2/5 ★ – jared_c's review of Atomic Heart.

To start off, I don't think I can recommend this game to anyone. For every one thing it does passable, it does about 3 or 4 things terribly. I have a problem where if I put in even a little bit of time into a game, I need to see it through even if it's terrible..and terrible Atomic Heart is. The story of Atomic Heart takes place in an alternate history 1955 where due to a scientific breakthrough, Soviet Russia is the world leader in tech, economy, basically everything. Imagine the Will Smith movie 'I, Robot' but made by hardcore Russian faithfuls, sprinkle in some Bioshock (very heavy handed inspiration) and that's Atomic Heart. Visually, it has some really impressive set pieces and graphics but there is not much in terms of enemy variety. 90% of the enemies you will fight are the exact same weird looking robots with mustaches. The story feels like it was written by some horny edge lord, as the dialog feels incredibly immature, and this is easily one of the horniest games I've played. Everyone knows about the Russian ballerina dolls from afar, but let's just say their designed with some very realistic frontal plots. There's a vending machine upgrade station that basically begging you to sexually assault her. It's very cringe-y. The main character (whose name is P-3?) has a catch phrase I'm assuming the devs wanted to catch on, where he says "crispy critters" WAY too often. It's basically used in place of any reactionary cuss words, jump moments, almost any scenario. If you played a drinking game of taking a shot every time he says this phrase, you would be dead by the end of the first chapter and not have to finish this game. The developers have stated they are huge fans of Bioshock (who isn't? it's a much better game..), and sometimes way too heavy handed showing their inspiration. Not really much of a spoiler but at one point towards the end you go into a light house, an elevator starts descending, and it opens up to an underwater city incredibly similar to Bioshock's intro. The rest of the game basically consists of large buildings that are laboratories, then an 'open world' that you navigate to get from one of these labs to another. The open world segments are a lesson in patience. Enemies can get repaired (and do so frequently, without really any way for you to permanently stop it), and will do so frequently. By the time you finish one swarm of enemies, they first few may have already been repaired and will start attacking you again. There are cars you can use to drive between these labs, but it's like driving on a thick sheet of ice and your car can either run over a multitude of enemies, or it will completely flip and fly through the air if you hit an empty cardboard box. It feels completely random as to what will happen hitting anything with your car. They added a patch midway through my play through that added basically a performance mode to the game, adding a higher frame rate for bumping down graphics a little bit. I didn't notice too much of a difference between the two modes. Performance wise it's passable, nothing too poor or great apart from one segment where I thought I would need to completely restart my console. In the middle of a large room with three enemies attacking me, the fps dropped to probably 5. It would stutter completely to the point I would think it froze, would fast forward for a few seconds, then freeze/stutter again...all while being attacked. The best thing I can say about this game is it's relatively short. My total play time was 22 hours and 22 minutes, but I think a decent portion of that was on pause while taking breaks/eating/etc. I'm not sure how this game has gotten a lot of praise and pretty good scores, as it was a struggle for me to finish it while not enjoying much at all of it. This is even before getting into the devs Russian state ties while they have been invading Ukraine for over a year now. All in all, stay away from this game and thank me later.