The Revolution will be Polymerized, and you can see it first-hand in Mundfish's debut title Atomic Heart. Will this First-Person Action RPG and its fast-paced gameplay and crisp visuals bring out the proletarian in you? Find out in Game8's review!

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Atomic Heart Review and Score Explanation

Atomic Heart Score Explanation

Atomic Heart Review: Bolshevik Bioshock

Atomic Heart is a great debut title for a new studio, with its crisp visuals, intense gameplay, and great story. Though parts of it remain unpolished and subject to a decent amount of bugs, the game manages to pull through as a unique showcase of Soviet Superscience in the vein of the games that inspired it.

Atomic Heart Full Game Review

Pros of Atomic Heart

Things Atomic Heart Got Right
Visuals and Worldbuilding Bring Soviet Superscience to Life Good Plot Where Everything Is Not As It Seems Fearsome and Difficult Enemies Are Fun To Fight Decent Open-World Action RPG Mechanics and Good Weapon Variety English Voice Acting Is Divisive but Decent, Soundtrack Rocks

Visuals and Worldbuilding Bring Soviet Superscience to Life

The first few minutes of Atomic Heart show you apartment blocks built in the Socialist Classicist style mixed with androids and robots that fly with orb-shaped propellers. As you paddle yourself down a canal, one of the flying robots hovers near you and offers a soda. Once you’ve gotten on land, you walk down sun-lit streets with scientists hawking so-called THOUGHT devices that connect directly to your mind, with moving billboards advertising the things as if they were smartphones.

That’s just the first taste of the Soviet Superscience presented to us in Atomic Heart, and I couldn’t get enough of it. You’ve got creepy-looking mustachioed science androids, you’ve got railguns, you’ve got Kalashnikovs, you’ve got the weird-looking architecture straight out of 1950s Science Fiction but looks rather off because it’s Russian. The design of Atomic Heart is a vision of what the Soviets thought the future would look like, a perspective that is rarely seen, especially in the west.

Mundfish seems to have combined this aesthetic with a modern digital finish, as you’ll see that the menus and computer interfaces you come across in Facility 3826 all have a sleek, minimalist finish. So the end product is something fantastical and weird, but also strangely modern and familiar. All presented with crisp, brightly-colored graphics courtesy of the Unreal Engine.

The game looks outlandish partly because of the intensive worldbuilding that’s gone into this game. In the design of the world, the enemies, and the weapons, you can see that the developers put a lot of time into thinking, researching, and ultimately extrapolating what future Soviet Technology would look like.

Most robot enemies you come across were designed with civilian applications in mind, and your weapons are mostly experimental weapons produced at Facility 3826. The labs you scour in search of answers (and supplies) are full of Soviet propaganda posters and experiments done to conquer space. They're not there just to look cool; they make sense within the game’s world, giving us what is probably the best representation of the Soviet Raygun Gothic aesthetic in video gaming so far.

Good Plot Where Everything Is Not As It Seems

The plot itself borrows heavy inspiration from other immersive sim games like Bioshock and System Shock before it. At the start, Agent P-3 is like Booker DeWitt, taking a ride to see the majesty of the Chelomey Complex, a literal flying castle in the sky just like Columbia. But then things inevitably go wrong, just like in Bioshock, and P-3 has to fight his way through robotic hordes to find the man responsible for the chaos.

It’s hard to speak much about the game’s plot without spoiling the story. But it’s one full of intrigue, peppered with elements of a psychological thriller. By the end of the game, you’ll either make sense of the story and figure out who the real culprit is, or you’ll fall right into their clutches out of ignorance.

Aside from the main story, Facility 3826 is chock full of other little stories, hidden away on computers and audio logs. Yup, just like in Bioshock. I’ve already talked about how worldbuilding contributes to the game’s aesthetic, but here the logs and the audio files make the game’s world come alive quite neatly, even though they’re a common feature in games of the genre.

Unlike other games in the immersive sim genre, Atomic Heart has cutscenes where you’ll see P-3 interact with other characters in the game while the story unravels itself. Don’t worry; they’re not too long. They’re just there long enough to give the game a cinematic quality without overstaying their welcome.

When you play, the only thing I can suggest is to be exacting with details, and trust no one. Not even yourself.

Fearsome and Difficult Enemies Are Fun To Fight

One of Atomic Heart’s selling points before release was its emphasis on melee combat. You fight enemies in first person and have a dedicated dodge button. The enemy attacks, and you dodge. When they glow red, they’ll make a super attack that can knock you down and expose you to even more damage. So you dodge, get in close, and strike back. Later on, you’ll have access to firearms and even more fantastic superweapons, but you'll still need melee weapons to deal with certain foes.

The great thing about Atomic Heart’s enemies though is that each enemy has to be dealt with in a different way. Some are weak against electricity, others are weak against fire, and you'll need explosives to quickly kill other enemies. They also have different attacks. For example, the starter enemies, those VOVA’s with mustaches, try to dispatch you with close-range melee attacks. But later on, they get a shield that you’ll have to shut down by hitting its very center. You think it's easy? Try doing it while they shock you with their long-range electrical batons. There will be Pchelas that fly around as they fire their lasers at you, Belyashes that will try to burn you to ashes, and Rotorbots with deadly spinning blades for hands.

But don’t think that you’re only fighting robots in this game. You’ll have to also fight biological freaks of nature like the Sprouts, which infect dead bodies and turn them into Mutants. The Sprouts are birthed by Mothers who spawn an unlimited amount of Sprouts. So with all the dead bodies around Facility 3826, you’ll have to take them out before you’re overwhelmed…

These enemies, with their unique movesets and behaviors, make combat fast-paced and intense. You’ll have to beat them with your unique abilities, weapons, and quick thinking to survive. Is a Large Mutant taking too many bullets to kill? Get behind it and hit the glowing boils on its back. If a Pchela is tanking your Dominator plasma gun, use a Kalash and see it go down in two hits. Certain enemies are even resistant to firearms, so the only way to deal with them properly is with a melee weapon. Or your fists, if it comes to tthat.

Point is, you’ll find yourself having to think of new and creative strategies to take out the game’s enemies. They’re using their entire arsenal to kill you, so you’ll have to repsond in kind.

Decent Open-World Action RPG Mechanics and Good Weapon Variety

What’s an immersive sim without a decent weapon lineup? Atomic Heart has a total of 12 weapons, 7 being firearms and 5 being melee weapons, all of them with their unique upgrades and abilities, such as the familiar Kalash that can get electromagnetic components, the Fat Boy rocket launcher that you can later upgrade with a revolving rocket chamber, and the Zvezdochka that can hit enemies from afar once you get its second blade.

But to get these weapons to their full potential, you’ll have to explore Facility 3826 and look for Testing Grounds or Polygons where the blueprints for their upgrades are being kept. You’ll also have to get the right materials to craft these upgrades. This is where Atomic Heart stops being an immersive sim and starts playing more like an open-world Action RPG a la Fallout where you raid robot-infested dungeons for blueprints and supplies.

The Action RPG elements are most present in the character progression system, which is simple and elegant with many useful upgrades to spend your limited neuropolymers on. You can give P-3 increased health, make him more resistant to laser fire, increase his energy recharge rate, and give him Polymer-based abilities like shooting chain lightning, freezing enemies in their tracks, or covering them in Polymer goo that makes them more susceptible to fire, lightning, and ice.

The character and weapon progression is easy to understand, but don’t think you’ll have an easy way of getting blueprints or resources. The surface is teeming with robots, cameras, and drones that will repair any robot you destroy. So on the surface, you'll have to be stealthy, and engage the limitless robot hordes only when necessary.

All in all, Atomic Heart's First-Person RPG experience is great, with an immersive and dangerous overworld you’ll have to scavenge for supplies, backed by an easy-to-understand upgrade system.

English Voice Acting Is Divisive but Decent, Soundtrack Rocks

Okay, I’m putting it out there now: P-3 sounds goofy as heck. You can tell that they’re trying to make him sound badass, but his reactions and choice of words (“Crispy Critters!” is plot-relevant, but they could’ve at least thought of a better phrase) make him come off as a clown. Still, he has his redeeming qualities, so his voice acting is not that bad.

The English voice acting is good already for the simple fact that they decided to not use fake Russian accents, like how they did in the movie “The Death of Stalin”. The fake Russian accent is a relic of 90s strategy games and would’ve been grating to listen to for hours in a game like Atomic Heart.

As for the soundtrack, it’s a mix of old Soviet orchestral music, mixed in with Russian rock, pop, synthwave, house, and techno. Like the game’s Soviet sci-fi aesthetics, these are sounds that we don’t get to hear much in mainstream games (The only time I remember any Russian song made it to a popular game was GTA IV more than a decade ago).

Mick Gordon, the composer for the Doom and Wolfenstein games, helped craft Atomic Heart’s soundtrack, and it shows, especially during moments where you RIP and TEAR through hordes of mutants and robotic nightmares. The developers also took remixes of old Russian songs, giving them a new techno or rock vibe. The soundtrack, though sometimes a little too busy during battles, lends to the game’s uniqueness overall.

Cons of Atomic Heart

Things That Atomic Heart Can Improve
Game Tries to be Too Many Things at Once Release Version Crashes, Gets Framerate Drops, Other Bugs Several Mechanics Aren’t Explained All Too Well

Game Tries to be Too Many Things at Once

At first, when you play Atomic Heart, you’ll think that it’s just like Bioshock. Because it is. There are multiple weapons, and a fairly linear map, with the same skill and weapon progression. It even dips into Survival Horror in the early stages of the game, with ammunition and supplies being few and far between.

But when you get out of the Vavilov Complex, the game opens up into an open-world Action RPG. You’ll be thinking, “Well, that’s great! More Atomic Heart!” But then you open up the map, and you find that you can’t put waypoints on the locations you want to go to. You have quest markers showing you your next objective, but you don’t have a minimap or even a compass to show you what's north and what's south.

It's apparent that Atomic Heart tries to be many genres at once, leading to a rough implementation of their mechanics. It tries to be an open-world RPG, but the map is useless. It tries to be a survival horror with terrifying enemies and cramped spaces, but you have a lot of ammo to take enemies on with. It tries to be an immersive sim, though fortunately this part didn’t have too many problems.

I’m not saying these elements are bad, though. The open world is dangerous and immersive, and the horror elements can unnerve people. But you can see the rough state these elements are in because the developer probably ran out of time to polish the final product (note, the game has been in development since at least 2018). Maybe a yhear more in development could've smoothed these rough edges, though few game developers have such a luxury.

Release Version Crashes, Gets Framerate Drops, Other Bugs

During the first 20 minutes, while touring the Chelomey Complex, the game crashed at least three times, showing an Unreal Engine error box. Once I left the Chelomey Complex, the crashes stopped, but not completely. Up until the end, I got two or three crashes, though they were few and far between. This only shows how unpolished the game still is despite its sleek veneer.

In certain locations (like the Vavilov Complex room with the Polymer mixing vats), the framerate can drop like crazy even if you’re running the game with recommended specs. Thankfully, moments like these are few and far between too.

Another bug our team found was the cutting of audio lines from characters whenever you play an audio log and such, making you miss out on important story-related details. We can only hope that Mundfish fixes these bugs in a future patch.

Several Mechanics Aren’t Explained All Too Well

Some mechanics in this game are rather obtuse. The lockpicking mechanic, for example, doesn’t even have a tutorial, while the rhythm-based locks and the color-based locks can give players a rough time too if they're not used to solving them yet.

Some sections you need to pass to push the story forward suffer the same obtuseness. For example, in the Vavilov Complex, you’re supposed to kill Sprouts before they get into the room’s huge cooling fans. But you’re not told that you can keep the whole room operational by using SHOK on a fan once it’s been turned off (Sprouts need to get into three fans before the whole system needs to be reset).

Another case is a puzzle at the VDNH level, where you’re told to use your glove on the magnets near the entrance. Unfortunately, there's no indication that you need to pull the magnets back except for a small insignia on its side. This can catch players off guard if they aren’t observant of their surroundings.

Atomic Heart Story Plot

Atomic Heart is a First-Person Shooter/Action RPG developed by Mundfish and released for the PC, Xbox, and Playstation systems. The game aims to combine quick shooter action with melee combat, and will pit you against robotic and organic enemies.

In an alternate timeline, the Soviet Union discovered technology that puts it ahead of every other country in the world in the fields of robotics, communications, and genetic engineering. You are Major Sergey Nechayev, codenamed P-3, working as an agent for Doctor Dimitry Sechenov. Sechenov is the man who discovered Polymer, the special substance that allowed the invention of all the Soviet Union’s technological marvels.

Among these many marvels is Kolektiv, an alternate version of the Internet invented much earlier than in reality. At the start of the game, the Soviet Union is on the cusp of launching Kolektiv 2.0, which would allow for the linking of both man and machine in a single network, leading to the enlightenment of humanity. However, the launch of this system at Facility 3826 is sabotaged by a so-called “local malfunction”, causing the facility’s robots to go haywire and kill all humans present.

Your mission now is to track down a certain Viktor Petrov, the alleged mastermind of the sabotage. But as P-3 continues his pursuit, he will find himself tangled in a plot where absolutely nothing is what it seems at first glance, and he will have to use everything in his arsenal to survive.

Who Should Play Atomic Heart?

Atomic Heart is Recommended if You Enjoy:

• The Bioshock Series
• The Red Alert Series
• System Shock

Atomic Heart is a good mix of all these games: The story and worldbuilding worthy of a Bioshock title, the Soviet Superscience and aesthetic of the Red Alert games, and the suspense of a System Shock title, all neatly wrapped in a jam-packed 18 to 24-hour-long package.

Is Atomic Heart Worth It?

Buy the Game or Get It via Game Pass if You Want To Save Money

Atomic Heart is a great game worthy of its price tag. You can play it for at least 18 to 24 hours, and even longer if you want to get all the upgrade blueprints for the game’s weapons. However, once you’ve completed the main story, the game can become pointless to replay any further. If you want to get it but don’t see yourself playing it past the credits, then we suggest you at least get it through a service like Xbox Game Pass.

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Atomic Heart Trailer

Atomic Heart Product Information

Title	ATOMIC HEART
Release Date	February 21, 2023
Developer	Mundfish
Supported Platforms	PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X
Genre	First-Person Shooter, Action RPG
Number of Players	1
ESRB Rating	Mature
Official Website	https://mundfish.com/

Michael Mendoza Ab..

Reviews video games by day, tries to write novels by night. He's a sucker for open-world games (Bethesda Fallout titles, Mount and Blade Bannerlord, Grand Theft Auto), CRPGs (Planescape: Torment, Disco Elysium), and First-Person Shooters (Call of Duty, Battlefield, and immersive sims like Bioshock..