Inspect the underlying mechanical design of Atomic Heart, and it's possible to detect echoes of influence from a distinct set of first-person adventures. Robot revolutionĮven with its messy narrative frame and fractured world design, I had high hopes for the combat. Conversely, Atomic Heart, with its empty laboratories, pristine museums, and crumbling underground facilities, feels somewhat hollow – a 4K facade dressed in a stunning ambient lighting model. They feel lived-in, as if they existed long before you clicked in from the start menu, and will continue to do so long after you leave it all behind. What these environments lack in points of interactivity, they make up for with a stunning sense of time and place. That there was no life – only death and decay spread throughout every nook and cranny.Ĭonsider the worlds put forward by BioShock – the underwater odyssey of Rapture and Columbia's floating castle in the clouds.

Given this framing, I was surprised to find so little to do, see, or find.

You can idle forward gradually if you want to – in both the core missionset (predefined facilities that you move through linearly) and the wastelandish open-area which connects the campaign together. You're given the space to explore environments, which are largely gated by frustratingly oblique lockpicking minigames and the terms outlined by quest progression. Even still, I wish that Mundfish better capitalized on the wondrous world it engineered. Additionally, while Atomic Heart is certainly a good-looking game for the most part, the quality of some of its visual assets (particularly in cutscenes) really decays towards the backend of the story.ĭespite the appearance of a Deus '0451' Ex reference before you've even had the opportunity to work out whether you want to invert the thumbsticks, Atomic Heart was never pitched as an immersive sim. Whether it was collected resources sticking to the side of the UI, swelling audio which refuses to subside after combat concludes, enemies getting caught in the environment, powers refusing to switch, and so on.

I encountered a plethora of frustrating bugs throughout my time with Atomic Heart.

Atomic heart release date time