It’s at its worst during firefights when dude-bro and glove are waxing lyrical on some deep sci-fi themes, but the execution comes off as unintentionally bad. Every story beat is explained to you, then over-explained, then explained some more to the point where it almost becomes confusing because you’re constantly overloaded with a jumble of information.

It’s a Deadpool-style deep dive into exposition, minus the charm of Ryan Reynolds and the wit of a strong script built on top of clearly defined characters. You’ve likely never played a game quite like this before.īut the problem is the storytelling-the player-experienced execution of those plot events-is terrible. The plot of Atomic Heart may be formulaic but the way it plays out combined with Mundfish’s willingness to steer heavily into the weird benefits its overall uniqueness. Well, that and the rollout of a robotic workforce designed to take care of the menial jobs and free up humanity to do, well, whatever it likes.īut as any sci-fi fan might expect, large populations of robot workers are a bad command away from turning on their fleshy overlords, and that’s exactly what kicks off the action of Atomic Heart. The game starts strong with a gorgeously presented prologue of a 1955 Soviet city in an alternative reality where Russia has become a post-World War II global juggernaut care of its creation of a “Polymer” super substance. You play as due-bro protagonist Major P-3 who riffs off his more straight-laced talking super-glove called Charles (no, really). After spending 14 hours blitzing through a main-path run of the campaign, there’s a lot to love about Atomic Heart but its shortcomings loom large. That very first Atomic Heart trailer dropped in 2017 and, honestly, by the time more of the game was showcased, the more I tempered my expectations.

So it should come as no surprise that Atomic Heart has been on my radar for years, given how heavily the initial trailers leant into what looked like a Soviet-themed spiritual successor to BioShock. Such is my longing that I’ve recently replayed the first two Rapture-set games and am prepping for another run at sky-high BioShock Infinite.

Oh, how I long for another BioShock game.

Atomic heart first look trailer music