Atomic Heart Gameplay - Everything You Need To Know

 

The game Atomic Heart has a lot of potential in terms of its story and design, but unfortunately it suffers from too much unnecessary content. Despite its unique premise, interesting setting, and compelling player character, the game's best and worst aspects are stretched out to the point where they become unenjoyable.

The game's length, at around 25 hours, is generally a good amount of time for a playthrough. However, the game fails to make good use of this time by including too much tedious and uninteresting content. As a result, less than half of the playtime is engaging, leaving players with a game that feels like a jumbled mess.

In summary, Atomic Heart has the potential to be a great game, but its excessive bloat detracts from its strengths and leaves players with a frustrating experience.

Atomic Heart has an intriguing story with a unique premise and interesting player character, Major Sergei Nechaev, also known as P-3, who is on a mission to stop a conspiracy that could prevent the launch of Kollective 2.0. However, the story becomes convoluted and confusing as P-3 is pulled in different directions and played by various characters, creating dialogue that is difficult to follow. The game's combat and gameplay should have been engaging, but the variety of weapons and enemies end up feeling weak, and bosses all use similar abilities, making each encounter feel repetitive. The open-world sandbox gameplay has interesting elements, but they are infrequent, and the game's attempts at filling the game with content end up creating frustrating bloat.

The crafting mechanic in Atomic Heart is memorable for the wrong reasons, as it is tied to a strange and abrasive bot that harasses the player. The game's dungeons have too many layers, with puzzles that arbitrarily elongate otherwise simple tasks, leading to confusion and forgetfulness of the objective.

The bloat could be removed to reduce playtime and improve the game. Atomic Heart also suffers from performance issues and bugs on Xbox Series X, with players losing progress due to a flawed save system. The game's story, gameplay, and world design have potential, but fall short of delivering a satisfying payoff.

Atomic Heart releases on February 21 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. This review is based on an Xbox Series X code provided by the publisher.