Atomic Heart

The saying goes "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is". That's at least initially how I felt about Atomic Heart. It had all the trappings of my ...

As a collective effort, you’re going to lose yourself in the narrative, setting, and what’s going on. This isn’t just my favorite game of this year, it might be one of my favorites of the decade. I had one other issue where I clipped into a box and got stuck, and that was the only one I had to restart. There were tons of sprouts and mutants heading my way, and I was able to use the mass telekinesis power to lift most of them in the air and slam them down, killing almost every one of them instantly. Select your weapon, find the thing you want to upgrade, and spend the items necessary to do so. The weaponry you use is decently varied, and the best part is that the system doesn’t feel bloated. You get a few moments to compose yourself and make your way to a pod that will airlift you to the base, but yet again the robots come after you, and after a crash landing you have to pick yourself up and get a move on. Another thing that keeps you engaged is the combat, and it’s a blast. I think some of it is the lifeless, dead-eyed look you get out of them. Because of his work, robots now fill the streets of Russia, taking on the jobs no one wants to do and introducing a new renaissance. It had all the trappings of my kind of game, from setting to gameplay and more, and I’ve wanted so badly for it to be good. It’s a fair comparison too, even with my opinion that Bioshock might be one of the few legitimate 100/100 games in existence.

Atomic Heart has some solid bones in the story and general design, but it is worsened at every step by an incredible amount of bloat.

P-3 will spend a lot of time questioning why doors are so hard to open or why he's even doing a given task, and players will be too. Atomic Heart's story, gameplay, and world design have promise, but the payoff is lacking across the board. [combat in Atomic Heart](https://gamerant.com/atomic-heart-doom-wolfenstein-crazier/) should have been engaging at the very least, but it isn't. Indeed, someone might play Atomic Heart for twelve hours in a single day, and it would feel like they made about 3-4 hours of progress. Perhaps the best way to describe this is that Atomic Heart's entire story is predicated on a choice between two evils, one that is bad and one that is worse, and players are incessantly shuffled between the two. The same thing happens with nearly every dungeon and removing this bloat from Atomic Heart would easily reduce its playtime to about 10–12 hours, and it would be a much better game as a result. It's that the crafting mechanic is tied to a strange, red refrigerator-looking bot, who upon the first few encounters, violently grabs the player, makes obnoxious and sexual remarks, and frequently harasses them. Then, they are tasked with finding four other random objects, which become entire quest-length tasks themselves, and by the end of it, players will no longer remember what they are supposed to do after leaving. Along the way, a variety of secrets and relationships are unearthed, and there are a few exciting moments created out of the chaos. For example, there are a few interesting things to do in the open world like finding new weapon blueprints and an activity called Training Grounds, but they are so infrequent that it eventually becomes uninteresting to pursue them. But in trying to achieve so much, the game ends up adding an equal amount of filler. A special assignments officer assigned to USSR hero Dmitry Sechenov, Nechaev wears an AI-controlled glove named Charles that gives Nechaev someone to talk to and unlocks some special abilities throughout the game.

Developer Mundfish's first-person shooter about a KGB agent in Soviet Russia features fun combat against robots and monsters on Xbox Game Pass — but to what ...

While there is a Detective Mode to highlight useful objects, using it forces P3 to move at a snail’s pace, and the items lose their glow the moment you exit the mode. It can all feel a bit simple: a brutal retro shooter with inventory management and crafting and a macho lead character. For a game where melee is encouraged, it’s far too difficult to clock incoming projectiles or flanking enemies. Melee weapons and guns must be built at crafting stations, after scavenging the environment for bits and bobs. And the crumbling Soviet setting, while glorified in the context of the story, seems to have been built spectacularly for an equally spectacular collapse. Divining what the game intends to say (or doesn’t) about society or culture is particularly challenging, considering its creation. But as I barrel into the core of Atomic Heart, I wonder whether this game is what it appears to be — or if it’s something much more interesting. Indeed, Mundfish’s relationship to the Russian state remains [murky](https://www.eurogamer.net/questions-remain-over-atomic-heart-developers-russian-origins). But as I journey deeper, it helps my curiosity that the characters themselves are likable enough. P3’s main job is overseeing security for various facilities run by Sechenov and the government. The game begins with spectacle, peacocking its world, its aesthetics, its technology. Like those utopias, Atomic Heart’s Soviet nation is failing, under leaders plagued by the Icarus complex in which grand ideas come to naught.

Today marks the embargo date for Atomic Heart, the bizarre new sci-fi game from Mundfish, which has attracted some manner of controversy given its ...

With an incomprehensible storyline, weightless combat, and frustrating first-person platforming, Atomic Heart is left to stand in the shadow of the video games that so clearly inspired it.” [Twinfinite (4/10)](https://twinfinite.net/2023/02/atomic-heart-review-missing-more-than-a-beat/): “Despite what is a promising combat formula as well as the supporting systems behind it when it comes to skills, crafting, and upgrades, there are also several equally frustrating aspects of it that hold the game back. [GamesRadar (5/10)](https://www.gamesradar.com/atomic-heart-review/): “Atomic Heart has a lot of big ideas, but it doesn't do a good enough job with the basics. And my friend Skillup gives it a big old “Do Not Recommend.” This isn’t just my favorite game of this year, it might be one of my favorites of the decade.” In the broader context of the video game landscape where GOTY contenders hit above 90, studios get bonuses at 85+ and anything under a 60 is an utter disaster, I would declare these scores “fine.” Today marks the embargo date for Atomic Heart, the bizarre new sci-fi game from Mundfish, which has attracted some manner of controversy given its connections to Russia.

You'd be forgiven for getting stumped right at the start of this first-person shooter, out now for PlayStation, Xbox, and Windows PC. How to use the scanner in ...

For instance, during the “Made in the USSR” mission, you have to find the “voice, the symbol, and the sprout of the Motherland.” Activating the scanner will highlight the three items — a radio, a hammer, and a plant — you need to progress. If you hold the scanner over a specific enemy, you’ll be able to see a list of their resistances and weaknesses, plus a rundown of the loot they’ll drop when defeated. Whatever struggles you’re having while learning how to use the scanner, know that it’s not a bug (probably).

You'll spend a lot of time collecting resources throughout your adventure to upgrade weapons, craft much-needed healing items, and even invest in skill trees ...

Power Amplifier can be found in the Shok skill tree. Morning Exercise can be found in the Character skill tree. This will come in handy most against higher-health enemies, but it’s worth having in general, as you should be using Shok as often as you can anyways. Resistor Malfunction can also be found in the Shok skill tree. In this guide, we’ll tell you the best skills to buy first to make things a bit easier on you in the opening hours. You’ll spend a lot of time collecting resources throughout your adventure to upgrade weapons, craft much-needed healing items, and even invest in skill trees that will grant you a variety of new abilities and enhance the ones you already have.

Atomic Heart is an upcoming first-person shooter video game developed by Mundfish, a Russian game development studio. We got an early look - here is the ...

The enemy variety is limited, and after a while, the combat encounters can start to feel a bit too familiar. The game features a blend of retro-futuristic design and Soviet-era aesthetics, creating a truly unique and captivating world. The game also features a captivating story, with several twists and turns to keep players engaged. One of the strengths of Atomic Heart's enemy design is that each type of enemy requires a slightly different strategy to defeat. The game features RPG elements, allowing the player to level up and upgrade their abilities. The player can use a variety of weapons, including guns, melee weapons, and even their fists.

Once you reach the surface, you'll have to contend with even more enemies. Robots respawn constantly due to deployed repair drones, and cameras can raise the ...

- After unlocking the door, you can then travel to the HAWK Relay and hack it. Disabling enemies and security in an area is very useful, especially this early in the game. She’ll give you an upgrade to your hacking ability and a blueprint. - Use a camera with a view on the HAWK Relay. - Follow the line and look for a tower. By located security towers, you can find and unlock HAWK Relays, which can be hacked to disable every robot in a large area.

Atomic Heart Review: The first game from Mundfish wears its influences on its sleeve, but can it forge its own identity?

You can take your time and hoof it from place to place on foot, fighting robots and avoiding sensors along the way, but the game will supply you with poorly-controlled jalopies that hasten travel time. However, given how unlikely such a monumental change like that would be, Atomic Heart is destined to be a one-and-done type of experience. It’s a rather basic tale of people in power trying to tighten their control of the world with P-3 standing in the middle. It’s a nice addition, but I honestly don’t have much reason to return to Atomic Heart other than to gawk at its architecture. Once you get outside and into the fresh air, you can feel the developer padding the game time again with an open world that connects all the different stations that make up Facility 3826. In the early hours, the bloat can be seen by all the keys you need to fetch to open doors. Robots, built with a substance known as Polymer that has been the backbone of the Soviet’s successes, have lost control and killed most of the workers at the facility. While that combination might sound ripe for experimentation, the anemic nature of the glove skills can be a real letdown. Certain enemies do have elemental weaknesses that you can learn via scanning, but if you don’t have any weapons boosts that can exploit said weaknesses, then all you can do is hit them with a combination of dodges, melee attacks, gunshots, and whatever glove skills you have equipped at the time. Once I did that, I was able to peel back the curtain on Atomic Heart‘s combat and realized it was rather elementary. The opening moments of Atomic Heart can best be described as a Stalinist’s wet dream with how it depicts its idealized vision of the Soviet Union. With a lot of games, ten hours is more than enough time to draw a clear conclusion about how you feel about it.

A prominent Nvidia RTX showpiece, the long-awaited Atomic Heart, launches on PC without any ray tracing graphics options whatsoever.

[reviews of Atomic Heart](https://gamerant.com/atomic-heart-review/) haven't been all that positive. [Atomic Heart supports DLSS at launch](https://gamerant.com/atomic-heart-denuvo-drm-dlss/), however. [Atomic Heart showed off 4K RTX gameplay](https://gamerant.com/atomic-heart-4k-rtx-gameplay/), hyping its graphics as one of its most exciting features. The lack of ray tracing is sure to disappoint some players, but the feature's prominence in pre-release materials comes as a bit of a guarantee that it should eventually be made available in-game. While the game is bound to find an audience with its Bioshock-like combat and plenty of content — according to the early reviews — some of the features that PC players might've been eagerly anticipating won't be available on day one. While the game has had a long and troubled production, having initially been announced back in 2018, its remarkable graphics have always been one of its most notable features, and developer Mundfish even collaborated with Nvidia to produce in-engine RTX showpieces years ago.

Watch the tense launch trailer for action-RPG, Atomic Heart. Get another look at the game's story, combat, and robots, and meet some of the characters ...

Send those pesky robots to the Soviet scrapyard with this launch-day deal for PC.

You'll need more than just a quick trigger-finger to survive, as you'll have to scavenge for resources, upgrade your skills, and use your environment to your advantage if you want to take the machines offline. You'll have access to combat abilities granted by your experimental power glove and a cutting-edge arsenal, to help even the odds. Set in alternate history Russia, the Soviet empire has risen to power thanks to a loyal army of robots that see to the nation's every need. The pricey premium edition comes with the Atomic Pass, a digital art book, and a pair of weapon skins. Or that's how it used to be, until a robot uprising put the Russian populace at the top of the endangered species list. The Atomic Pass is the biggie here, as it retails for $40 separately.

Atomic Heart isn't nearly as accommodating as most first-person shooter. Beyond just the best starter skills and weapons, this advice should help you start ...

Also, you’ll worry less about the fact that you can only save at save stations. By holding down L1/LB, you can freeze enemies in place for a short time with a steady stream of ice. But you’re restricted in how many consumable supplies — med packs, ammo, that sort of thing — you can cart around. There is no penalty for resetting, either: Sometimes you might have to solve a multipart puzzle, but in backing out, the game will acknowledge that you’ve solved the first part and start you at the second. It’s not always easy to gauge whether or not you can make a jump, but there’s one simple tell that works 100% of the time: If your hand is held outward (as seen in the screenshot below), you can make it. If you’re stumped on one specific puzzle, you can back out, then immediately jump back in to get a randomized variety of the same puzzle.

Atomic Heart's dazzling world design, extraordinary production values, and fast-paced fights make for a solid campaign, but the derivative plot and often ...

On the one hand, Atomic Heart is a good game on its own merits. Sadly, the best writing is hidden in the various terminals throughout the game, which contain most of the worldbuilding and connect other characters to one another. His interactions with the sexually frustrated crafting machine are especially painful, and the rest of the cast isn’t much better. Battles are both dangerous and satisfying, and the diversity of opponents keeps combat engaging. Instead of stealth, hacking, and environmental traps, Atomic Heart demands faster and more reactive shooting to curb the attackers’ superior numbers. The player assumes the role of Agent P-3, an operative under the command of Soviet genius Dr.

Atomic Heart offers a variety of skills and upgrades, though some quickly prove to be more valuable than others.

Combined with Sponge Effect, this skill allows you to soak a hit, destroy the attacker, and use your Energy weapons to focus on other nearby foes. Given the power of Energy weapons in this game, you can easily justify running a shield for this skill alone. Melee/Energy is a viable combo for most of Atomic Heart, so this skill soon proves to be worth its weight in Neuropolymers. As the only “defensive” ability in Atomic Heart, you may be tempted to pass over Polymeric Shield in favor of other options. This incredible skill allows you to lift “heavyweight” enemies with your Mass Telekinesis ability. One of the best AoE abilities in the game, Mass Telekinesis allows you to handle multiple enemies at once with relative ease. I’m not sure why that isn’t just part of the base ability’s functionality, but you will want this skill as soon as possible. Atomic Heart allows you to assign two abilities to your “Ability Slots,” and Frostbite is by far the most useful of those slotted, optional abilities. This skill allows you to acquire additional resources from defeated, frozen enemies, which means you’ll want to unlock it as soon as possible. So while you can eventually gain access to many of the skills in Atomic Heart, the better approach is to constantly change your skills around based on what the situation calls for. It doesn’t hurt that a properly upgraded Shok ability also happens to be one of the most useful overall abilities in the game. You didn’t come here to hear that, though, so let’s look at some of the best ways to upgrade your character in Atomic Heart and the kind of character build you’re ultimately aiming for.

In the Brave New World chapter of Atomic Heart, you will need to defeat the Hedgie boss, activate the Hawk to continue, and complete a mirror puzzle.

This will prompt the game to send you underground to open a jammed lock. To progress to the Exhibition, you need to access the Hawk. After defeating Hedgie, you will be asked to find a way into the complex. The game will inform you that you need to access the Hawk. Once in the main Exhibition park, you will have to defeat Hedgie - the game's first major boss fight. You can do this by climbing up the Volan tower marked by your objective marker.

If you are wondering what the Atomic Heart VDNH door code is, so you can access the display case, we've got you covered with an explainer of how to find it.

Head through the door opposite the locked door, and into a room with a dead body on your left and a computer terminal on the right. When you enter the VDNH building in Atomic Heart, after taking a left and following the corridor, you'll come to a door with a lock on the outside and an interface with various buttons. [Atomic Heart](/atomic-heart/)'s key locations, there are side paths where you can grab different collectibles or find resources for crafting, meaning sometimes it's worth it to take the time to explore.

The Atomic Heart HAWK system controls overworld security via Dandelion Cameras, alert levels, robotic reinforcements, relay towers and Pchelas.

However, this is usually a sidequest and it's entirely possible to get around the area without doing so, with a mixture of intelligence, stealth and firepower. Opening them is enough of a process that you should only bother if you're going to be running back and forth to do secondary elements. - A HAWK relay, or Volan, is a small tower with a glass dome that links the HAWK to all the Dandelion Cameras in the area. The end goal of being in an area should be to overload the relay at a terminal, which will render it safe. - HAWK Terminals are small computers in booths used to control the HAWKs themselves from ground level, usually situated beneath the HAWK itself. [Atomic Heart](https://www.gamesradar.com/atomic-heart-guide/) doesn't explain especially well at first, often leaving players feeling rather flummoxed and intimidated by the tangle of mechanics and hostile robots that have to be carefully navigated.

Mundfish's 'Atomic Heart' launched without ray tracing, even though Nvidia has bragged about its RTX options since 2018.

Even on an RTX 3060, performance with DLSS Quality mode and the Atomic preset averaged over 100 fps at 1440p Atomic — though not in the opening sequence, where it was in the 50–80 fps range. We did a quick test of the game running on and Even 1440p remained playable, with the indoor areas in the early part of the game staying well above 60 fps — 4K dropped to about 40 fps, though. "Atomic Heart is a fantastic looking game and we are very pleased with what Mundfish was able to accomplish," Nvidia's director of global PR, Bryan Del Rizzo, told Tom's Hardware. 9, Mundfish founder and Atomic Heart director Robert Bagratuni said the game, which takes place in a alternate universe Soviet utopia, that "consoles will not support RT for now, but we strive to give our players the best and most optimized visual experience possible." Mundfish's Atomic Heart is releasing today, but without a feature that the developer and Nvidia have been pushing for years: ray tracing.

Atomic Heart is out on PC, and despite being a showcase of next-gen gaming tech, it runs shockingly well on a wide range of hardware.

[RTX 4090](https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-review/), I was between 120 frames per second (fps) and 165 fps where my [Alienware 34 QD-OLED](https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/alienware-34-qd-oled-aw3423dw-review/) tops out with the highest Atomic preset. [Steam Deck Verified games](https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/steam-deck-verified-games/), but it currently has a Playable status. You can turn on FSR, either through the game or through the Steam Deck itself, but I never needed to. Because the game is so well-optimized, features like DLSS and FSR feel less like a crutch and more like the free performance boost they were intended as. It’s not nearly as fast as [Marvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales](https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-dlss-spider-man-miles-morales-pc/), so artifacts are few and far between, and they’re tough to spot. The most shocking part of Atomic Heart is that it doesn’t stutter on PC. Even more impressive is that Atomic Heart uses Unreal Engine, which is a game engine notorious for stuttering in I think it was the right decision given how well the game runs and looks without ray tracing, but it’s still a bait-and-switch situation. It would, as ray tracing normally does, add additional depth to lighting and shadows, but the traditional rasterized techniques employed by the game already look fantastic and save a lot in the performance department. That might surprise you considering Atomic Heart doesn’t support ray tracing on PC (or consoles, for that matter) at launch. It’s no secret that ray tracing tanks your performance, and with games like I was confident I’d enjoy the game, but I’ve been burned by too many half-baked, stuttering, buggy PC ports over the past several years to put too much faith in an ambitious AAA title with next-gen tech from a first-time developer.