Atomic Heart Is The Most BIZARRE Game I've Ever Played

well atomic heart has finally arrived a game that I really thought was going to spend the rest of its life in development hell however developers mind fish have proven me wrong and it's seen the light of day five to six years after its initial announcement I'm pleased to hear you don't have any questions for once and yeah look I'll be the first to admit that I didn't have high hopes for this thing but I can say without a doubt that not only is it not a bad game but it's also one of the most bizarre and unique games I've played in recent memory in terms of the tone the premise the writing the art style and the mechanics there really is nothing else like this at least in the realm of the kind of things that I play so if you're hoping for a gorgeous looking action RPG that takes a serious detour into the Twilight Zone combined with some of the finest Euro Jank that money can buy well I'm also more than aware of the controversy surrounding the game but for the sake of the video I'd rather just not involve myself in any of that stuff and just talk about a first person shooter okay so with that out of the way let's finally delve into this thing so we can see if it's your particular brand of vodka well today's your lucky day [ __ ] so atomic heart takes place in the 1950s in an alternate history where the Soviet Union developed a substance called polymer in the 1930s which rapidly increased their technological growth and caused the country to flourish much faster than normal this led to some pretty huge breakthroughs in the field of Robotics which means that they've been able to replace humans with machines for all manual labor and manual jobs freeing up the general population to do whatever they want as a result of this most people live in these Giant floating cities riding pedal boats down canals eating ice cream and drinking soda playing as one of these fortunate folks of kjb Officer named Major Sergey you [ __ ] and the game opens with a prologue in this gorgeous Utopian city which is so insanely detailed and Vivid to look at that it's kind of astounding to think that it's only running on the Unreal Engine 4. it reminds me of one of those old Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s and if John pertly Suddenly showed up and started snooping around he'd feel right at home especially too considering how much some of these robots look like tons yeah yeah yeah been there done that skip the four play bot it also wouldn't surprise me if there's some kind of Doctor Who Easter egg thrown in there somewhere too I mean barely two minutes in and they throw in a very blatant System Shock reference oh thanks Mom uh the code zero four five one okay I understood that reference and then the in-game description for the rocket launcher references a Wayan Brothers movie from the late 90s that's not even scratching the surface of how bizarre this whole thing is and speaking of scratching there's going to be a lot of that combined with the top of people's heads when they try to decipher just what the hell happens during the ending regardless though this first 20 minutes is just stunning visually and pretty damn captivating with some highly detailed backdrops and really unique imagery tips say the least it's a great example of the Retro futuristic art style that we just don't see in video games enough and I think you could spend hours just walking around this area alone admiring how much work they've clearly put into bringing the whole thing to life it's like every aspect of the game when it comes to the presentation is brimming with Polish and every single era you explore has a sense of being real and lived in a lullaby I don't like this in all these abandoned buildings belongings are cluttered and scattered around like people have left in a hurry and then beneath the surface inside all these top secret facilities bloodied corpses and destroyed machines highlight the horrific events that unfolded when all these machines turned from my experience with the game 2 it also runs amazingly well well admittedly with an RTX 4080 still though that is kind of unheard of for a modern game and especially one on the Unreal Engine I think the only thing it has going against it is the lack of an fov slider and the sooner this becomes a standard option for every single third or third person shooter the better nah I've still got work to do here anyway back to the prologue once you're done sites saying you're then given your first main objective which is to investigate a nearby facility got it and because you're on a floating city it obviously makes standard vehicular travel a little bit tricky so instead you and your car are then airlifted down to the surface at which point a Roy Scott's song kicks in [Music] a song which with over a decade and this is just the beginning of a really good selection of licensed music not to mention we've also got old mate mcgordon to compose the original soundtrack there's operatic songs like Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the flowers and then at one point you shoot mutants to Carmen but maybe I'm getting a bit ahead of myself finally once you're out of the city is when things start to kick into action and you haven't even managed to land yet before you're suddenly attacked by hostile robots yeah these machines clearly haven't heard of asimov's Laws of Robotics that was really very rude of them then you get to your feet with little more than an ax to defend yourself with then have to begin the long journey to figure out what the hell is going on along the way uncovering the details to the major shady past which is where it takes a serious nosedive Into The Surreal imagine Special Operations and that's the last question you get and it all sounds pretty good right but the only issue is that from this point on and I think really for the first couple of hours atomic heart just throws so much at you that it really does become kind of overwhelming what a goddamn [ __ ] because the outsider coming to grips with the basic mechanics there is just so much dialogue between in the major and his sentient combat glove named Charles and for these next couple of hours man these two bicker back and forth incessantly like some kind of married couple yeah even lucks like cookies right Charles yes do you like cookies I can't have a state this enough there is so much bandage during these first couple of hours of gameplay it honestly kind of reminded me of when I played through high on life in the way that it just never seems to stop though admittedly this stuff here is far less obnoxious choke on it and die you fat turd guess to the point where there's so much dialogue that you'll be in the middle of a conversation then you go off and do something which triggers a completely new line of discussion inadvertently ending the one you were just on fair enough but it's illogical to have seen that stuff before it's cryogenic right indeed it is there's also probably something lost in the translation here and for someone like me who speaks English as a first language some of the phrases and the way that people talk sounds like it's been either written by AI or aliens laser wall that's some serious security people put them up for a reason if you see one that means there's something important on the other side no [ __ ] the most bizarre Thing by far is the conversations the manger has with another sentient machine called the Nora because it's the it's the interface you've got you've got to use to upgrade weapons craft items and also improve the Major's abilities and early on here Nora just constantly makes these really Oddball sexual references squash your polymer inside me but then at random she just stops being a complete Sex Fiend and responds you like a normal friendly person please select the desired procedure at times the dialogue is just complete nonsense and borderline gibberish like at one point the man just talking to Nora and insults her by saying that she's never done anything to help him which is just flat out incorrect easily it's not like you're actually helping me or anything I mean bro she literally upgrades these weapons craft Samo and does all that other stuff if I can get a good weapon out of her I guess she'll be worth it you're also meeting random NPCs here who are often instantly killed off or don't show up again for a few hours by which point you completely forgot that they even existed yeah so what's your name doc Marissa and you ask a lot of questions then of course you've got absolutely golden lines of dialogue like this this place used to be really nice until everybody got killed and then stuff like this I'm gonna see you real soon too so get ready prick trust me the preparations are well underway there will be surprises dog shut up holy hell I'm wasting my [ __ ] time here one of the solutions to the voice acting is to I guess change it to Russian which is probably the way you should be playing it but by doing that it becomes kind of difficult to try to focus on reading the subtitles along with focusing on the gameplay itself and this kind of pacing just never eases up I mean even late in the game might be in the middle of intense fights while the main characters are just casually chatting to each other without a Caring World or I'd be trying to get past these really tricky platforming sequences while this constant commentary was in the background and distracting me Critters I don't get it why does it have to be so complicated now look I never expected award-winning riding in this thing but then on the other hand I didn't exactly expect hunt down the Freeman levels of dialogue either yeah you're breaking my heart I don't give two wet farts about your relationship thankfully the revelation Nations and the moments that are supposed to shock you still work at doing that but the running commentary from the major and these other ancillary characters it's just kind of dreadful and they definitely needed to include an off button for this constant chatter choke on it and die you fat turd aside from that though how's the gameplay well I've seen this thing being referred to as Russian Bioshock online a lot but outside of an incredibly obvious reference to the game and being able to shoot lightning from your hand atomic heart I don't think is really anything like Bioshock at all I wouldn't even really call it an immersive Sim it's really just an action RPG where you use weapons and other abilities to get the job done you start off out in the Russian Countryside with only an ax and get to chopping down evil robots with pedo stashes but then shortly after that you meet an old lady named granny yeah real creative Name by the way and then you're thrown underground and have to fight your way back to the surface now you're moving through these dank interior environments picking up everything that's not bolted down like an absolute kleptomaniac and having a hacking to lock doors and avoid security cameras not necessarily you're crafting weapons scrimping by on ammo and suppliers and slowly unlocking new powers by spending neuropolymer whatever that is and any that does not so Nora stations you come across eventually you do get back outside again and then the map really opens up at which point it almost kind of feels like an open world game with this giant Countryside to explore and one of the crappiest cars of all time used for traversal honestly man this thing is so dog [ __ ] you can somehow write it off even if it only takes damage from the rear and it's like you're playing the old Grand Theft Auto games or something with flames coming out of the Bonnet to Signal when one of these rust buckets is about to explode still though I assume that's actually kind of accurate to how most European Vehicles perform put it in h this is when it starts to remind me more of the Fallout games exploring the Wilderness and either avoiding or engaging in combat with all these hostile machines while stepping over the corpses of the people who used to live here while you rummaged through their belongings for pieces of scrap again speaking of Bethesda games check out the lock picking mechanic I mean does that kind of look familiar to anyone I understood that reference tommykart does have one Godly inclusion though and that's being able to mass loot you know how in most of these games you need to match the interact button on lockers and tables to pick stuff up well this is one of those games where you hold down a single button and suck up every single little piece of loot like your arms turn into a vacuum cleaner it's just so cathartic too I mean the sound of all those items clicking and popping as they go into your inventory is like a dose of Fentanyl and if your inventory is full excess loot is sent right into storage so you never have to worry about becoming over-encumbered which is a god-tier quality of life inclusion and that's all very handy because you're gonna need all of this stuff for improving your gear at the start of the game when you've only got the ax in the shotgun it almost kind of feels like a bit of a survival horror game you've even got those little rooms that are safe havens where you can save your game manually but then once you start unlocking abilities and getting more weapons it just turns into an action game and although the game has a basic stealth mechanic where you can Crouch and sneak up behind enemies for takedowns it's kind of clear that the best way to play here is to forgo all sub-defusion just go in guns blazing just what I always wanted weapons have to be crafted and even before that you'll need to find the blueprints for them out there somewhere in the wild which as far as I can tell does seem to be randomly generated then to craft the different upgrades for these weapons to improve them even further you've got to go through all these underground training grounds and loot specific chests and that's an entirely different story what the hell is that a special transporter for valuable cargo or comrade the earlier weapons include a Makarov pistol which gets modified more than Vin Diesel's Dodge Charger and because it's a game set in Russia you've got to have the AK-47 when you absolutely positively got to kill every [ __ ] in the room accept no substitutes some of the less historically accurate weapons include an energy pistol which again looks like something out of a Fallout game along with an energy assault rifle a rocket launcher and a railgun the rocket launcher I think being by far the best weapon in the entire game and the railgun something I guess I'll experience in another lifetime yeah because I didn't ever manage to come across enough resources to craft even one of these things in my entire playthrough that's also of course alongside whatever melee weapon you want to use and this is where it starts to get pretty interesting because all of these melee weapons have vastly different ultimate attacks with the fire ax you can do a full 360 swinging this thing out at the same time and then with that Razorback thing you get towards the end of the game you can outright knock enemies on their ass and then melee weapons also have the benefit of refueling your energy bar so if you've got an energy weapon it's more or less giving you a quick and easy ammo refill while you're still dealing out damage and that right there is what's referred to as a win-win I actually kind of regret not doing this more on my playthrough because that setup really does kind of make you Unstoppable because whenever your energy runs low you can just swap out to your melee weapon whack someone a few times and then fill it right back up you're constantly upgrading all of this stuff by spinning all those various components on them and I really felt like I had a pretty good build gone at one point with the AK and the shotgun that I never really felt like I needed to change things up and that's kind of the problem I mean you're really just fighting the same few enemy types over and over so there's not really any incentive to change up your Loadout if you find a setup in a Groove that works early on now aside from just spouting off your name dialogue Charles is also more or less a glove that gives you your superpowers and for these you've got shock Frost Mass telekinesis polymer and shield shock is always active by default and I am a bit underwhelmed here at how this thing has been integrated into the gameplay and I know I said before how the game isn't really anything like Bioshock but for this instance let's use it as a purely visual comparison right seeing as it has an almost identical skill there with Electro body when you hit someone with that Electro bolting Bioshock they're gonna know it and you're gonna know it there's a loud zap sound the enemy you hit starts screaming and convulsing violently shaking from the effect and the lightning itself even acts as a light source sending pulsive electricity across their body however in atomic heart the shock effect is more like what happens after you put on some thick socks rub your feet on the carpet for 10 seconds and then touch someone with your finger as opposed to really feeling like you're Conjuring up this powerful element and rendering these robotic opponents completely useless I guess I'm trying to say that it's just such a piss weak looking effect even once you're upgraded to do more damage and chain between enemies it's also were they disappointing how it hasn't been integrated in the environment either I mean there's countless times when you're moving through pools of water and due to Sheen you'll be able to zap the water to do like bonus damage or something I mean considering half the enemies in the game are robots you'd think there'd be some kind of way to integrate that instead it doesn't really seem to do anything and water in this game is just more of a set dressing in fact the water doesn't even react to the player at all you can walk through the stuff and it doesn't even move and again let's compare this to Bioshock right the water in that game behave like water it had dynamically displaced depending on the player's movements and if you hit it with a wrench or you shot it with a weapon you'd get the appropriate particle effects I don't know man it's kind of funny to me have an engine that somehow two generations older than this one is somehow more detailed nsw out in a comic heart considering just how amazing the world looks overall but then just how little of it you can actually affect I mean you can't even shoot these little propane tanks for easy explosions okay I'll deal with it can someone tell me why is it that the better looking at video game environment seem to get the less detailed and interactive they also become [ __ ] I mean their security cameras every five meters when you're outside but you can't hack into these or even turn them against your enemies you can zap them which is going to shut them down temporarily but if you destroy one a repair bot turns up like two seconds later to replace it there's a Workhorse ability and one you're going to be using a lot shock does come across as being pretty underwhelming yeah what a shock as for the other powers you've got frost which is able to cover enemies in ice however compared to shock this thing is almost too effective and you can even hilariously freeze enemies while they're in mid-air because I guess this world is so technologically advanced that basic physics don't even apply here this works on almost every single enemy type in it more or less just let you have your way with them until they Thor out and you can get into a pretty easy Rhythm here of just spamming this on a bunch of enemies and then finishing them all off quickly with your melee weapon it's pretty good at ordering those robots around Mass telekinesis is also another really useful power now this thing lets you push enemies into the air without hover for a few seconds again completely vulnerable to all incoming attacks after that they'll drop to the ground with barely their dignity left intact but you can get an upgrade for this thing later on which also lets them slam down into the ground so even for the ones you didn't have time to get around to they'll take a beating from this power regardless and again like frost it's another supremely useful power that I had in my Loadout almost the entire time I was playing the game to the detriment I think of the other two Powers polymer and shield now polymath has a pretty big overracking presence in the game aside from being something you can shoot at enemies like the pleasant from Ghostbusters 2. it's also a substance that you can use to Traverse the environment which seems to retain memories from other people the leather close two blocks down the history behind this stuff is the reason for why the world is as advanced as it is but in a gameplay sense I just found this thing kind of boring what it's supposed to do is amplify Elemental effects so if you spray this crap on someone and then hit them with a frost or a shock attack it's supposed to amplify that but I mean just freezing someone normally or using an energy weapon seem to more or less have the same effect whilst also freeing up one of my power slots you're really only fighting either robots or organic enemies which are humans taken over by some kind of Spore parasite that looks like a combination of a clicker from The Last of Us and then the demigor gone from stranger things gotta say too that I [ __ ] hate these four things they're by far the most annoying enemies in the game they're about as small as a duck's dick and they blend him in the background due to their size and appearance anyway you can craft these little cartridges that look like nitrous oxide bulbs and these give an elemental effect to any of your weapons including the melee ones so for Elemental damage your idea here is that machines take more damage from shock grounds and then the organic enemies take more damage from fire it's a simple system and an idea that's about as old as The Flintstones and I just kind of felt like using these cartridges was way more effective in dealing with each enemy type that I just never felt like I needed the added bonus of covering everything in polymer on top of it not when I could just hold half a dozen people in there at once shoot them with a shotgun and then slam them into the ground from a relatively safe distance choke on it and die you fat turd so that's for the shield well that thing's just completely [ __ ] useless thank God the game lets you refund all the polymer you spent on these upgrade trees in case you change your mind and that right there might be one of the smartest things this game actually does I couldn't agree more comrade major I think what's gonna make or break this for a lot of people is if they can find their own personal Groove with the combat early on when you don't have many abilities and weapons it's definitely going to be pretty boring but when the game opens up and throws you into these larger environments and lets you Sidetrack to collect all those optional upgrades you can really start to have a lot of fun with it as long as you're willing to overlook that insane amount of Jane when you're engaging in combat out in the open world though you're really just fighting a losing battle because no matter how many robots you kill here more are going to be repaired or spawned in and it makes it really frustrating when you want to take things slower and go off and explore the world because you quite literally can't do that because there's enemies every five seconds and once they see you losing them becomes a real chore later in the game I had like a mini boss enemy chasing after me across the entire map and not only did I have to deal with this stupid [ __ ] thing but also the constant onslaught of like a dozen robots that were also attacking me and then on top of that the major and Charles were having this casual conversation about politics or something while I was getting choked to death and sprayed with bodily fluids yeah it's their job to be concerned about their country's security they don't have any hard evidence that means they don't really have a leg to stand on right indeed shut up some of the weapons don't really feel or sound all that impactful either like the starting pistols are just kind of waffled I think the rocket launcher and the AK get it done but ammo for the format is kind of rare and expensive to craft so you're going to want to save that stuff for the boss fights and the melee weapons are good but there's not really anything to them apart from just mashing the same basic attack over and over still though when the combat really started to get fun for me was when I finally got in the rocket launcher and that Razorback weapon that they've showed off in all the trailers I'd also upgraded myself so I had faster weapon swapping along with increased movement speed and at that point I could just go super sweaty and run around hitting things with the bat abusing cooldowns on my powers and then swapping back and forth between my ranged weapons as I need them so there is fun to be had here but yeah you've kind of got to go looking forward no [ __ ] but I think we're atomic heart really shits the bed of the boss fights and the reason I say that is that for most of these it doesn't even seem to matter what kind of skills or upgrades you've got which for a game which is all about approaching the combat in your own way it kind of seems like it's missing the point in tiling the first major boss fight for instance is against this giant rolling robot that looks like the omnidroid from The Incredibles and this thing just pretty much rolls around the arena during which time all you can really do is avoid its attacks and then shoot that giant glowing weak spot when it finally appears you can't freeze it you can't grab it and none of your ability seem to affect it at all yeah I've seen this crap before the next boss after that is this kind of bizarre experiment inside one of the many Labs you have to go through and this thing is completely resistant to gunfire so your main method to attack it is to just avoid it and then whack it with the melee weapon and then the couple after that a week to explosive so if you haven't unlocked the rocket launcher by that point well I can only imagine how you'd ever possibly beat it and it's kind of a shame because despite having all these cool superpowers and tricks up your sleeve you're forced into approaching these fights in a very specific way and what's even worse is that they just flat out recycled these guys numerous times about the game and fighting them is about as fun as having to deal with an ingrown toenail isn't that why you're here what was even worse for me is that I had a bug when I was playing this where the bosses wouldn't even drop what happens to be the rarest crafting ingredient in the game yeah this thing here right you need this to craft the best weapons and I could literally say this thing floating in air in front of the boss but it wouldn't let me pick it up I mean look middle don't get me wrong the visual spectacle of these fights is awesome I mean look and you just know that some poor [ __ ] had to Crunch into the Twilight hours to animate all of this stuff but it just makes you wonder why you spend all this time upgrading these powers and learning all these combos to utilize in combat only for it to just mean deadly Squad outside of the combat and the exploration Atomic heart's also got a fair few puzzles to solve hey I think I get it and the bulk of the side content is going to be going through all these various underground training facilities to find those blueprints all of which are hidden behind these puzzle sections some of these are clever and fun to solve but then others are just incredibly tedious and the ones that they repeat over and over get old really fast this place is nuts one of these I couldn't even figure out for the life of me like you got to move around these lasers to line them up in a specific order and look man I must be pretty stupid because I could just never understand what the Heller was supposed to be doing I just kind of ended up rotating them at random until it finally solved itself getting through these locked doors involves this little timing minigame waiting for each bulb to light up before clicking the mouse and then a second phase often involves moving around these colored circles and shuffling their positions all of which are pure RNG and at one point I got stuck on one of these for like five minutes so I left the door in frustration and then came back instantly and it automatically solved itself I think the concept for these is fine but the issue is that you never find a way to shortcut through any of these like the lock picking and the hacking it's always going to be exactly the same and you don't ever gain the ability to speed up the process again let's go back and compare the whole thing to Bioshock right in that game you'd eventually unlock the means to make the hacking less tedious slowing down how quickly things moved or just outright using tools to bypass it all together atomic heart though has none of that in other words you're basically useless and for a game which literally references the opening segments of Bioshock so that's Neptune huh looks nice actually it looks amazing a Rapture I understood that reference shut up you think they might have also taken just a few of these gameplay cues same thing with the parkour like there's no upgrade to move yourself faster or really any way to get better at it it's always going to be this incredibly slow methodical process of clambering across these very clearly marked out Ledges and making precise jumps in fact you know what I think honestly I can climb up Ledges and the side of buildings faster in real life than the major canning but what if you're wrong Atomic heart's also got this incredibly annoying feature where enemies do a Charged Up attack and if you're hit by this it knocks you on your ass and again in any other game there'd be like a late game upgrade so you could ignore that but this thing just completely whacks it I mean another example is like how you can't even put down a custom marker on the map and how to keep pausing the game to check you going in the right direction I don't know man it's just kind of weird for a game which really seems to take so many cues from countless other modern titles to just lack certain basic features like this finally there's the usual roster of bugs and glitches you expect in a game like this so much blood spilled just because he made the Sprouts mutate just like enemies hitting you through walls wonky animations or things like soft locking missions which then require loading up all the save files you know usual stuff even just basic oversights like during the finale of the game there was a text log I came across which I'm assuming I was supposed to be reading but for some reason it had to be the only text in the game that they didn't translate into English I also do think atomic heart is maybe just a little bit too long finishing the game took me somewhere around the 20 hour mark and look yeah it is a unique experience there's no doubt about it but as a wise man once said brevity is the soul of wit and what I'm trying to say is the game didn't need 20 hours to hook me in when it already had me after two that's a challenging wank it could have been half the length or even just you know three or four hours shorter and left me wanting more which meant I would have most likely gone back in for a second playthrough yeah yeah yeah been there done that I still can't think of any other game that has as much batshit insane content as atomic heart does though and for all its shortcomings it's still one of the most unique games I've played in recent memory apart from scorn and that's actually probably a good comparison because there's always something about these kind of artistically unique games it always seems to divide people I know that scorn had a similar response and a few years back I think it was the same thing with we happy few so until another game comes along that lets you fight oddly sexualized Russian ballerina robots and a giant metal death ball with tentacles atomic heart is gonna have to tide you over fine whatever I'm outta here [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: GmanLives

Views: 721,236

Keywords: atomic heart review, atomic heart gameplay, video games, atomic heart, ign first, atomic heart combat, atomic heart ps5, atomic heart gameplay 4k, mundfish games, atomic heart preview, atomic heart weapons, atomic heart new gameplay, atomic heart game, video games 2023, atomic heart demo, atomic heart official gameplay, atomic heart boss, atomic heart game review, first person shooter, bioshock, gmanlives, gggmanlives, 2023 fps games

Id: UBemNvHWooQ

Length: 29min 28sec (1768 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023