When you first enter Rapture in the original Bioshock, Andrew Ryan asks a question “Is a man not entitled to the sweat on his brow?” and then proceeds to answer it with three different locations (Washington, The Vatican and Moscow) and the answer being no for each BUT if the third option was answered with a yes; you would get Atomic Heart. A game that takes inspiration from the Bioshock games and adds in its own little features to make it different. The most obvious being that it’s all about robots going rogue and killing all the humans in the Facility 3826 and being set in Russia.

You play as P-3, Sergei Nechaev, a special ops soldier given the order to escort a prisoner from a prison camp when everything goes wrong. You are attacked and knocked unconscious while the robots rampage about. Once you wake up, you find only robots and corpses scattered all over the terrain. Your order suddenly becomes possibly the last hope to stop this carnage before it spills out into the rest of the world.  You and Charles, the talking power glove, must discover the extent of the damage done to the Kollectiv 2.0 which allows all humans and robots to connect with a device acting as the connection. As you progress through the story, you start learning the secrets behind the facility and not everything appears to be what it seems.

While the story doesn’t really grip you right in the beginning, which is a shame as the premise is interesting, it does thankfully improve as you play further. The only thing wrong with the narrative is the main protagonist himself.  Not sure if it was intentional but you cannot help disliking his attitude and in general douchebaggery to the people around him. While the interactions with Charles can sometimes be humorous, they do make it very clear he does not like machines and is constantly arguing with the glove. While one of the other characters tends to steal the show like Granny Zina, who acts as exposition during times but does it in such a way you cannot help but like her.

As the opening suggests, the game takes a huge chunk of inspiration from the Bioshock series where you can wield both weapons and supernatural powers at the same time. With it being set in an alternate 1950, most of the ranged weapons are based on the time period with the standard pistols, shotguns and rifles resembling the real things but does also include some futuristic weapons such as the rail gun, the compulsory rocket launcher Fat Boy and the Dominator which basically uses the polymer as ammo. As for the melee weapons, they might as well come straight from a Mad Max movie as the only real standard one is a fire axe that you get right in the beginning. The rest all look like they were made on the fly with motorized spinning saws on a piece of wood or the Snowball that looks like an axe and a mace had a child. initially ammo is scarce so you will tend to rely on the melee weapons until you can start hoarding ammo and can even craft more.

While some weapons can be found, the majority need to be built once you get the blueprint. These are normally in chests scattered around the levels or with the safe room. On top of the actual weapon blueprints, you get upgrades for each one that increases stats or adds extra abilities to it. The best thing is that all these upgrades, at least the first upgrade changes the weapons appearance. This is how you end up with even more futuristic and barbaric looking weapons. Part of the upgrade is also the addition of cartridge slots that you can use to add different effects to the bullets like shock, freeze or fire to the weapons they are attached to. These upgrades are done through NORA, which is basically a very masochistic robot that makes every encounter very awkward if there is someone in the room with you. The upgrades are separated into different categories with melee weapons normally having the blades and handle being upgradable and the cartridge slot if added. The range weapons on the other hand have the basics in this regard, barrel, stock, magazine and sight with the additional cartridge slot.

As the opening suggests, the game takes a huge chunk of inspiration from the Bioshock series where you can wield both weapons and supernatural powers at the same time. With it being set in an alternate 1950, most of the ranged weapons are based on the time period with the standard pistols, shotguns and rifles resembling the real things but does also include some futuristic weapons such as the rail gun, the compulsory rocket launcher Fat Boy and the Dominator which basically uses the polymer as ammo. As for the melee weapons, they might as well come straight from a Mad Max movie as the only real standard one is a fire axe that you get right in the beginning. The rest all look like they were made on the fly with motorized spinning saws on a piece of wood or the Snowball that looks like an axe and a mace had a child. initially ammo is scarce so you will tend to rely on the melee weapons until you can start hoarding ammo and can even craft more.

While some weapons can be found, the majority need to be built once you get the blueprint. These are normally in chests scattered around the levels or with the safe room. On top of the actual weapon blueprints, you get upgrades for each one that increases stats or adds extra abilities to it. The best thing is that all these upgrades, at least the first upgrade changes the weapons appearance. This is how you end up with even more futuristic and barbaric looking weapons. Part of the upgrade is also the addition of cartridge slots that you can use to add different effects to the bullets like shock, freeze or fire to the weapons they are attached to. These upgrades are done through NORA, which is basically a very masochistic robot that makes every encounter very awkward if there is someone in the room with you. The upgrades are separated into different categories with melee weapons normally having the blades and handle being upgradable and the cartridge slot if added.

The final part of the arsenal is the use of Polymer abilities through Charles. These are obtained by purchasing them through NORA and can then be applied to the glove to be used. These are normally elemental based as lightning, fire or ice, same sets as the cartridges that can be used. There is another where you can use the Polymer itself as a weapon, the only one not based on an existing element. Along with the attacks, you can use the Polymer to upgrade the abilities or your character with increased health, bigger storage space and such. A nice feature is that you can refund your spent Polymer with no charge and apply them somewhere else allowing you to easily spec your character and abilities as needed and not lock you in a certain playstyle. Character upgrades can stay however as they tend to be the passive abilities.

While the weapons are interesting, what you get to use them on is just as unique. The Robots have that early 1950 aesthetic with big round parts and large eyes. Of course not all of them look like that as the lab techs that you encounter were designed to help scientists so required a little more finesse so they look more human. Although why they gave them a small moustache is most likely to make them look more friendly but they are anything but since they tend to open up their face to shoot you with a laser. All the machines were designed for specific functions like cutting trees and tending to fields so they all tend to have sharp tools at their disposal or the labourers that big and have large limbs that can knock you around. And since they are robots, they do tend to be able to take a beating before being disabled or destroyed.

However, not all the enemies are machines as you do encounter mutants, dead bodies that have been taken over by plant based Sprouts. These remind me very much of the headcrab zombies from the Half-life series as they also replace the head with a monstrous appendage. While they initially move slowly, as soon as they are in striking distance, they can pounce from all fours and knock you down. The sprouts themselves are spawned from a Mother plant that tends to be hidden or tucked away so finding it becomes a challenge in itself but using the scanning ability makes this significantly easier. There are a few other biological enemies about but they are best to be discovered while playing the game.

The start of the game has you running around the Vavilov Complex so the action tends to take place in corridors, small offices in the upper levers and as you get deeper, large open areas where you normally encounter more enemies. You can spend a good few hours in this area as you look for chests that contain valuable resources or blueprints.  This is where they made a decision that I am not a fan of: FPS Platforming. In current game design fashion, there are yellow marked objects that you can use to clamber up or around the walls. While this is not so bad at first, they do increase it by adding jumps across gaps and having to jump off the wall in a 180 degree direction. The biggest issue is that this does not always happen automatically and requires a button push which can lead to frustrating times when trying to latch on to something to get to chests and items. While most of the crafting materials can be found from defeated enemies or searching the various desks and cupboards, which is made easier as you can just hold the R1 button and move from one side of the room to the other, looting as you go, the chests contain the more specific items required for crafting weapons and their upgrades.

With this being Sci-fi based, they give you an explanation on why you can carry so many items without overflowing pockets and that is the Mary Poppins bag. It’s not called that but works in the same way that the items are shrunk down until you need to use them and unlike the bag, does have a limit to how many items you can carry in it and everything takes up a slot, or two, or three. This allows you to carry quite a few medkits or energy kits that can be used. My issue with this is that ammo has a stack and can only contain so much before creating another stack. While not the end of the world, if you tend to hoard ammo to be used for those times when they are needed, you end up with numerous stacks that take up a few spaces each. I do understand this is to allow the player to only carry what is needed as you can store the excess items with a NORA but you have a futuristic bag that can shrink the objects, you would think it could just carry all the shells or bullets in a single slot rather than spread it out over many.

The game only really opens up once you leave the starting area and have the entirety of the Facility open to explore. This is where the gameplay does change quite a bit as there are machines called Hawks that hover in the sky and monitor everything that goes on with the use of various cameras scattered around the areas. This slows down the gameplay as you need to sneak around the machines and cameras to avoid triggering an alert in which all the robots in the area will descend on your position. If you attack any reboot in view of a camera, the alert level gets pushed up to 2 and this will summon reinforcements and your chances of leaving, and living, get smaller. You can normally hack a monitoring centre that allows you to use the cameras to look around and see what you can expect in the areas and later get access to control centres that allow you to shut down the systems and explore the area at a safer pace.

Don’t assume then that you can just sneak around and clear the area of machines either as the Pchela, small flying robots, are released from domes that look like insect hives when a robot is destroyed and repairs them. This means you cannot ever clear an area unless you are being clever as the Pchela cannot enter some buildings so if you can successfully lure the patrolling robots like the Labourer into a house and destroy it there, they tend to stay dead. Since the area of the Facility is massive, you can walk everywhere or drive there if you can find a working car. The driving is not the greatest, but it’s not that type of game, as the vehicles tend to handle poorly when having to make any type of movement other than straight. This caused me to topple off a cliff or down a path a few times. The cars also tend to be insta-kills for anything that is unfortunate to be in front of you.

While the game is tons of fun and can be said to be another Bioshock, it is not without its own bugs and glitches. Some of them are not so bad that would ruin the game but can be a bit frustrating and distracting. The first one I encountered was that after doing a scan, the equipped weapon just disappeared, and it looked like the P-3 was holding an imaginary gun. This only stopped after proceeding a bit further into the game and entering semi solidified polymer to traverse an area. The latest I had was related to the subtitles and speaking prompts of the various things you can interact with. The one set of subtitles would just stay on the screen and not disappear. Thankfully, this did not overlap when further subtitles appeared but would get pushed up to the top of the screen, initially giving me false hope it had been removed. The last one was quite funny when it started as you can interact with non-hostile robots or even dead bodies that tend to give you speech options and when trying to skip the sentence, it speeds up the talking and sounds like the game is running 100% times faster. This only occurred once I started up the game the next day to continue playing as it had correctly the previous time by just stopping the dialogue and moving on to the next.

While not game breaking issues, it can be explained that this is the first game by Mundfish so they are still very much learning as they go but as a first attempt, Atomic Heart does very little wrong. I was unable to have as much time as I wanted with the game, so I played the game with English language selected and automatic pop ups translating the Russian text all over the place, but it is recommended to play the game with English subtitles and in Russian to get the best experience. The game is a fresh take on the FPS genre that melds together ideas from other series, and they work out quite well with nothing really feeling out of place or useless. The story is a slow burn but really picks up with content after the starting area and can easily keep a completionist busy for a good 35 plus hours. With all that, there is only one thing left to say: Crispy Critters! It pops up a lot.

You can purchase Atomic Heart for the PlayStation consoles from Koodoo using the below links.