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Sum-Up

In-depth analysis further down.


🟩 Pros
🟥 Cons



- Highly satisfying gunplay and melee combat: both have realistic handling, good weight behind hits and solid feedback from hits taken by both enemies and yourself.
- Compelling exploration that rewards meticulous looting and going off the beaten path. Many Easter eggs, secrets and optional areas are scattered throughout.
- Exceptional visuals / art direction that feature meticulously-designed environments consistently, despite the world’s large scale and high location density.
- Good variety of gameplay that alternates exploration, puzzle-solving, combat and story-related content (lore etc.), so that none of them become repetitive.
- Excellent optimization for the graphics it delivers. I managed to run maxed settings, constant 60 FPS on a four-years-old machine in 1440p.
- Dommy robo mommy.


- Underwhelming, predictable story that uses way too many stale tropes, alongside a cringeworthy, unremarkable, one-sided protagonist.
- Difficulty curve becomes too forgiving after early game due to high power creep of weapons, abilities and passive perks compared to the threats you’ll encounter.
- Even if weapons and abilities are well-diversified, only a few of them truly prove to be ‘the best’, leaving many others as redundant or simply worse alternatives.
- The stealth system is a gimmick that you’ll never use at any point; it doesn’t reward you in any way for taking this difficult approach, and has no ‘raison d'être’.





🟨 Bugs & Issues
🔧 Specs



- Certain mechanics aren’t properly explained in the tutorials, resulting in frustration.
- Rarely, you may get stuck in world geometry, forcing a reload.
- Sometimes the enemy repair function may not work correctly.
- Visiting certain locations too early may lead to softlocks in rare cases. Save often.


- 3900X
- 2080Ti
- 32GB RAM
- SSD
- 1440p





Content & Replay Value:
It took me around 34 hours to complete Atomic Heart, taking extra time to explore each location accurately and complete all side content I could find on Armageddon (Hard) difficulty. Content is linear and there aren’t branching choices (except one near the finale) - I see no reason to replay once finished.


Is it worth buying?
Yes. The price of 60€ is expected for this production level, and fair for the proposed amount of content and quality.


Verdict: Very Good
Rating Chart Here
Atomic Heart proves to be a solid Immersive Sim that, despite a mediocre story and cringe protagonist, still manages to deliver fun and exciting gameplay.


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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2943197230

In-Depth

Setting & Writing
In an alternate timeline, the USSR has become a technological powerhouse after WW2, with breakthroughs in fields such as nanotechnology, AI and energy manipulation that far surpass those of our present-day world. Affirming itself as the leading world power, it builds the utopian symbol-city of Chelomey, and nears the launch of Kollektiv 2.0, a worldwide neural network merging man and machine to an unprecedented degree. Agent P-3, the protagonist, attends the ceremony, but things take a horribly wrong turn.
The narrative shines the most in its indirect form, through the visual clues and remains from events transpired before, while it proves mediocre in both lore files, dialogues and cutscenes. The worst offender is your musclehead alter-ego, which not only has the intellectual capacity of a broken treadmill, but is also a ceaseless discharge of cringe, with puns and lines that make Leon from RE4 seem like Socrates. The events are predictable, moral dilemmas get sidetracked, and the classic rushed exposition dump near the end comes as the last nail in this atomic coffin.
Exploration & Secrets
The world is divided between linear and open-world areas, the latter becoming available only several hours later. The sprawl of facilities, complexes and residential areas comprising the freely roamed, although a few may be inaccessible until a specific story point is reached. In both instances, minutely exploring with the aid of your Scanner tool to highlight loot and other important things, will be paramount to accumulate crafting supplies, blueprints and useful consumables, while also discovering files and secret areas from time to time.
It’s satisfying and enjoyable to traverse the world by foot or car - no fast travel so make sure you search accurately. Save points are placed regularly, allowing you to use them unlimited times. The main difference between closed and open-world areas is the enemy presence, much more massive outside, featuring reinforcements and an alarm level system, although your foes can be temporarily disabled by destroying a certain facility.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2944133332
Combat System & Bosses
With firearms, improvised melee tools and polymer-based powers at his disposal, P-3 is a living arsenal. Your limited, upgradable inventory can hold a generous amount of ammo, weapons and consumables to keep you alive in a fight, while powers and abilities only have cooldowns, no other resource than time is required. Energy is used instead to power certain weapons, and is gained passively, with consumables or by striking foes in melee. A dodge system allows you to avoid melee and ranged hits, while defensive upgrades and medkits do the rest.
Enemies range from simple humanoid bots to mechanical horrors with many weapons and moves, and dangerous mutants worthy of STALKER’s Zone. Mini and proper bosses are uncommon sights, giving you fights that won’t prove too tough especially later on, due to your arsenal becoming way too powerful, same for your skills, granting you simply too many advantages for these fights to be as ‘epic’ as they should be. Unless you get caught in an insta-kill QTE - those are crap.
Character Progression & Crafting System
AI-powered fridges, sometimes considerably more horny than expected, will be at your service to craft all sorts of consumables, ammo and upgrade both your weapons and P-3’s abilities -provided you have the needed materials, blueprints and XP, all looted from the world and enemies. These upgrades will add secondary fire modes to guns, improve their stats, specialize them to damage other robots or organics, and upgrade all of your abilities to be stronger, faster, and last longer.
In general, provided you loot thoroughly, you will never run out of anything and be in far excess of materials to make all the ammo, health kits and other stuff you may need. It has to be noted that scrapping weapons or abilities returns 100% of their materials, so that you can try different ones and spice up the gameplay, a good choice that however hinders the replay value, since you can “have it all” in the same playthrough this way.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2944380105
Puzzles & Optional Content
Both linear and open sections feature a generous quantity of puzzles, that range from logic-based locks, to timing sequences, beam redirections, and more than a few unique ones with their own mechanics. None of them is very complex, and they’re accessible even to those who aren’t familiar with the puzzle genre. Testing Grounds (dungeons) are the main secondary content, awarding unique upgrades for weapons and requiring some extra effort to unlock.