with a great Atom Punk aesthetic, filled with 1950s rusty sci-fi and robotics. The vintage look of the facility makes for a striking setting that you want to see more of.

Unfortunately, there isn’t actually a lot to do while exploring. You can find more items and weapons to craft, but there aren’t a lot of side quests or world-building collectibles, making the exploration a feel barren once the novelty wears off. 

If you don’t want to walk, you can also get around the map with a car for faster transport but there’s no actual quick travel function, although, from what I mentioned above, there’s not much of a need to backtrack either. The control for the car can be very slippery however and they are not all that durable. One bad tap from a robot can leave some of them on the verge of blowing up into scrap. Still, it’s a notable option if you’re looking to get by faster. 

Besides the open world, a large portion of the main story will take you to underground facilities which are very linear and it can take a while before you can get to the surface. This is where the game will introduce a lot of puzzles. While I’m usually not a fan of puzzles in video games, the ones in Atomic Heart are actually creative and fun to solve without being so overly complex that you’d get stuck on them or need a guide. I actually look forward to doing these as they create a good change of pace from the main combat, speaking of which. 

Duel Weilding With Your Glove

While the story may lack, Atomic Heart makes up for it with its gameplay. The game is an FPS action game with a heavy focus on melee combat. The vast majority of your time will be spent shooting and smashing your way through the robotic hoards and it’s truly a blast.

In terms of weaponry, you have an assortment of ranged guns and grafted-together bludgeon items but your best weapon is the polymer glove. With this, you can use up to two special skills of choice that use polymer technology and the standard “Shock” to stagger enemies with electric current.

The fun of the skills is how they can allow for potential new combos with the weapons. For example, you can coat the enemy in a polymer gel which will cause them to take more damage from elemental attacks. You can even upgrade each skill to add to their abilities. My favorite was probably the Mass Telekinesis skill where at first you can only lift the enemy, but later, you can follow it up by slamming them to the ground which deals a lot more damage. This becomes very helpful when you’re surrounded by a lot of enemies that you can throw at each other. 

Skills can be performed while using weapons at the same time which makes the combat very flexible. It is just a quick click of a button to activate a skill making it easy to swap from skill to weapon and back again. It’s a great system that allows you to almost duel wield attacks one after the other, rewarding experimentation between skills and weapons while still being easy to understand. 

The Enemies

You going to need that large arsenal of weapons as well to fight various enemies found across the factory. There are two types of enemies in this game: machines and organic. As you can guess machines are the robots that are going berserk, while organics are enemies that are born as the result of an advanced experiment creating what I can best describe as plant zombies. They each have their own set of attack patterns and different weaknesses which while easy to read, do add to the chaos of switching between different skills, keeping you on your toes through each fight. 

The enemies do also present another flaw in the game though. They’re incredibly fast and agile yet there’s no indicator to keep track of them. This would be fine if the game was built similarly to say, a Doom game where the player is highly mobile but P-3 isn’t that quick. He only has a short dodge move (with a cool down mechanic) and later a sprint he can unlock. This leads to the enemies often using hit-and-run tactics on you, quickly darting back before you can get a good swing at them. They’re not super difficult to beat but this does mean you have to sink a frustrating amount of time into getting rid of them so you can move on.

You also have the option to incapacitate them from behind with a solid bonk to the head but the game clearly isn’t built around stealth either. The enemies are very sensitive and if they even so much look somewhat in your direction, they’re gonna see you and act accordingly.

From Scraps To Scrapper

You can save, buy supplies, craft items and upgrade weapons at small refrigerator-looking devices scattered across the world. This is another interesting aspect of the game as you’ll be running out of ammunition and consumables a lot. Crafting materials can be scarce and enemies don’t drop them as often as you’d think, so stopping by these safe points and making the most of what you have is a big part of the game. Don’t forget to save your progress as well, because the auto-save function can be brutal sometimes when picking the latest checkpoint. 

The game clearly wants you to make use of the safe points. Even though you don’t have enough materials, there’s an option to disassemble some items which can add a lot more materials that you need to craft or upgrade weapons compared to when exploring. You can also assemble new weapons although you need to find the blueprints to build them first. These are well hidden and missable if you just focus on progressing the story, making them the best incentive to explore the area and offer some replay value for later playthroughs. 

Atomic Heart also has an item management system similar to Resident Evil where you need to make sure everything you have can be carried in your backpack. The crafting as a whole works pretty well and does force the player to put some pretty deep thought into what’s worth taking with them to the next area, more ammo, more healing items, a new weapon? It’s up to you. 

Atomic Heart

It’s hard not to look at Atomic Heart without comparing it to Bioshock or another immersive sim FPS Game but that’s not a bad thing. If you’re looking for a new trek through a vintage early 20th-century dystopian fortress, Mundfish’s new outing will certainly scratch that itch.

It’s not quite as polished as Bioshock with the thinner story and clunky semi-open world but what it does well, it truly excels at. The mixture of melee and ranged combat from the skills of your glove make for a fun mix-and-match style of gameplay that’ll keep you excited as the hoards of manic machines keep coming at you and crafting elements just further add to that excitement as you look to see what you can build next. Atomic Heart isn’t mind-blowing but it’s a promising start that I think has the potential to become a bigger IP with the right nuts and bolts.

Atomic Heart will launch for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, and PC on the 21st of February 2023.

The game code was provided by the publisher. The title was reviewed on PC.

For more information on the game, check out our review with the game’s director and CEO Robert Bagratuni.

Atomic Heart

Publisher: Focus Entertainment

Developer: Mundfish

Release Date: 2023-02-21

Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S

Welcome to a utopian world of wonders and perfection, in which humans live in harmony with their loyal and fervent robots. Well, that's how it used to be. With the launch of the latest robot-control system mere days away, only a tragic accident or a global conspiracy could disrupt it… The unstoppable course of technology along with secret experiments have brought rise to mutant creatures, terrifying machines, and superpowered robots—all suddenly rebelling against their creators. Only you can stop them and find out what lies behind the idealized world.

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