In Atomic Heart, play as P3, a polymer-enhanced super soldier sent to repair a robot uprising threatening the lives of everyone in an alternate past Soviet Union. Using automatic flaming rifles, turbocharged axes and lighting guns, fight your way through hordes of robots and mutants while discovering the truth behind the uprising and your past.
Atomic Heart fails to dispel the illusion that it is little more than a Soviet-era communism propaganda piece while creating frustrating gameplay mechanics buried under satisfying puzzle mini-games. Despite rumors of becoming the new BioShock, it refuses to follow what made those titles great.
The Elephant in the Room
Atomic Heart is very pro-Stalin’s Soviet Union. Any criticism it tries to hint at subtly is thrown away in the ending and through overt exposition between the two protagonists. Sometimes through explicit and out-of-context lines that dissolve into “I love the Soviet Union, everyone should live like this.” Throughout the game these ideas are never challenged or criticized and the ‘veil’ is never removed from the protagonist’s eyes. This is how it fails its spiritual predecessors like BioShock and Prey. Despite the system creating world-ending and enslaving scenarios it’s the fault of random flukes among a handful of people. Not the Soviet Union, and therefore its glory and might is preserved as CHAR-les and P3 are quick to remind the player.
In a video game about killing robots, I feel like I am being fed propaganda from the 1950s. Every time there is a system that shows exploitation or greed or questionable scientific ethics, P3 and his glove will start a sincere philosophical discussion whereas P3 serves as a mouthpiece of “huh, this seems questionable” followed by CHAR-les bending over backward to justify it followed by P3 saying, “makes perfect sense to me, anyways have I told you I love the Soviet Union? I have? Well, I’m going to again because it’s just so amazing.” Any criticism of the world is so buried under subtlety that it might not even exist at all. This left me with this icky feeling that Mundfish is making this game for the sole purpose of selling me on Soviet-era communism, and not designing a game meant to provide entertainment.
Though the subtle hints of genetic exploitation and “volunteer” slavery throughout the game and the change of heart made by P3 near the end can be used to give Mundfish the benefit of the doubt, their apology referring to showing “period appropriate” racist cartoons and music in Atomic Heart makes them seem politically questionable, especially considering the main protagonist’s repeated and outspoken love for cartoons within the Soviet Union.
With that out of the way.
The Narrative Sans Soviet Union Nationalism.
The player controls a pseudo-retired soldier named P3 whose defining trait is his potty mouth that comes straight from a 13-year-old boy who learned the words “shit” and “fuck” for the first time. With thought-provoking lines like “How do I get out of this shit ass room?” Who flip flops between praising robots and their responsibility for rising the Soviet Union to power and also despising them with the core of his being. He has the patience of a chimpanzee, but I would too if I had to sit through more unskippable dialogue paced as if the level designers and writers were never allowed to speak to each other.
What makes P3 truly infuriating is that he is extensively and strangely cruel to his life-saving, infinitely useful, cordial, deadly and extremely intelligent glove. Not just a jab here or there that tells the player P3 is a tough but fair go-getter but for some strange reason, he truly hates it and will interrupt it, yell at it, call it profanities and threaten to destroy it constantly in any situation. It makes him exceptionally unlikeable and resulted in more than one awkward head scratch, especially considering CHAR-les, the glove he apparently can’t stand, is unendingly helpful and patient. It only made him out to be a loyalist, roid-raged, jarhead that occasionally served as the mouthpiece for Soviet Union propaganda with brilliantly written (completely out of the blue) lines such as “The Soviet Union sure is an amazing place, isn’t it? Man, am I ever proud to be a soviet citizen! What a country!” Though as frustrating, questionable and eye-rolling as he turned out to be, at least he wasn’t forgettable.
The computer terminal entries, sentient dead bodies and pocket-watch audio diaries could have been a clever way to diversify the game’s lore and provide opportunities for side quests and point the way to secret stashes or easter eggs. Instead, they all just read like the scattered ashes of the writer’s recycling bin. The few that contain mild or overly subtle lore entries are hidden behind piles of boring nonsense that require far too many button inputs to navigate in or out of while you listen to how a janitor wants to propose to a robot or read Cindy’s invite to the movies this weekend. This is such a frustratingly failed opportunity to expand the gameplay beyond hacking and slashing your way through underground compounds rather than devolve into a time waster the player ends up ignoring after the 20th “man, I hate being dead.”
As far as dismantling the system and removing the nationalist veil over P3’s eyes, instead, the game follows along a “good guy was really the bad guy” plot that you can smell from the first chapter of the game. What made the twist-but-not-a-twist-at-all especially insane was the second, far worse twist ending that made CHAR-les a secretly evil “I want to destroy all humans” super goo while attempting to turn the scientist who wanted the enslave all humans . . . sympathetic? With bafflingly little explanation or build-up, it destroyed any credibility it was attempting to scrounge up with the extensive philosophical debates the player had to sit through while wondering if P3 was secretly an insecure robot for how often he berates them. This ending makes whatever the player had to experience and learn to reach the ultimate climax of the story essentially useless as a hidden, second villain you couldn’t stop attempts to end the world on a whim because you happened to be wearing it.
Our Loot
The game provided abundant opportunities for exploration in the form of recently abandoned offices and apartment buildings fresh with the fruits of the Soviet Union’s labor. However, the game defaulted to punishing exploration by hanging alarm-sounding cameras around every corner, forcing the player to constantly use their speed-reducing scan to check every angle or accidentally alert every robot in the vicinity while more are sent careening through the sky. Even after you destroy a camera, half a dozen drones rush to repair it and every robot you just destroyed in less than two minutes. If everything goes right, you are forced to sprint through various compounds and polymer-filled stairwells while sucking up loot like you are robbing the place, and if Stalin forbid you raise the alarm to level two then you are forced to leave the area or become swarmed by a whole army of high-level enemies. This would be a fun and interesting encounter for high-value loot areas, but the game decides that every street corner and outhouse must be protected by the full glory of communism. This discourages any glancing hope for exploring all locations without spending an egregious amount of time babysitting alarm levels and repair bots.
What makes navigating this newfound wasteland a teeth-grinding slogfest is that there is no sprint button. The player only moves at a comfortable speed when moving forward in a straight line. Any other direction and it’s like P3 is trudging through hot tar, which is what I’d rather be doing than juggling a dozen robots while tip-toeing the battlefield at the same time. This kind of movement in a first-person action game turned what would be some interesting boss fights into dodge timing hell while reloading weapons like it’s a Sunday drive or waiting for your energy to recharge like the cord is frayed and the port is clogged with dirt. All the action and cinematic explosion of movement only come from the more dangerous enemies, who can sometimes be extremely agile, which makes playing a character of a vastly different speed unnecessarily frustrating and made encounters a fist-clenching struggle rather than an edge-of-your-seat battle.
The Redeeming Qualities.
Introduced in a very sexually aggressive way is a crafting station found throughout the game. Between bursts of admissions of love and lust the station allows the player to manage their inventory and stash and build or upgrade various ranged and melee weapons. The arsenal the game provides is impressive and contains unique weapons that utilize diverse kinds of ammunition and projectiles with secondary firing and elemental canisters. This is the core of Atomic Heart’s gameplay and is what fuels exploration and looting. Each weapon contains unique upgrades that must be unlocked with blueprints found throughout Facility 3826, and the crafting station will tell you where they are so that you aren’t forced to lift every rock or couch cushion until you happen to stumble upon it. This gives the player initiative to create their own missions and objectives in a way that directly benefits the gameplay. With this system, you are able to design a custom loadout utilizing as much or as little as you are comfortable foraging for. It’s only unfortunate the alarm system made this more of a chore than it needed to be.
As far as character upgrades, allowing infinite refunds to explore new playstyles while slowly building up your stockpile of polymer aided in creating builds that complement your weapon upgrades without stealing your resources.
As for navigating the various solar-punk compounds, the devs were not afraid to include puzzles to break up the intensity of combat while still providing a challenge. Mostly in the form of lockpicking using diverse formats while not overcomplicating with variety that were surprisingly satisfying to solve even after dozens of locks. Some, like the laser puzzles, were deceptively simple while avoiding becoming a pointless obstacle even after the trick was learned. The more complicated level-based puzzles were rarely used twice and included some surprisingly unique designs and solutions that I wish were incorporated more often.
Atomic Heart shot for the moon and missed but wasn’t able to land among the stars. Rather it found itself somewhere muddy and bleak with the occasional gem hidden beneath the muck, and a grumpy ex-soldier who loves saying “crispy critters.”
Final score: 2 out of 5
Matthew has been a lifelong lover of video games since he could first hold a controller, and among his favorites are narrative-heavy, singleplayer games like; Divinity: Original Sin 2, Elden Ring, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Hollow Knight. Matthew also plays tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder and Call of Cthulu. He graduated from the University of North Texas with a bachelor’s in Sociology and minored in English.
