It’s a huge missed opportunity and had me itching to just fire up the Bioshock remaster instead of continuing on.Ĭompletionists are also in for a frustrating experience as I found the map to be nearly useless and the collection of menus and UI hard to navigate. This leads to even more frustration as scanning is supposed to provide opportunities for stealth that most of the time devolve into monotonous, bad feeling combat that not even supernatural abilities can redeem. Double tapping a button to scan an area feels pretty awful when the loot button is a single press on the same button.
This is particularly frustrating when surrounded by multiple enemies.Įqually frustrating are the default controls that feel fiddly. Enemies will have a red circle appear when attacking to notify the player to dodge but I felt as if it never worked as intended, always second guessing myself. Adding to the ill-feeling melee combat is a broken dodge system that feels like it doesn’t function half of the time. At times I felt I was hitting enemies with a pool noodle rather than a metal instrument, and the enemies also fail to react in an appropriate manner. A big component in P-3’s arsenal is melee combat and traditionally in this genre it’s fairly straightforward and impactful (the thick smack of Bioshock ’s wrench comes to mind), but here it feels lifeless and limp. It brings me no pleasure to say that Atomic Heart falls short when compared to its contemporaries. System Shock was the birth, Bioshock was the crown jewel, Deathloop was the chaotic playground. We’ve seen numerous takes on what I call the “mystical power firearm fantasy” genre that stemmed from immersive sims as a whole.
Now comes the part that could potentially redeem this game: the gameplay. Sadly Atomic Heart does very little with such a framework and its story becomes forgettable at best and frustrating at worst. All interesting topics worth exploring, especially given the real world similarities to situations happening right now. and the relationship between humanity and robotics. The story also attempts to be thematically deep but ends up being about an ocean wide but a puddle deep when it comes to soviet utopias, A.I. It’s unfortunate too because a lot of care seemingly went into the aesthetics of the world and enemy designs. This made the story feel nonsensical, confusing, and worst of all: boring. Instead the game has a tendency to throw players into situations with little to no context without a “hook”. You were given just enough information that the intrigue of discovering more was enough to keep you playing. What made games like Bioshock work is that the storytelling in that particular game presented players with a hook and a dangling carrot of a mystery for them to uncover. Equipped with a polymer “glove” that allows him to wield powers such as electricity, it’s up to P-3 to set things right.Īfter a graphically impressive introduction, players are thrust into this world without any rhyme or reason. system that every single robot is connected together through. Players will take up the role of P-3, a no-nonsense officer sent to Facility 3826 to deal with robots that were once obedient going completely rogue and to figure out what the hell is going on with “the kollectiv,” an A.I. On the surface, Atomic Heart is another power fantasy immersive sim set in a dystopia gone wrong in the vein of Bioshock and Prey, but the game’s myriad of problems hold it back from being anything other than a footnote in an ever crowded spiritual successor landscape. Despite impressive showings and an alarming controversy, the game is finally here and in the hands of players worldwide. Atomic Heart from developer Mundfish is quite the conundrum in the way that I kept asking myself, “how did this go so wrong?” Announced all the way back in 2017, the game has had a long development cycle fueled by player hype and expectation over what the game actually was or what it was going to entail.
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