Atomic Heart

In their review, Asmir Kovacevic summarized this game as "amazing ideas but lousy execution". That's almost fair: much of it is brilliantly executed. But whether you would enjoy this game or be frustrated by it will depend on how much you care about the bad systems. For myself, I'm glad I played it... but also feel some relief in being done with its aggravating aspects.

I am 100% sold on the setting, and it's presented with fabulous detail and so much delight. Atom-punk alternative history USSR with robots and flying cities? Take my money already! From the first few minutes of the game you could not wipe the smile off my face. Area design, modeling, textures, lighting (usually), and color schemes all get full marks from me. This world captures its concept just perfectly, and anybody familiar with Soviet-era architecture and design and style will gobble up the details. I have quibbles, with some areas being too dark, face animations being a bit dull, and the lack of HDR support. But these are little things. I dare say the presentation as a whole is as close to perfect as I can imagine with current technology. And the music: Soviet-era new wave, banger after banger. Delicious. The design team deserves all possible awards.

The game structure is great, too. Imagine Half Life 2's City 17, with its sprawling underground structures and vehicle traversal through an idyllic countryside littered with ruins. Now imagine Prey (2017)'s Talos I spaceship, with its dense corridors and computer terminals chock full of emails from which you can construe the events leading to the current dismal state. While you're at it, add challenge areas with environmental puzzles, like Portal. Now staple them all together. If all of that sounds ambitious, it sure is. But none of these are throwaway ingredients added just to inflate the size of the game. All of them get the dev's full attention. Some people have criticized the mix of open-world-ish, emergent areas and intricate, directed levels as a lack of identity, but in my view they cohere nicely and allow for a good variety of gameplay. The pace of "switching" between these modes is also good and kept me engaged and excited.

But there's an "unfortunately" here, as was foreshadowed. There are a lots of issues, and they are serious enough to dissuade you from playing.

They started when the protagonist started talking. He's impatient, arrogant, and really quite dumb. The English language voice actor imbues him with absolutely zero charm. I can't be sure, but I think this characterization was supposed to be humorous, or at least satirical. But all I felt was irritation. I hate this guy. And in this game, this guy is me.

And then there's platforming. It's bad. Really bad. It's ridiculously hard to make jumps, grab ledges, or even understand what is possible because the traversal affordances are just not there. A few times I found myself falling between cracks and getting stuck, forcing me to reload a save. You will hate platforming, but even regular traversal is unpleasant. Just walking (you can't run) is clunky. Little bumps in the terrain slow you down or stop you completely, and turning around has a weird deceleration that feels unnatural and sluggish. And when you're in the thick of intense combat and get stuck on a piece of paper on the floor, it's downright infuriating. Controls are generally mushy. Picking up and throwing objects: annoying. Having to come at an object at a specific angle in order to activate it: annoying. Also annoying: dialog can interrupt dialog, and this happens automatically. I once got three voices talking at once. And there are general quest bugs with things not activating when they're supposed to.

I'm baffled that the game shipped like this. The design is so polished, but game testers didn't complain about these basic elements?

Also, the UI is a mess of too many sub-menus, inconsistent controls, and poor indicators. Upgrading weapons (you do this a lot) is just so, so tedious, as you have to keep trying everything to see what is possible. And it also took me way too long to realize that I wasn't collecting healing items because my inventory was full. Again, there was no indication that this was the case. It wasn't even obvious to me that extra things were being moved to storage. Why would they be? I didn't even realize there was a "storage".

It's easy to imagine what went wrong. As ambitious as it is, there was no way everything could have been designed to perfection. I would humbly suggest that with some directorial restraint ("less is more") this game could have been truly great.

All things considered, Atomic Heart is a spectacular experience, as long if you can muster patience for its flaws.