But I’d be spoiling things if I said more. There’s also a reason for why they have such a powerful arsenal. And that’s because they’re built to be durable. You see, the robots you fight are very tough. This point kinda bounces off one of the last reasons, but only a little. But for it to be fun, you need a challenge. Amazon has the cheapest copy at $84.99 with free shipping.Anyone can make a game with robots to shoot and kill. For the few things it does well, its ambitions ultimately cripple it, leaving it firmly in the cold shadow of greater titles that it so desperately seeks to emulate.Ītomic Heart launches on February 21st for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC. While I ultimately did enjoy my time with Atomic Heart, I can’t not view it as a disappointment. I’ll go so far as to say if your interest in Atomic Heart is mainly from a design standpoint, buy the inevitable art book instead. As barren as it is, even the overworld, for all its lush greenery juxtaposed by abandoned cars, has a real Tales from the Loop appeal. Like in other areas, it borrows from BioShock’s handbook in delivering a world of several extremes-it showcases capitalist decadence through its lavish marble auditoriums, it also places man’s hubris on a pedestal through its dilapidated laboratories. Other niggles, such as UI persisting throughout cutscenes, were present and kind of undercut the attempt at establishing some tone.Īnother area that Atomic Heart has great success in is its art, although I’m prepared to omit any human characters from that otherwise blanket statement. The frame rate was largely inconsistent, pop-in was always a given, and I encountered a couple of hard crashes in one particularly theatrical boss fight. Sadly, things aren’t quite as smooth for its console counterparts. When I previewed the game on PC, performance was as crisp as you’d hope for. It doesn’t do anything particularly creative with how it structures fetch quests, but I do admire how it creates a sense of place and lets the untapped creativity of Atomic Heart’s design team run rampant. Atomic Heart’s corridor crawling is the game at its best, and I’ll recall the game’s first handful of hours fondly. The former are vast enough, though they’re ultimately void of anything worth seeing, so much so they might as well be a tunnel from point-to-point. The game is a series of overworlds separated by a series of facilities. RELATED: The Twisted Metal Series Is Off To A Stupid Start And I'm Kinda Here For ItĪs I gleaned from my initial preview, the game is structurally probably a bit more like Metro Exodus than it is Halo Infinite. Granted, they’re as plainly signposted as the story’s many “twists” by obvious arenas, but they’re a thrilling showcase of what the game does best and that’s its combat. The game’s most dazzling minutes, the ones that truly sell to me that fragments of the Atomic Heart game I wanted does exist, belong to the magnificent boss fights. I’m a sucker for a shotgun and seeing the shells in Atomic Heart tear shreds off of the several automatons lining the halls-and even shearing them in half-never gets old. I might have only secured blueprints for no more than a handful of the weapons on offer, but they all felt powerful in their own right. The two prongs of attack both feel great and feel like the only area where Atomic Heart might even edge out its precursor. It’s a shame because I feel as though all of the game’s action, if it were condensed down into a more linear experience, could make for a much better game. Atomic Heart’s biggest sin, in the end, is that it forces us to reminisce about what is ultimately a better game. Hilariously, it all feels like another self-sabotage gunning for an impossible gold standard. There’s a particular character whose mad turn feels so unearned that it’s almost insulting. Its cast of characters, from top to bottom, is thoroughly repugnant and the “hero” has levels of vulgarity that should have died when Duke did forever ago. That said, mince and mash is perfectly serviceable in a pinch and Atomic Heart gets the job done, it just never rises to the lofty heights of those it imitates. Sadly, those that expect caviar and get served mince and mash are bound to be disappointed. To put it the only way I feel I can, Atomic Heart is unadulterated, pulp schlock.īased on my preview of the game, I’d expected Atomic Heart’s story to do its best to emulate BioShock’s musings on determinism and free will. It’s got a self-referential, almost self-deprecating sense of humour that surprised me to no end and its nods to the games it so badly wanted to be-see any BioShock game-were so on the nose. Atomic Heart is all at once the strangest, most off-the-wall, most bombastic game I think I’ll play this year.
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