1.5/5 ★ – PigParty's review of Atomic Heart.

Playtime: 8 hours Abandoned Man I hate that I'm doing this because I've been excited for this game for a long time. Atomic Heart is not good. It's generic in every way possible. The story so far has been uninteresting which is an impressive feat that they made a superpower Soviet Russia experiencing a robot-apocalypse not cool or intriguing. I've tried reading all the emails, listening to all the voice recordings, and I've done everything possible to try to be engrossed in this world. It's just generic. The enemy variety is awesome but none of them are interesting. They're robots. The game has a strong opening. It presents the world to you and the utopian society they want you think it is, but then shit goes bad quickly. For some reason, every cut scene seems to have giant 2-ton hunks of metal falling on the protagonist yet not killing or injuring him. It's so overused that I'm over that shtick and I'm only 7 hours in. Part of my problem is the story/cutscenes feel like I'm watching one of the recent Fast & Furious movies because they have the protagonist surviving incredibly deadly falls, massive things falling on him, etc. and he comes away without a scratch. It breaks my suspension of disbelief its so absurd. It doesn't make it feel like the protagonist is just a badass. It portrays him as lucky, not proactively doing anything to ensure his survival. The writing in this game is something else... I don't think the main-story dialogue is that bad. It's certainly not great, but it's not horrible. At least as far as I got. But every instance where I try to engross myself in the world by listening to NPCs, voice recordings, or reading emails, I end up experiencing the most laughable writing I could imagine. There's dead people with a neuro-device that allows them to talk to you for a little while after they die. A lot of them explain how they died, how the robots turned on them, etc. That would in theory be extremely interesting, and I always had a conversation when I could. But the dialogue from them was so bad that about an hour before I quit the game, I also stopped talking to them, and skipped their dialogue lines altogether when I did have to hear dialogue from NPCs. It's grating some of the stuff they say. The combat is alright but really leaves you wanting more from it. The gunplay is fine but unsatisfying, and it feels almost punitive to use guns over melee. Melee feels fun but again, it at times feels punitive to use it. What made me decide I didn't want to keep trudging through this game was the first experience with the "open world" aspect. The game is good enough in its crafted, mostly linear areas. Everything feels placed in its spot for a reason. The open world part is so incredibly unfun that I decided it wasn't worth continuing what I had thought up until then was a good enough game that I would see it through to the end. Flooding the open world with cameras on every street post and on flying robots is a horrible design decision. Add on top of that an unending brigade of repair bots that will immediately come and start repairing every robot/camera you just destroyed. That's where this game lost me. It didn't do enough in any other area (gameplay, story, world-building, atmosphere, generally being fun) to justify putting up with this.