Atomic Heart is a game I recall hearing about around the time it came out, it looked pretty cool but I've seen people both praise and detract it. I held off playing it because I thought I wouldn't enjoy it but I did ended up enjoying it, the game has it's issues but it's a game I can say I mostly enjoyed.
I'll begin with the story and the game makes it clear that it's a story driven game, the interesting part is that it was supposed to be a movie but it got turned into a game. I'd say the story is mostly pretty interesting but it has some major problems when it comes to themes and when it comes to making me think, I'll give the game credit for having me reflect on various ideas in the moment like the idea of giving control to someone who seems to act like they have humanity's best interests and the conversations P-3 has with Charles does a good job at making the delivery of it's themes and ideas feel organic within the gameplay and on top of this, much of the story is very direct and you don't need to read notes or listen to the audio logs to get what is going on within the story so I comend the game for all of this despite mostly playing games for gameplay.
However there is just one major flaw with the story and that is the main character P-3, I've seen a good number of people share their immese dislike for the character but the thing is, I don't think he's a bad character on paper since I've spoken to and aruged with many people over the years who speaks exactly like he does. The kind of guy who is overly rude, sure of himself, is absolutely convinced they are right despite how much evidence to the contrary has been shown and puts way too much faith in one person or thing just even though that faith is ultimately misplaced and it's clear they are being used.
I've seen many act like him, and it's not this that annoys me, it's more so that the story shows very little interactions and shows so little of the backstory between him and Scehenov, the story rarely if ever shows why P-3 puts so much trust in him. There's not many interactions between the two and most of the story is spent with Charles. There's rarely if ever any kind manipulative sympathy shown by Scehenov making P-3's lack of professionalism towards everyone seem all the more forced and irrational.
Another issue is that the twist happens too late in the game to be impactful, it has the Metal Gear Solid 2 problem where a big twist that happens late in the game is too hard to sync in because of it's late reveal, the characters have no time to reflect and slowly change because by the time it is revealed, the game is almost at an end.
I still think the story isn't "bad" by any means but if these issues I mentioned was somehow fixed, I would probably like P-3 more, maybe not as much as Legacy of Kain's Raziel but someone I would geniunely find interesting especially for an FPS protagonist. The fact that Atomic Heart's story has me talking about it for so much of my review does speak a lot for how much I found it interesting, I tend to mostly talk about gameplay.
Speaking of that, it's mostly just "fine". The game is very much an FPS game in the vein of something like Bioshock, there's a homage to it late game and the Facility the game takes place is somewhat similar to Rapture, there's powers for the player to use like a shock ability, upgrades, lots of hacking mini games, exploration and looting and so on. I do however prefer Atomic Heart's gameplay since death isn't a slap on the wrist due to the fact that there is no Vita Chambers and I find combat to provide a more satisfying kick to it especially when fighting the biological mutants.
Combat at first is a little challenging since you have some weaker weapons and ammo is low, I had to use frostbite and telekinesis a lot but I eventually just primarily used the shock ability since it becomes deadly late game, you also get weapons like the Dominator which has unlimited ammo but slowly recharges upon energy depletion, but the axe is still pretty reliable even later parts of the game, I used the shotgun on tougher enemies and bosses and once I found the blueprints for Klash, the game became even easier since I had so much ammo lying around for that before obtaining the gun.
You can also craft healing items and ammo in the locker and you get lots of resources by looking around, so you will rarely run out of ammo or healing items.
Enemy variety pretty much loses steam after a few hours since they all get introduced in the first few hours.
I did play on easy, but the combat with how a staggering animation would activate every time P-3 got hit just annoyed me and made combat less fun, and how enemies can be spongey especially in large numbers could make an "okay" combat system possibly aggrevating so I never bothered to raise the difficulty.
There are some annoying padding and fetch quests but the waypoints made them bearable.
Overall, worth checking out if you enjoy games like this.
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