Atomic Heart’s cool artwork and Soviet robots grace an old-school FPS

If Atomic Heart Its first trailer, which was released in 2018, attracted widespread attention. Mundfish’s retro-futuristic, surreal designs, set to an Iron Curtain tango and featuring featureless furry humans, primitive robotics and 1950s utopianism, created a sensation. The Soviet design was an extravagant, colorful version of BioShock or Fallout. It had a bizarrely happy spin. Naturally, we wanted to find out more.

Just five weeks after its initial release, the game still remains art-led. It was a pleasure to have the opportunity to try it. Atomic Heart’s opening hours, plus a short preview of a later section, recently; it opens with as grand a piece of table setting as you’ll ever see, as the player is carefully shepherded through a spectacular tour of a flying city. The time limit for you to view the artworks of the team must not exceed 40 minutes. Drones with spiral propellers speed around, smiley automatons dispense exposition, sleek aircraft fuselages hang from a vast office lobby and massive art deco buildings tower over military parades.

But this isn’t the paradise we’ve come to play in. Voice-over — which eschews the potentially othering effect of Russian accents in favor of the universal language of macho American video game banter — establishes the player as a special forces operative codenamed P-3, who’s been called into service by this society’s scientist-priest-king, Dmitry Sechenov. Sechenov hopes to usher in a new age with his “neural polymer,” which allows knowledge to be literally injected into the bloodstream and could potentially link all human consciousnesses in the ultimate Communist neural network. But there’s trouble down on the surface to deal with: A robot uprising has plunged a splendid research facility into chaos.

Image by Mundfish/Focus Entertainment

Before we go any further, let’s deal with the elephant in the room: Mundfish was founded in Moscow, but relocated its headquarters to Cyprus at some point last year as the invasion of Ukraine threatened sanctions against Russian businesses. The developer’s website is keen to present it as an international operation, and it claims (plausibly enough, but unverifiably) to have Ukrainian team members. Focus Entertainment in France has been acquired by the developer. Atomic Heart.

Mundfish didn’t make any statements public about the war during that year. This comment was made by the developer shortly after this article was published. on Twitter: “We want to assure you that Mundfish is a developer and studio with a global team focused on an innovative game and is undeniably a pro-peace organization against violence against people. We do not comment on politics or religion.” It’s unlikely to put the concerns of some players to rest.

Whatever the nationality or politics of the people who made it, there’s no denying that Atomic Heart is a deeply culturally Russian game, both in its setting and the way it has internalized a certain flavor of late-’90s/early-2000s hardcore PC game: graphically advanced, brutal, systemic, and cynical in its worldview. Its gleeful use of Soviet iconography, and all the echoes of Russian exceptionalism and imperialism that go with it, is hardly unique — many American and European studios have done the same, and without the specificity or the imagination that Mundfish brings to the material. It will be different by 2023. Some may find it difficult to digest or provide support.

Analyse of how much Atomic HeartIt will be up to the reviewer to examine its political dimension. However, the shadows are of BioShock BioShock infiniteAlso, Half-Life 2, loom so large over this game that it seems unlikely it won’t examine them at all. Secherov is a ready-made Andrew Ryan figure, while the research facility presents the game’s quirkily upbeat Soviet dream as a horrific wreck, almost completely deserted by humans.

Image by Mundfish/Focus Entertainment

Our commando hero is able to face down haywire and murderous machines in the initial stages of the mission while conversing with his neurally connected glove. This glove allows for telekinesis, environmental scans and interfacing with neural polymers, which grant P-3 limited superpowers like electric shock blast. But you’ll need to deal out physical violence too, via craftable and modifiable weapons of a blunt, old-school variety: a heavy ax and a shotgun at first, an assault rifle and an electro-pistol later.

Atomic Heart The game isn’t afraid of being punishingly hard. After the game’s long introduction, the brutal first combat encounter comes as a shock. Ammo is scarce, melee can’t really be avoided, and even the basic android enemies you face, which look like jerky crash-test dummies brought to life, present a mortal threat. There are some stealth opportunities, but this isn’t a refined, Arkane-style immersive sim; it’s more about gritting your teeth, buckling down, and brute-forcing the game’s systems until you get a better result. Mundfish is not designed to overwhelm players with enemies, but it does include long spells of exploration and puzzle-solving as well as gathering crafting resources. They can also be used to upgrade the station, which is a sex-crazed sentient cabinet that speaks to P-3 with a deluge full of porny double entendres that are the most out of touch element in the script.

Image by Mundfish/Focus Entertainment

During the opening hours of the game, you’ll spend a lot of time confined to a claustrophobic underground warren of corridors, labs, and offices, occasionally punctured by giant robotic drilling worms on the rampage. My preview gave me the opportunity to move on to a small section of open-world that I could explore by car. This area consisted mostly of roaming enemies or entrances into more underground areas. The stage was used as a sports arena for the boss fight with the Omnidroid 1000-like, spinning, tentacled, robotic robot. Amazing ThingsIts frenetic attacks were interrupted by brief periods of stillness when it exposed its weak points and just sat.

Atomic Heart is a bit of a throwback, and that’s not all a bad thing; mean-spirited corridor shooters with spectacular art direction used to be ubiquitous, but they aren’t anymore, nor is their particular brand of masochistic fun. It will probably do well on Game Pass, where it’s included from day one, if the audience can get comfortable with its Russian roots — and if Mundfish can get it in shape (the build I played on PC was notably buggy).

Atomic HeartLaunched on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on February 21st, Xbox One, Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series X will go live on February 21st.