izigame.me

TLDR; It's not a bad game, but it's not worth the hype nor the full price. The story execution is mid at best, the english voice acting is rough and the gameplay is repetitive. Outside of its premise and visuals, there's nothing special to it. Get it on sale if you really want it.
If you really want to get this game, get it on sale because it's definitely not worth the full price. The score and the art direction is nice, but it falls short on everything else. While the premise is interesting, the story is poorly executed and there's no feeling of resolution to either endings (if anything, the endings, for me, knocked the game down to a 4/10 at best). The game entirely relies on near incessant info dumping to convey its story and its world, and it does very little to make Atomic Heart's universe feel more alive or immersive. It gets tiring fast both on account of the amount of information being thrown at you and the english voice acting. Said voice acting is at best middle of the road. Conversations feel stiff and unnatural, which I guess does go with the characters— they all feel rather bland. The main character only stands out because of how annoying he comes off across. Outside of that, he very much just feels like your generic action shooter protagonist.
The gameplay gets boring and repetitive fast. Most of the game involves searching and retrieving something, with a few different puzzles and some combat in-between. There's very little variation in the puzzles and while they do show up here and there, it's definitely not enough for this game to have the puzzle tag attached to it. The combat is fairly alright, but again, very run of the mill at best. At worst, it gets annoying when there are repair robots in the area, and even worse when facing the Plyush type enemies, which become repetitive bosses in a few sections. There are few boss fights in the game, but none of them feel particularly fun or rewarding.
And for a game claiming to be open world, exploring doesn't feel rewarding either. Outside of the testing grounds, there's no real incentive to explore, except maybe a few computers where you can read some emails.
All in all, Atomic Heart had a lot of potential, but it fell short on too many aspects for me to recommend the game at that price point (or frankly, at all). Once the novelty of its visuals wear off, it very quickly starts feeling exhausting. It's especially disappointing, for me. I don't usually write reviews, but this was one of the games I was most looking forward to. My mistake was coming in with high expectations, something that felt justified with all the positive reviews. I should have lowered said expectations, because for a full-priced game, I was expecting a lot more than what I got. While it has its highs, it also has a lot of lows which, for me, really outweighed the good. Again, for a game selling at an AAA game price, its quality doesn't reflect that. If you're willing to buy the game at full price, all the more power to you, but nothing in Atomic Heart justifies that price point.