Atomic Heart (2023)

I don't like to like to boil down a game to "it's like X but with Y", like the old "Skyrim with guns" or "the Dark Souls of platformers" but when they wear the inspiration on their sleeve like this, it's hard not to call Atomic Heart "Soviet BioShock".

There's always a man, there's always a lighthouse

Abandoning this one.

Not because I'm not liking it. I'm not, but thats not the problem.

After playing the intro scene, I simply cannot play more than 15 - 20 minutes without getting a heating alarm from the PS5.

I've got this alarms before while playing games like FF16 (once) and Spider-Man 2 (twice) but this is happening in every game session with this game.

The game suffers from technical difficulties and oddities here and there which takes away from the overall satisfaction i got from this game. If you like a bioshockesque kind of narrative with very nice combat this is definitely for you. A couple of remarks:

• weapon upgrading system is bad: upgrading is tiresome as you need to check for every weapon what is available and if you have the materials every single time you think you might have enough materials for an upgrade.
• The whole hawk system is a bit convoluted for what it really is.
• The test sites are not really talked about in the game if you just happen to find one or look on the map for them they're probably nice but i missed them all.

Aside from all of these remarks i would still highly recommend this game!

Intro sequence goes on and on and on The world design is nice. However, a 5 minute boat ride and 5 minute air ride sandwiching an entirely uneventful 10 minute walk through the city is total overkill in selling the pre-catastrophe immersion.

I finally reached a point of unlocking weapons and abilities and things are starting to come into focus.

Not a fan of the double-tap-and-hold scan control. Not a fan of having to move a cursor over menu items in terminal screens rather than simple d-pad navigation. Why can't we have both? Not a fan of the clunky process for getting info from corpses via voice lines.

Weapons and abilities are neat. I appreciate the bioshock nods.

This game is... rough... It plays okay, but it's nothing special for a Bioshock clone, mostly though nobody shuts the fuck up and the dialogue is just so, so, so bad. Also, the intro is far too passive, it's gotta be what, 20-30 minutes before anything really happens? 20-30 minutes where you either don't control the character at all or can only walk while insufferable dialogue is badly acted...

Jesus, I couldn't uninstall this rubbish fast enough...

Completely aside from the game, which I may play many years from now but don’t have a burning desire, I was curious about the devs. I checked their about me page and it looks like “Artem Galeev, Robert Bagratuni, Evgenia Sedova, and Oleg Gorodishenin” are leading a company based in Cyprus and that includes staff from “10 countries including Poland, Ukraine, Austria, Georgia, Israel, Armenia, UAE, Serbia, and Cyprus.”

But that’s only 9 countries listed? Why not list the 10th?

Sorry, I know the answer is obvious and the war is tragic and I certainly don’t hold individual Russians accountable for anything their government does, but I find this kind of politician’s double speak to be so hilarious in this context.

There is something about the main character that is a huge turn off. He doesn’t actually seem to care about anyone or anything that I can tell. To him, everything in the world is an inconvenience. He seems to treat helpful NPC’s very poorly as if they should just get him what he wants and shut up. He asks a lot of questions but his reactions almost seem like he doesn’t care at all about the answers.

The combat is dull, and the intro is incredibly long. I played maybe an hour but I am done.