Crispy critters! These atomic powered murder robots are lacking heart and emotion. What do you mean that’s a gardening robot? It’s got a saw blade for a head. 

Atomic Heart takes place in 1955 within Facility 3826, a fictional USSR military base built to manufacture robots. Scientist Dmitry Sechenov has created a special substance called ‘Polymer’, a neural network ‘Kollectiv’ and planned to include it in the next version of robots. This would introduce the THOUGHT device, which would allow humans to control robots with their mind.

Atomic Heart is a passion project. From the starting menu to the ending credits, there is deep love and enthusiasm put into every aspect of this game. The opening sequence is one of the most impressive I’ve experienced in a long time. A city that is full of life, colour and atmosphere. The overarching grip of the Soviet Union is prevalent every which way you look in the communist utopia. The world is alive, there are people everywhere. Noise and celebration, everywhere. An hour later, the robots have been turned into combat mode and the protagonist, P-3 or Major Nechayev (which I believe may be a reference to Sergey Nechayev a famous Russian Communist revolutionary) has been sent to capture the escape criminal responsible for turning the civilian robots into murder machines, which have been killing everyone in sight.

It is at about this point that the story ceases to be as simplistic. Atomic Heart is very much a tale of twists, turns and mystery. There is a world here, with many different pulls for power going on. Alongside a world of turmoil is the day to day struggles of the Communist life of the Soviet Union. The desire to explain everything in turn causes what could have been a relatively decent story of deceit and collusion into an absolute cluster of mismatching and converging information. Fundamentally the base story is fine and if you focus purely on storyline progression and really pay attention to what the characters are saying, you’ll start to work things out. Or in my case, just as the game wants, you’ll be completely and utterly deceived by everyone and lead to an ending that I’m not quite sure makes me feel complete. What appears to be the ultimate goal with what is known as the ATOMIC HEART, may or may not actually be the end goal. It’s somewhat unclear in the ending that I got if this concept is what the end goal ever was, or the manipulation tactics used by the cast of adjoining side characters. Whilst the story never made my brain hurt from trying to figure it out, there is a huge amount of information that must be conveyed.

This is where the game falls apart slightly. There is too much information that must be narrated to the character. The game attempts to skirt around this with a large number of unskippable cutscenes, and relatively deep conversation trees with characters; that inevitably don’t actually tell you anything particularly useful. Whilst this makes sense on a character basis, as they are all trying to sway you to their side and their methodology of thinking, it means the areas of the story that need to be explored better are somewhat left by the wayside. There are also moments where P-3 and his AI talking Glove, Char-Les, will engage in a very long-winded conversation during moments of gameplay. Whilst I don’t mind them talking things out a little during slow periods or puzzle sections, the intense firefights are definitely not a time for this to be occurring. The major problem that comes from this, is that whilst you are stressing out and trying to survive the relatively difficult and intense encounters, Char-Les and P-3 are completely non-nonchalantly discussing subject matter to explain the gaps that are forming in the story, or to push an idea of what is truly happening beneath the surface. 

This comes across as a massive disservice, because where Atomic Heart truly shines is the combat encounters. Combat is fast paced, intense and whole lot of fun. Everything is dangerous, and everything is deadly. From the logging robots who have a giant saw-blade, to the Pchela flying drones that will rebuild the destroyed robots. All the way to mutated corpses who’ve been infected by spores that were created by Russian Scientists attempting to create fauna that could help them terraform other planets for habitation. Every encounter requires you to be on the ball. You will collect and craft a series of weapons across the game, and each enemy has a weakness to difficult types of weapons, from melee to energy or ammo based weaponry. The melee weapons are incredibly fun to use, but I feel somewhat under-tuned for the majority of the experience. The game punishes you for wanting to get up close and personal with knock down attacks and enemies that can take a walloping, whilst also restricting the amount of inventory space you have. Which means you’ll need to choose what weapons and ammo you carry conservatively, alongside your healing supplies. Atomic Heart walks the survival crafting route of combat quite well, and the boss fights are truly a test of how well you’ve been maintaining your supplies. If there had been less focus on creating such a complex background world, and a slightly more narrowed focus on the overall narrative direction, Atomic Heart would likely be a far more solid overall experience. The combat is accentuated even further with an incredibly good combat soundtrack. It is quite heavy, so people who are opposed to heavy music may struggle a little with it.

After the initial main scenario section, the world of the game opens up a bit. Essentially turning the game into an open world experience, this too, was a bit of a strange direction. There is a lot of item scrounging to do in the environment, and for those who want to be well stocked on crafting supplies, you’ll likely be exploring the open world a lot more than I did. For me however, aside from trying a little bit to get into the Testing Grounds, which serve as the only real side-content to do outside of the main story, I didn’t particularly enjoy spending time in the open world. This will be entirely dependent on the player. If you enjoy scrounging and survival games, as well as stealth elements the open world is your oyster. You’ll find Chippers, which are audio files of the people who once inhabited the now desolate space, as well as all the supplies, and weapon upgrade blueprints your heart could desire. All in all, there is a modest fifteen hours’ worth of side content, but if you’re pretty up to speed with the gameplay, you’ll likely really only need ten at most.

Visually Atomic Heart is incredibly striking, as mentioned before the opening sequence is one of the best visual experiences I’ve ever seen in a game. The sheer amount of things happening on screen at once, that happen fluidly and without issue is intense. A particular section has you battling off hordes of mutated corpses, leaving the room full of gore and dismembered body parts, as well piles of goo and gunk from exploded enemies. There is also something visually striking in the environment and despite spending a lot of time inside ‘complex’ like areas, no environment feels the same as another.

Atomic Heart is an interesting passion project. It aims to do a lot of things, and whilst it succeeds in the areas it needs to, it could have done far more if there was just a little more focus. The inclusion of the open world and side content isn’t necessary. You could have a pseudo-open world environment, to give you some level of traversal between facilities. But fundamentally the main story, as convoluted as it is, is far better than the weaker side content areas. If you focus predominately on the main story, you’ll finish up in under twenty hours. Whilst it may be a short experience, there does appear to be multiple endings and a lot of hidden stories to uncover if you find yourself falling in love with the game, that will definitely extend the experience hugely. The game was clearly developed by folks who have a real love for videogames and it is one that really needs to be experienced to truly understand.