Atomic Heart is a surprising, ambitious, deeply flawed game that at times feels close to greatness.
Four or five hours into Atomic Heart, you'll walk through a door and the game will swing into one of many seamless first-person cutscenes. A man points a gun at you, babbles something about blowing a giant plant to kingdom come, and your protagonist gruffly swears, complains, and sets about fetching the thing to blow up the thing.
Atomic Hearts' narrative-focused opening is like a communist version of Columbia and the grandeur of its sprawling research institute, a utopia-gone-wrong showcasing the best of retro-futurist Soviet robotics, makes for one breathtaking vista after another. But the influence runs far deeper than aesthetic.
One reason for this is how hard Atomic Heart leans into collecting and crafting. Throughout the game you're wearing a sentient super-glove, and everything you point it at will open and the goodies will zoom towards you. Remember the scene in Ghostbusters where the library cards start flying out of the drawers? In Atomic Heart you trigger this effect constantly and so far it hasn't gotten old.
The game pretty much acknowledges this by including a system that refunds all resources for deconstructing any item. The idea is clearly that players should swap around and experiment with playstyles, but the cumbersome interface and its tiny icons mean the process is no pleasure, and most of the enemies don't encourage or demand this flexibility.
In terms of how you actually navigate this place, Atomic Heart offers one memorable and well-used idea: A viscous goop that your character can swim through in order to move vertically around certain environments. This weird-looking substance snakes around certain locales, often asking you to swim loops high above, and provides some magnificent perspectives on these environments.
Things then begin to unravel. No-one is quite who they seem to be, and the various layers of Soviet bureaucracy in this fictional Russia are locked in an internecine war and undermining each other .
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