I'm going to start with the story of Atomic Heart, in theory at least, that's the most important part. In Atomic Heart, we are P-3, a Soviet Major who is a veteran of previous conflict and an idealist who is under the personal employ of Hero of the State Dr. Sechenov. The year is 1955 and after some new scientific breakthroughs in the aftermath of WW2 (plus the survival of a deadly plague), The Soviet Union has become the dominant power on the world stage. Their use of robotic labour has given them a significant advantage and they're holding celebrations to usher in the new Kollektiv 2.0 which will further connect the minds of the users and form a shared neural network. In the middle of the rollout, the robots go berserk and start murdering civilians. As Sechenov's representative on the ground, P-3 is tasked by Sechenov to hunt down suspected saboteur Viktor Petrov and to help Sechenov regain control of the rampaging robots. Also accompanying P-3 is Charles (pronounced Char-less) an AI that operates through P-3's polymer glove.
Sounds solid right? Atomic Heart borrows heavily from other previous works (mostly Bioshock in the respect the game is set in a post war utopia that is secretly sinister despite a glossy veneer and is led by a motivated megalomaniac that's deceiving the public) but there's certainly potential in that synopsis. You're trapped in a single facility for most of the early portions of the game so you get more news about what's going on in the larger picture from P-3 "bantering" with Charles in exposition dumps (more on why "bantering" is in quotation marks later). This irritated me because although I understand we're seeing it through P-3's eyes, he's constantly behind and unable to properly process the plot because of his predetermined alliance with Sechenov. I was constantly cursing and muttering under my breath when he would progress. He'd defeat a boss, he'd be given the next location to go to, Charles would explain what happened previously and P-3 would just yell at him to shut up because Sechenov is like a father to him and that Charles didn't really "understand" what was happening. Until the appearance of Molotov, it's all just verbal exposition and when it's delivered in such a grating manner, it makes it hard to care. There's very little progression until the climactic betrayal in the initial location and after that P-3 is so oblivious to the larger machinations of the story that it just made me check out. Anytime I'm quietly calling our protagonist a moron repeatedly isn't a good sign for a game. They also pull some real zany plot twists at the end after slow playing everything for so long and those reveals had little impact for me. I wasn't rooting for P-3, Charles or any of the remaining characters at that point so why should I be invested if there's a surprise antagonist? I was way past any sort of intrigue.
Going into the characters, P-3 is maybe the most unlikeable character I've experienced in any piece of media for a long time. He's got scars from his previous life (plus a convenient case of amnesia, my FAVOURITE plot device!) but he's completely loyal to Dr. Sechenov. He's a capable soldier and someone to be feared when he's holding a gun or an axe. But he's in this crazy scenario and he's repeatedly facing life and death choices at any moment and he's so uninterested or bored by it. Charles is explaining what's going on where in the facility to potentially give him an edge and his typical comment is SPEAK ENGLISH or I DON'T CARE or SKIP TO THE IMPORTANT PART. If he's so blasse about everything, why should I think any of this is cool or worthy of my time? I just kept wishing he'd shut up or actually take a moment to consider what was going on around him, it would have shaved a few hours off the campaign. Charles is his Johnny Silverhand style companion, a separate personality that helps him navigate and fight his way through his predicament. I preferred Charles as a character but the relationship is very reminiscent of Cyberpunk 2077 and it was done better in that (this game shares a few pros and cons with that other overhyped mixed bag of a game, including the same voice actor as the main character). They could have had something here if they had some kind of shared rapport or camaraderie but they seem to hate each other until they suddenly don't. The other characters were either one-note or obvious, of course Dr. Sechenov is duplicitous (DUH!), Dr. Filatova's motivations are pretty scattershot (I can't tolerate killing someone but I'm okay subjecting the Soviet populace to hurtful and a potentially dangerous experiments?) and Petrov, Zina, Molotov and Stockhausen barely qualify as multi-dimensional let alone interesting. At most I'll concede that I found Granny Zina amusing in her appearances, I didn't care about her but I did laugh a little when she would pop up. There's a WTF quality to both the Twins and NORA that I couldn't help but be curious about but there's little dimension or real development with them and they're more there to either titillate or shock potential players of Atomic Heart. I didn't see those parts of the game coming, I'll give Mundfish that.
Atomic Heart is a first person shooter and one of the more positive qualities it possesses is the wide variety of weapons and powers available to P-3. The polymer upgrades are heavily influenced by Bioshock's plasmids but they're fun and they give you some breathing room with large groups of enemies. Another positive choice is that you can redistribute completed weapons and spend the raw materials on something else. It saved my skin with some of the more persistent bosses. The actual combat took a little while to get used to and while I was frustrated by some parts of it (enemies are very perceptive and even when you're trying to be stealthy, they'll spot you before you can get close), any negative aspects fell to the wayside compared to the combat in the open world. Once you start exploring the other corners of the facility, there are robots that are sent out to continually fix and respawn dead robots within minutes of them being put down, even if you're still in the area. Unless you have the weapons and the ammo to just spray everyone again and again as you leave and come back to specific sections of the map, this makes exploration more annoying and too difficult to attempt. Add on that the cameras will raise the alarm and call enemies to them and that the cars you use to travel the map explode within a couple of collisions (aka lightly touching anything in the environment minus the enemies you can run over inexplicably), it make traversing the area an irritating slog.
I didn't like Atomic Heart but there were a few things that I still enjoyed. I really liked the design of the bosses (minus the Plyusch which looks like a decapitated mascot that bled all over itself) and a lot of the boss fights were pretty entertaining. I also thought a couple of the puzzles were well designed (most of them weren't but a few of them were interesting). My favourite was adjusting the robot ballerinas in the theatre to show their shadows enacting the revolution.
How do you grade something that had a good idea at the centre of it but they couldn't deliver the goods at the end? I'm glad Atomic Heart found it's audience, despite a mixed critical reception, there's a cult-like following developing around this game. I just can't get there, between the sloppy storytelling, the awkward platforming, the aggravating combat in the open world, the loathsome character of P-3 and the buggy performance on the PS4 (at least the experience I HAD on PS4), it just wrecked any goodwill I had toward Atomic Heart. Mundfish has already announced a sequel and despite the fact I didn't like the original product, I'd be intrigued to see where they decide to go with it. If they could retool and rework large sections of this game with the sequel, with this narrative, I do think they could accomplish something great. I can't recommend Atomic Heart even on sale (I paid the full $90 for it). It's got some standout qualities but you can't get by on premise alone. I seem to be in the minority though and if you don't believe me, give it a shot and maybe you'll feel differently slaying robot nemeses as P-3 across Facility 3826.
