As an ambitious first game, Atomic Heart wears its influence on its sleeve, mostly taking from BioShock, but you can also see shades of Far Cry, and even Watch Dogs, too. It’s not bad company to evoke when you’re an independent studio with AAA ambitions. And at times, Atomic Heart shows and realizes its potential. Unfortunately, all too often Atomic Heart comes off as over-developed in some areas and frustratingly underdeveloped in areas such as quality of life. What’s left is a mixed bag with a good game mired with amateur design decisions.

Atomic Heart, from Russian developer Mundfish, makes a gorgeous first impression. It lulled me in with it’s gorgeous presentation before dragging me along it’s plodding opening sections. I’ve become increasingly less patient for games that take so long letting the player do the thing they’re going to spend most of the time doing. It’s well over 10 minutes before you fight your first robot. The start of the game even has you take an elevator all the way up to the top of a tower, get a car key mere steps from the elevator door, then take the elevator back down to open the car door, futz with the radio and then be essentially airlifted out of the area, I’m all for story and world building but the pacing of the opening is absolutely brutal.

• Related Reading: No Atomic Heart Multiplayer Add-Ons “Planned at This Time;” DLCs to “Significantly Expand” Open-World Territories

Taking place in 1955 Soviet Union, you play as Major Sergei Nechaev, friend of robotics and AI scientist Dmitry Sechenov. On the day Sechenov is launching a neural interface between humans and robots, things go horribly wrong and the robots begin killing the humans. Sechenov tasks Nechaev with helping him get things back to order. The rampaging robots turning on humans is well-worn territory by this point and honestly barring some neat touches here and there, nothing here is all that original, or frankly, interesting. There are some twists and turns, but if you’re even remotely paying attention it’s easy to see where the story is heading for the most part.

The basic structure of the game has you going to four major locations, accomplishing some task and then moving on to the next area. In between these major locations is an open world with lots of locations to explore that provide you with weapon blueprints and upgrades to ramp up your arsenal. Each of these “testing” locations are full of environmental puzzles that were frankly my favorite parts of the game. The problem is the rewards rarely seemed worth it. I managed to get by pretty well using the tools I found that weren’t off the beaten path.

This speaks to a larger issue with Atomic Heart. It’s loaded with ability options and weapons to try and use, but I honestly didn’t really bother. Most of the weapons you find have to be created and they’re created by gathering raw materials to fabricate them at the in-world, extremely horny (yes) vending machine. This means you’ll spend tons of time gathering up materials, and ammo while exploring. In one of the games more inspired gameplay decisions you can essentially Hoover them up from drawers, chests, closets and the like by holding down R1. It’s extremely satisfying now matter how many times I did it.

As far as the abilities go, you have a shock that’s assigned to the triangle button, and then you have frostbite that freezes enemies and telekinesis that lifts them into the air and eventually can upgrade to slamming then down and damaging while they’re lifted in the air. There’s also a Polymer shield that you can use to take the brunt of damage, a Polymer spray that can be used in tandem with elemental damage you can add to your weapons.

Ultimately, however, I stuck with just telekinesis as it was the best all-around ability allowing you to damage enemies as well as shoot them while they’re in the air. It proved entirely effective through my entire playthrough. You can even upgraded so you can lift and slam bosses, which is fortunate because I encountered a bug that would only allow you to use the first power selected anyway.

It’s in combat where I had the most fun with Atomic Heart. Lifting groups of enemies in the air and either slamming them down or shooting them till they blow up was incessantly satisfying and fun. So fun, in fact, that I didn’t even bother with the other powers after trying them all and realizing again and again that telekinesis was still the most fun and effective means of dealing with the vast majority of enemies.

It’s the stuff outside of combat where Atomic Heart suffers from being over-stuffed with variety. Normally, variety in a video game is a great thing but it can also have too much going on. The game is lousy with puzzles. There are puzzles to unlock doors, to move platforms, to power generators and so on. And not just one puzzle, there are several. There are lasers, snapping your finger at the right time, finding a “cookie key,” moving certain lights around to match color coded locks, a lock picking mini-game, moving platforms and on and on. Even better? There are puzzle locks to outside areas that you can easily get to by walking around the side of the building.

The biggest issue is that the game doesn’t really explain any of this well or sometimes at all. And if you miss a tutorial prompt it’s gone forever because the game doesn’t have any way of looking them up. I still don’t know how to add an elemental cartridge to a weapon. I had to figure out accidentally how to use the weapon wheel (it’s holding the square button by the way).

Earlier I mentioned Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs, well, that’s because from certain points you can hack cameras and use them to unlock doors remotely. The game never told me this mind you and when you move the cursor over a camera there is literally no button prompt that says to take over the camera view — another thing I found out by accident by pressing the cross (X) button. Most camera views are useless since you can’t do anything but to view the area. You have to find the one camera that has a view of what it is you want to open. I’m all for games not holding your hand, FromSoftware is my favorite developer after all, but they at least give you a tutorial for what the buttons do.

So what does Atomic Heart truly offer other than an occasionally fun, not at all original, game with too many ideas that aren’t fully fleshed out? Unfortunately, not much. It’s worth a rent or definitely checking out on a subscription service but it needs some more polish and refinement before the good things can surface the way they should.

Score: 6/10

Pros:

• Fun gunplay and telekinesis
• For a AA game it’s gorgeous
• Side content has fun environmental puzzles

Cons:

• Way too many instances where the game doesn’t tell you what to do
• And if it does tell you, there’s no way to revisit those tutorial prompts
• Overkill on puzzles for regular tasks
• The story isn’t original in the slightest

Atomic Heart review code provided by the publisher. The game was tested on the PlayStation 5. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.