Ever since the first public glimpse at Atomic Heart in 2018, comparisons have been drawn to BioShock, the masterpiece crafted by Irrational Games. Sometimes these comparisons made ahead of a game’s release turn out to be wildly inaccurate when it actually comes out.
Having played over twenty hours of the review build of Atomic Heart, I can testify this is not the case here. Mundfish’s debut project is indeed clearly following that formula, albeit with slight modifications. Even the beginning is reminiscent of the last installment in the BioShock series, Infinite, with the protagonist walking through a seemingly realized utopia before disaster ensues.
Atomic Heart is set in an alternate universe where the Soviet Union achieved incredible technological breakthroughs thanks to a scientist named Dr. Sechenov, who invented a liquid programmable module called Polymer that links robots in a so-called Kollektiv network. This enables the USSR to create all kinds of marvels, including floating cities (again, a nod to Infinite’s Columbia), but the next step is Kollektiv 2.0, the polymerization of the entire Soviet Union, with all human minds joined into the same network through a remote neural interface.
Just ahead of the momentous day, robots suddenly go haywire, instantly killing nearly all humans in the massive Facility 3826, the home of these wondrous experiments. Major Sergei Nechaev, a soldier with a personal relationship with Sechenov, finds himself in the middle of the catastrophe while touring the Facility, tasked with surviving but also discovering what really happened.
Luckily for him, Nechaev is not only well-trained in combat. He is also equipped with Charles, a sentient glove capable of enhancing the protagonist in several ways. Charles can pick up objects (which is extremely handy when going through cabinets and chests for loot), throw them, or install powers such as mass telekinesis, shock, freeze, energy shields, and more. To upgrade Charles, you’ll need to gather polymers, which can be looted from defeated enemies as everything is polymerized in Facility 3826. But that’s only one-half of the character progression and crafting. By collecting metal parts and other resources, you’ll get to craft new weapons or enhance those already owned to add special attacks, deal more damage, be more accurate, et cetera.
While Atomic Heart cannot be considered an open world, it does reward thorough exploration of its environments, whether inside the buildings (which feel more linear) or in the large, open space where there are even cars to commandeer. If you want to unlock the coolest and most powerful weapons, including a rocket launcher, a railgun, and an energy weapon, you will need to look carefully all around the Facility. The best loot is found by infiltrating the so-called Polygons, underground testing laboratories that the Major himself calls dungeons at one point. Despite the name, those I’ve checked out were more like puzzle rooms, featuring only occasional enemies. Each Polygon has three tiers of blueprint rewards (bronze, silver, and gold) based on how far you’re able to go.
Indeed, despite being labeled a shooter game, Atomic Heart is relatively heavy on puzzles. Some are well-thought and will make you feel brilliant when solved, but others are extremely cryptic about what you’re supposed to do. This can be frustrating, especially when Charles is supposed to be extremely intelligent (the glove even asks philosophic questions of the Major at some point) but does not provide the least bit of aid in these cases, even when the player has been stuck for several minutes.
Locked rooms are another place where you can usually find good loot, but again, for some reason, there are three different mini-games popping up when you’re removing locks. Neither is properly explained and while two are very simple, the third is much harder to grasp in its rules. It doesn’t help that sometimes you will encounter this lock even during main quests, possibly frustrating the player right in the middle of the unfolding narrative.
That shouldn’t discourage you from exploring, anyway. Most of the time, it’s a blast, showing the extreme care put into Atomic Heart by Mundfish. There are literally dozens of voice logs documenting the lives of the employees and the inner structure of Facility 3826, not to mention emails to go through in the terminals and, most funnily, Nechaev’s ability to talk with some of the human corpses. That’s right, those who already installed polymers will have their memories persist for a time, which makes for very interesting conversations and sometimes help the Major on his journey.
Of course, most of the time in this game is still spent shooting at things. Atomic Heart’s combat is a lot of fun and a decent challenge when played at Hard difficulty, especially early on. Foes tend to be aggressive, so you’ll need to hit that dodge button a lot to avoid their attacks. Beware that dodging does not make you invulnerable when you’re doing it until you install the upgrade, which I heartily recommend.
In an excellent design choice, you can reset your upgrades at any time and get the full cost back. The same goes for crafting: if you dismantle a weapon or one of its extensions (say, a handle), you’ll get all the resources back. It’s absolutely great for experimentation, as it means you will never waste anything while checking out something new. More games should follow this route.
I went full-in with the electric shock so that it has greatly reduced cooldown, causes enemies to take more damage, and even jumps to nearby enemies without any damage penalty. When there are too many enemies, I just freeze them with frostbite, and if that’s not enough, then a rocket or two will do the trick.
While there’s plenty of robotic foes in Atomic Heart, the game also features organic enemies that look a bit like Clickers from The Last of Us. Nearby mutated ‘Mother’ plants infect with flowers, so you can usually prevent the Clickers from rising by quickly dispatching the Mothers. Robots take additional damage from shock, but organic foes are more vulnerable to fire. Indeed, even different enemies within one of those macrocategories can sport specific vulnerabilities or resistances, so it’s a good idea to scan them beforehand.
The scanner is also extremely useful when you’re trying to be stealthy. Most robots can be disabled by sneaking up to them from behind if you can manage that on your own (there are no upgrades that improve the stealth capabilities of Major Nechaev, oddly enough).
Atomic Heart even has an alert system that will send reinforcements if the cameras catch you, particularly if you’re actively fighting. That said, the aggro range is relatively limited, so you won’t need to worry about being overwhelmed. When pursued, you can hide in houses if possible or even in the save booths spread all over Facility 3826. Overall, the game’s stealth system is not perfect, but it gets the job done.
In the trailers, Atomic Heart’s visuals always managed to impress. The game does look very, very good when playing it on PC, but perhaps it is more due to the art department than the technical one. Ray-traced features like reflections, for instance, are barely noticeable most of the time. On the other hand, I’m positively glad to say that the performance is magnificent. In our last pre-release interview, game director Robert Bagratuni did brag about that, and it turns out he had every reason.
With all of the graphics settings turned to the max as part of the Atomic graphics preset, at 4K resolution with DLSS Super Resolution set to Quality, on a PC powered by Intel i7 12700KF, RTX 4090 and 16GB DDR4, Atomic Heart runs comfortably at over 160 FPS on average. More importantly, the dreadful stuttering encountered in many recent Unreal Engine games is nearly non-existent. It’s been a while since we’ve had a triple-A game running buttery smooth, and it feels really good.
On the other hand, I have to note that DLSS Frame Generation (also known as DLSS 3) doesn’t seem to help that much here. In the reviewer guide, NVIDIA notes that the benefit may vary greatly depending on the scenes. Still, we benchmarked an optional boss fight in the open world and found that DLSS 3 only slightly improved frame rates. Do note that DLSS 3/Frame Generation adds about 10ms of latency to the 21ms registered with NVIDIA Reflex and no Frame Generation, so it becomes a question of whether you’re okay with slightly better frame rate at the cost of slightly worse latency.
There are some aspects of the PC version that could have been better. To begin with, there is no support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays whatsoever, which is nearly unacceptable in 2023. The regular brightness setting is also disappointing because it’s just a slider with no reference logo, unlike nearly all games made in the past two decades or so. Additionally, though Mundfish already revealed as much to Wccftech, it was still underwhelming to confirm that DualSense features like haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, while available on PlayStation 5, aren’t working at all in the PC version despite many games implementing them. We hope the developers will improve these aspects in a future patch.
I’m not quite ready to rate Atomic Heart, having only had access to it for a handful of days, but what I’ve played so far points to a very well-made game that falls just one or two notches short of true greatness. Still, it’s a must for any shooter fan, and it’s one of the most optimized games I’ve seen in a long time, a breath of fresh air given certain disasters released in the past few months.
Review code provided by the developer.
