Atomic Heart impressions: Shock-ingly good shooting

Game details

Note: Atomic Heart arrived to us in the middle of last week, with its embargo falling on a holiday Monday. What follows is not a full review but impressions of the first few hours. There are very light spoilers for the first 6-7 hours of gameplay.

One of the best things a first-person action game can have is a great kick. As a backup when ammo is scarce, or a crowd control tactic, a solid boot adds gravity to combat that can otherwise become detached crosshair clicking.

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In Atomic Heart, you don't have a kick, but the humanoid robots sure do. Give them a chance, and they'll fling themselves into a two-footed jump-kick that hits like a fishtailing Chevy. If you don't dash out of the way, you spin and hit the ground with a thud, slowly getting up from your hands while vulnerable to more damage. It's some of the most visceral melee fighting I've seen in a first-person shooter. And the gunplay has a similar oomph.

Atomic Heart's kinetic combat helps distinguish it from some inevitable BioShock comparisons. Yes, you're a skilled mercenary with a hazy past and a deep secret. Sure, you inhabit an alternate-history world where a Great Man has discovered a powerful but problematic technology that could change humankind. And, certainly, you have both mod-friendly shooter weapons and secondary powers you develop from upgrade materials.

For some people, an estimated 20 more hours of that BioShock style, with newer graphics and competent storytelling, might be recommendation enough. But Atomic Heart is different in a few ways, some of them quite refreshing. The gunplay and melee combat are more impactful, and the encounters are set up with a bit more freedom for strategy. The retro-futurist-Communist-Russian environments and sci-fi setups are wonderfully realized, with a wealth of lived-in detail you can absorb while exploring, gathering, and zapping.

There's a bit too much telling instead of showing and an outsize amount of cursing and crude sexual innuendo, and--seemingly inevitable for the genre--backtracking and this-machine-needs-a-part quests that drag out the game clock. Yet Atomic Heart doesn't feel stretched thin, at least so far. There's a lot going on here, and when the story and button-mashing are balanced, it feels fluid and fun.

Dobriy den, comrade

It's the mid-1950s, and Soviet Russia is not just ascendant, it is literally floating. Helpful robots do most of the work, cities float, and soon every USSR citizen will be linked up to "Kollectiv 2.0" and "polymerized," able to learn entire fields of knowledge in seconds. You are the highly trained, perpetually agitated, endlessly sarcastic Major P-3, and you're joined by the AI that lives in your left glove, CHAR-les. You're on a special assignment to assist the genius who made all this possible, visiting a city floating above the underground birthplace of polymers, Facility 3826. You will lightly interact with this world for at least 50 minutes before you get your first weapon, so it's a good thing it's spectacular looking.

Atomic Heart was five years in the making; luckily, there is a lot to show for all that time. Mundfish put in the hard work of making the humans more human and the robots off-puttingly not quite human. It almost hurts to think of the amount of work that went into designing the onion-domed corkscrew turbines on the little boat that carries you into town, the one you're likely eager to jump off and leave behind forever. The visuals of this fantasy world are an eye-catching mix of mid-century Soviet iron and Jetsons-esque gleam. You'll get back to some of this later, but first, you're due for 4-5 hours of underground tunnel running.