Atomic Heart came out just the other day and I’ve got to say, the reviews I’ve been seeing are interesting. Many enjoy the game. Many hate it. Others are relatively in-between. I want to preface this by saying that for a newer studio like Mundfish, this being their first major AAA title, it’s quite good in that aspect.
Now look, with that out of the way, Atomic Heart was not my favorite game and to be fully transparent, I didn’t really like this game much. With that being said, I would not outright tell you not to try it for yourself. I truly think this is one of those games that can be loved by some and hated by others very easily. Hence, the mixed reviews you’ve probably seen online already.
But let’s just get into the full review now.
Atomic Heart Has a Great World
Atomic Heart is an FPS action game that stars P3, a special forces member who lives in the USSR. The story takes place in an alternate history setting where the USSR won World War II and became the most advanced country, delving deep into technological advancement via robots and more.
First, this is where I want to talk about one of my favorite things in Atomic Heart: The world building. The setting looks well-designed and quite nice honestly. It’s vibrant, colorful, and full of things to see. I can tell the influence on Atomic Heart and I can see that the devs really understood how to capture the magic in their setting. They really got down the grandiose nature of the Soviets.
The scifi elements were unique as well and as a scifi author myself, I really liked seeing the implementation of the different concepts in the world of Atomic Heart.
The opening was very nice to look at, but it just took too long. I was honestly already bored and wondering when we’d get some gameplay. Typically, you want to start your game out with some sort of hook, but the beginning just felt dreadful to have to sit through, beautiful as it was. It just unfortunately felt like just one massive cutscene.
I did appreciate the vibrance of colors and the relatively nice graphics, but the graphics did falter at some points and at other points, it felt a bit choppy. Though, this seemed to get better as I progressed in the game.
The Story Was A Weak Point for Atomic Heart
I held out hope that I would enjoy the gameplay and enjoy the narrative. Unfortunately, I didn’t really enjoy either of those two things. Nor did I enjoy the pacing. It felt too slow at some points and at other points, it felt simply far too rushed.
The Dialogue is Actually Really Bad
One of the first things that I noticed in Atomic Heart is the dialogue. I don’t know how else to put this, but the dialogue is just atrocious. It’s really bad in my honest opinion. It felt like watching a Marvel movie combined with Forspoken.
P3 is constantly rude and swearing like a 7th grader that just learned what the F-word sounds like. He also frequently disrespects the glove named Charles, which is basically a robot companion of sorts. It’s honestly unprompted.
I mentally compared Atomic Heart’s dialogue to a game like Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and I realized that in some way, Blood Dragon did a phenomenally better job depicting the action-hero movie over-the-top dialogue. It just felt out of place in Atomic Heart. It was unprompted and really wasn’t good.
I recommend wholeheartedly changing the vocal language to Russian and playing the game with subtitles, it is so much more bearable when you can’t really understand what’s being said half the time. If you’re Russian or you speak Russian, sorry. I don’t think it’s that much better.
The Writing Needed Work
The writing is also just as bad as the dialogue. The story was very strangely paced. For example, when all the robots just turned evil and started attacking…that was just sudden and it felt off.
The story was also predictable and just downright boring at times. I didn’t once find myself caring about anything that was happening. It was pretty clear what was going to happen from the onset. I’m not saying that every video game needs to have an original story or idea behind it, but I’d expect just a bit more of an interesting story than what we got in Atomic Heart.
Also, we have to talk about the most annoying dialogue section for me: That stupid upgrade fridge. I’m sorry, I didn’t laugh. Maybe it’s just not my sense of humor, but it felt really bizarre and unnecessary. This is a bit of a nitpick, but it really ticked me off after the first few times of interacting with the upgrade fridge. Some people found it really funny, some didn’t. I fall in the latter category. It just irked me after some time.
Plus, Atomic Heart gets into this really bad habit from the onset of dumping so much exposition and world-building on you that it’s really laughably bad. I find that video games often will leave things for you to read around the world that explain different aspects of the world. You may get a cutscene about the history here and there. Something is involved in the process so that characters aren’t just pointing things out and explaining things as though it were some educational cartoon.
Unfortunately, Atomic Heart just liked to exposition-dump at any point in the game. It led to too much dialogue in my opinion.
P3 Didn’t Really Feel Human At All
On top of this, P3 doesn’t really seem to have much in terms of emotional reactions. It feels like he isn’t really bothered, scared, or anything about what’s happening. He’s just mildly inconvenienced. I don’t know about you, but nothing in his character screams clinical psychopath, so I’d expect some level of human emotional reaction that’s realistic from him. He just constantly seems bothered by stuff. That’s it. His most powerful emotional response is being bothered.
Now, here’s the thing: I don’t expect every video game I play to be some massive and epic story with powerful commentary and all that–but, I expect a video game that has a strong emphasis on story to work a bit harder on said story.
The story wasn’t exactly terrible, but anything good it had felt really marred down by the cringe-inducing dialogue and the bizarre pacing.
I did like the awesome Babushka Zina. She was really cool and was a super strong character that felt really great in the story.
However, I was lacking that connection with any other character. Why did any of them matter? What stakes were involved? Nothing in the beginning helped to establish why the player should care about anything that happens to P3, Sechenov, and others.
Gameplay Was Relatively Decent
Alright, let’s move onto the gameplay in Atomic Heart. Most of the core gameplay elements revolve around melee and gunplay, which is expected from a first-person shooter like Atomic Heart.
Now, the gunplay isn’t terrible but good luck being able to do much of it, especially in the majority of the opening sequences of the game. You barely get any bullets and have to craft most of them in the creepy robot fridge. Thankfully, the robot fridge is normal unless you need something specific that the game prompts you to get.
I really didn’t like feeling so restricted to mostly melee combat, because the melee was average at best. It took simply too many hits to take down the most basic enemy types. It made playing the game on any difficulty other than easy artificially dragging. I heard some people say to play the game on the easiest setting and it honestly feels much more tolerable to get through. I usually like playing at a harder difficulty in most games, but I just didn’t like how the enemies felt like sponges sometimes in Atomic Heart. That’s clearly trying to artificially inflate the length of the gameplay by inflating the difficulty of the basic enemies.
Still, the gunplay, for what it is, was fine. I personally liked it. The shotgun was effective and fun to use. I think the strongest part of the gunplay was just how smooth it felt. It wasn’t clunky or janky at all.
The second part of the core gameplay is the glove you wear and the usage of that glove. You can equip the glove with different powers like telekinesis and you can even shoot ice to freeze your enemies. This, I think, did add a lot to the gameplay and made it much easier at times. Telekinesis has to be the most effective power to use though. It’s like a free way to get through massive hordes of enemies. You can just lift them up and smash them right into the ground, which is easy.
Biggest Gameplay Issues
One of the biggest issues I had with the gameplay is the fact that there is no ability to sprint nor is there an FOV slider. Not being able to sprint at all makes the game feel a lot slower for no reason. I was honestly shocked, because games from the 90s have the ability to sprint, so how can a AAA game in 2023 not have that feature?
The level design is also frequently very unbalanced. Many missions will toss mass numbers of enemies at you at once, but they’re all the same enemy over and over again. Other missions just seem to drag on forever for no reason. Most of the game is spent telling you to fetch something while P3 complains about needing to fetch stuff as if the game is somehow self-aware of this point.
After you exit the laboratory for example, you have to deal with essentially immortal robots, making collecting necessary resources irritating and boring.
Boss Battles Lacked BIG TIME
There were also lots of disappointments throughout Atomic Heart and the potential for boss battles. There were instances in which it felt like a strong possibility that we would see or get to experience a boss fight only for the boss fight to cease to exist for the sake of a cutscene.
I can see that Mundfish has a lot of passion for this project and I can tell that they cared a lot about this game. Seeing as it is their first AAA title, I can only expect that they’ll go up from here. I say this because as much as some things annoyed me about Atomic Heart, credit given where credit’s due: it’s a solid video game.
It works and had virtually no issues running on my Series X. That’s not something I can say for a lot of other AAA releases from the past few years.
Plus, I can see what Atomic Heart was trying to accomplish. From what I played through, I can tell that Atomic Heart had a lot of ideas and things that Mundfish wanted to jam pack into the game. I don’t think they simply had enough time or enough resources to do so.
Should You Play Atomic Heart? Or Should You Skip It?
At the end of the day, would I recommend Atomic Heart in lieu of my complaints? Honestly, as much as I give the devs credit for their work, I personally did not enjoy Atomic Heart much as I was hoping to. However, I do not think that it’s not worth a playthrough. I would say that if you think this game interests you, then go for it. If you don’t think that this game is something you’d enjoy then skip it. It’s not the most amazing game out there, but I do think that it’s a perfect Game Pass title.
If you do want to play Atomic Heart, I would recommend waiting for a sale or just playing it through Game Pass if you have that.
Buy Atomic Heart
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Zainah Yousef
Zainah Yousef is the author of The Fallen Age Saga and specializes in gaming, social media advice, and reviews. She's been writing all her life and she probably won't stop anytime soon.
