

Though none of those games get nearly as intricate with the gymnastics as this does, especially when it starts messing around with perspective and gravity.īut the games that Atomic Heart recall most are the ones in the BioShock series. This also recalls the Far Cry games in how you sometimes have to climb and jump to get around, as well as Doom Eternal in how you can jump even further by using a mid-air dash. There’s also an alert system like the one that goes off in Grand Theft Auto when you’re being chased by the cops, while the stylized interior design owes as much to the Metro games as it does the recent Wolfenstein ones (and something else we’ll get to in a moment). Because you’re armed with both melee weapons and firearms, this feels more like Dead Island, Condemned, and, to a certain extent, Skyrim than, say, the guns-only Call Of Duty. In many ways, Atomic Heart feels like a bunch of other first-person action / adventure games and shooters mixed together. But when a terrorist hacks their operating system, causing them to see humans as a threat, it’s up to you, comrade, to infiltrate the facility where the bad guy’s supposedly hiding so you can stop the robots from turning Russia into a human free zone. In which Atomic Heart takes place, it’s been many years since Russia used robots to win World War II, and their society now resembles the art deco utopia we were promised in ’50s sci-fi movies and the beginning of Fallout 4.

That, unfortunately, is what happened when I started playing Atomic Heart ( PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC), a first-person sci-fi action / adventure game that could’ve been unique, exciting, and interesting…had they not made one simple mistake. Sometimes, when you first start to play a video game, you notice that something doesn’t feel quite right, and no matter how small or insignificant it may be, it still taints the experience.
