 Atomic Heart used a great art style, an impressive trail of graphics, and a ton of sexy and video ray tracing presentations to have a bunch of people really looking forward to its release. What wasn't super clear in all that marketing was precisely what kind of game Atomic Heart was going to be. Years ago, it sure looked like it was going to be sort of a survival horror FPS game, and then it seemed like it was more of a big set piece shooter. And finally, in about the last year or so, it started looking a lot like Bioshock, until a few months ago when we heard it was going to have some open world areas. Well, now we have the game in our hands, and despite the initial buzz being heavily influenced by all that ray tracing stuff, the game's actual implementation of ray tracing doesn't exist. It has no ray tracing. That's a bit of a disappointment, but whatever, it's fine. The real interesting thing is which of those games actually got released. Is it the horror game, the cod set piece game, Bioshock, Far Cry? And again, now that we have the game in our hands, it is all of them. It's literally every game ever smooshed into one interesting, frustrating, deeply, deeply flawed game. Let's take a look at how a game with such impressive art design and pretty well thought out progression ends up feeling like such a mess. We've got to touch on almost every aspect of this thing to fully appreciate what a crazy mash of ideas and quality it is. So we'll break this into sections. We'll talk about the gameplay systems, the story, the mostly good progression, and the pretty bad polish on offer. Atomic Heart, after the logo. A very bad, good game. Atomic Heart looks like a triple A game. It has a bunch of systems and mechanics that are all of triple A quality. It is the size and length of a triple A game, but this Atomic Heart is also an excellent example of a lot of the things we take for granted in triple A games. Atomic Heart looks like a triple A game because a ton of effort went into the art and graphics, but triple A games generally have a tremendous amount of polish when it comes to UI, bugs and the overall cohesiveness of the design. In fact, I would say that's what makes a triple A game. Atomic Heart does a bunch of stuff impressively well, but it also does almost all of the little things catastrophically terrible. This problem is so massive. The best way to do this is to simply list a pile of small annoyances that build up to create a game that seems determined to waste your time. Atomic Heart has a relatively fun crafting and upgrade system, but the implementation of this system is so bad I simply don't know how it's shipped like this. Let's go into this machine here, and we will talk more about this machine in the story section by the way. So I want to craft some AK ammo, and some shotgun ammo, and also some other stuff. So I click to show how much ammo I want to craft, and then I hold right click, and then it boots me out of the machine. So I want to make three types of ammo, and a couple of elemental cans. I will need to go into the machine, press the one key, because you can't click the mouse or just press enter a spacebar, craft the ammo, and then do that four more times. How could this possibly have passed through testing? And if you have not played this game right now, you're probably thinking dude give me a break. So you have to go back into the machine, but you will do this literally hundreds of times, hundreds. By the end of the game, you will have spent hours in this thing. Then there's this over here. In Atomic Heart you have a limited inventory. This is somewhat annoying, but I get it, it's fine. But what this means is, by the end of the game you'll need to pretty often juggle inventory to move stuff around and dismantle it. Now in a normal game, the inventory screen would let you move stuff and dismantle it on one screen. Not in Atomic Heart though. Let's say I want to dismantle all of the weird consumables that recharge energy that I'll never use. In most games you just go to this screen here and either delete it from your inventory or click a few of them and then press move to move them all over. But not in Atomic Heart. Inventory and dismantle are two entirely different menus. If you want to delete some ammo or consumables, you need to stay on the inventory page and individually either drag each item over or click and then press Y on the keyboard to move them. You can't click multiple items to move them. It has to be one at a time. And to actually delete those items from your inventory, you'll need to click and move, then go over to dismantle tab, then sort, then find that item, then right click and hold. You need to do that for each item every time. Again, you will do this dozens and dozens and dozens of times. You will spend at least an hour in this screen toggling between inventory and dismantle. This whole looting and crafting system is held up by the one thing that seems like an amazing feature at first, but starts to show some cracks after a while. If I had a dollar, for every time I've said it pisses me off to have to individually open containers and loot items in a game, I'd be rich. Especially games like Red Dead 2 where a bunch of shit makes me hold the button instead of press the button. Why do I need to hold the button? That's two seconds of wasted time hundreds of times over the course of a game. Darkrai 5 had you holding the button to loot thousands of times, pointless and annoying. Atomic Heart lets you hold the interact key, which is tea for me, to vacuum up all the items in a box. When I saw this in pre-release footage, my interest in the game soared as I thought it demonstrated that the developers had heard my anguish. And at first, this does help, and it's always strangely satisfying to hoover up all the loot, but sadly, it's finicky. If you're at the wrong angle, you'll only pull the drawers out half way and it won't complete. Plus, strafing right and left while holding the interact key is awkward and annoying. You cannot just stand in the center of the room and suck stuff up, which would've been great, I don't know why you can't do that. Instead, you gotta strafe around at a very specific angle to get everything. And I can't stress this enough, again, you will spend hours vacuuming up loot. A massive chunk of the game is vacuuming shit. Why? There's just a never-ending stream of drawers and dressers and boxes and chests, thousands of them. I understand that this is the reward for exploring the world, but the world isn't all that interesting and the open world is downright bad, so maybe we could've just had less chests and more loot in each chest. Just keep going, there's just so many little things that are wrong in the game, each one of which probably wouldn't have been a problem, but combined are a massive problem. There are cars in Atomic Heart, well that's not really right. There is a car in Atomic Heart, it's red. I assume it's meant to look like an old Soviet Lada? This is the one car you can drive. And there aren't all that many of these things. That's not a huge problem, unless this is the most fragile fucking car in the history of video games. If this is meant to be a joke about Ladas being shit, I guess that's kind of funny for anyone who grew up in the USSR. It's like a Ford Pinto in America maybe? But we don't use Ford Pintos in video games because that would be annoying as fuck. If they wanted this as a joke, and I'm not actually convinced that that's true, but if that was the intent, you can have it happen once, make your joke, and move on. But you cannot give the player a car, populate all the roads with robots, and then have the car literally fucking explode if I run over two robots. The car gets stuck on robots that you run over. It bursts into flames after hitting two things, and then you're walking because there's like three cars on the whole map. The entire point of the car is to A, drive by combat that I am not interested in because I just want to get to the next thing, and B, to run things over because that's fun. There's a reason the cars in Far Cry can run over like a million goons and trees before they finally explode, because that's fun, and walking because your car fucking exploded after running over two enemies is horrendous and terrible. How about those enemies in the open world? Respawning enemies in the open world is a basic game design thing, right? I mean, no one wants to have to trek through an empty open world. Well, I don't want to trek through any open world, but even people who like this stuff want there to be enemies. Well, don't worry, because Atomic Heart respawns its enemies. Every four to six seconds it respawns them. Continually forever. There's little blue guys that will respawn enemies over and over, and when you kill them, they'll spawn again and again and again until you either kill like 50 of them, or more likely until you decide you're done and you just run away because you're getting annoyed. There is one very specific way to stop this, which involves finding a tower, hacking a panel, cycling through cameras until you find a balloon, hacking the balloon, and disabling it, but all of that is an absurdly convoluted alternative to just walking away, so you won't actually do that, because it's needlessly complicated, like much of Atomic Heart. Okay, we're already three pages in, so let's just move on. Atomic Heart's small details are almost all toxic to the player. If one or two little things were annoying, it probably wouldn't matter, but when there's a mountain of small annoyances, shit starts wearing on you. Like I said in the intro, it wasn't clear what this game was before release. Was it Bioshock, Cod, Far Cry, Survival Horror? Well, it's all those games, plus more. Atomic Heart wears its influences on its sleeve a little bit too much. When all is said and done, the opening of the game has an homage to Prey and Bioshock Infinite. At the end, there's literally an underwater place that your dude says, So that's Neptune, huh? Looks nice. Actually, it looks amazing. A rapture. I wouldn't mind spending some time there myself. But here's the thing, Atomic Heart is clearly most influenced by the shock games. It seems obvious that this was initially envisioned as an immersive sim. There's the two hand combat with guns and powers. The hacking, the future utopia stuff. But while its surface level is similar, Atomic Heart doesn't actually capture what makes the best immersive sims work. That's because Atomic Heart refuses to focus on a few things. Atomic Heart has RPG elements, it has shooting, it has hacking, it has an open world, it has puzzles, it has a bunch of story, it has dialogue. And the way this shit is apportioned out is kinda crazy. Because when you really boil it down, what Atomic Heart actually is, is a hacking mini game. I cannot overstate just how many locked doors there are in this fucking game. There's so many that the protagonist is constantly joking about it. But dude, if you realized it was so egregious that you needed to acknowledge it in game dialogue, how about just removing like 50% of the locked doors? I'm not kidding what I say, you will spend again hours doing hacking mini games, hours. There are a few of them, and they range from the least common, which is Thieves Guild Skyrim style, to time challenges, to this here. None of these are difficult, they're just annoying, and all of them would be fine. And even if they were used sparingly. But there are so many of them, that by the end of the game I was seriously enraged. I wish I had recorded my voice because as the game went on, I got more and more pissed off at this. Again, hours of locked doors, hours. Can you imagine if in Fallout or Prey, you had to hack 150 doors over 25 hours? To the end of this game, I'm not kidding here, there were hacking mini games every room. You fight a boss, hack a door, fight a boss, hack a door, walk a hallway, hack a door. I'm not exaggerating, it really is that crazy. Obviously there's more to the game than just hacking of course. There's also puzzles, hours and hours of puzzles, entire hour long puzzle sequences. And you know what, they're actually reasonably good puzzles. But there's a reason that FPS puzzles are rare and easy. Puzzles are generally used in these kind of games as a change of pace. A little palette cleanse, so you're not spending the entire game shooting things. And I want to be careful here, because I understand that there's a group of people out there, maybe some of whom we've been watching this video, who really liked that about this game. But even for those people, I think the puzzles here have massive problems. A bunch of these puzzles require the game's platforming system. Oh yeah, I forgot, Atomic Heart also heavily features uncharted climbing. You know, that system that everyone fucking hates, and that is annoying, yeah that one. And it's the slowest climbing in the world. Listen, you can pull off first person platforming. Destiny 2 does first person platforming pretty well. Dying Light 2 got middling reviews, but the first person platforming in that game is actually quite excellent. But in Dying Light 2, the entire point of the platforming is speed. The whole game is about that platforming. It is focused on hitting zombies and platforming. That's all that game does. The better you get and the longer you play, the faster you can platform. And those games are very good at making the physics work well. Atomic Heart simply does not have the physics for this. There's this puzzle here that I failed like six times. Twice because the little ball thing disappeared, making me have to kill myself twice. Twice because Atomic Heart has the Dark Souls 2 thing where if you drop off a ledge, you're launched forward, so I rolled off the edge and died twice. And twice because your character will sometimes just jump face first into a handhold and not grab and just fall to his death. And maybe that would be fine if each attempt didn't require very slow and clunky, uncharted climbing. Climbing isn't fun. It's annoying. It's literally just moving, but slower. There's a reason most challenges in games don't drop you to your death. Because reloading and slowly climbing again is way more annoying than just dropping to a lower floor and trying again. There's this puzzle here where the solution seemed to be to jump over to this ledge. This ledge with spikes. Video game language long ago decided that ledges with spikes cannot be climbed on. I spent like 20 minutes trying to figure this out until I accidentally jumped to this ledge. How the hell did this get through? Did I break the puzzle? Is this the wrong ledge texture? Is this how it's supposed to be? Atomic Heart often has you asking whether the game is bugged or just weird. This meshes very badly with puzzle gameplay because in puzzle games it is imperative that you know the rules. And all of this would be fine, I guess. But again, you spend hours doing puzzles. Hours! There's a literal entire puzzle game stuffed into this thing. And again, these are real puzzles. This isn't like FPS change of pace puzzles. This isn't Half-Life stack and boxes puzzles. These are literal puzzle game puzzles. Which seems really cool in theory, but in practice ends up just crushing the pace of the game. Just crushing it, man. That comes down to taste, I guess, but in my opinion there are too many puzzles in this game and for a fact there are too many locked doors in this game by a factor of like 40. Another big part of the game is open world exploration and traversal. Why? Why does this game have an open world? It ends up being an annoying area you have to drive through. An annoying area you have to run through after your car explodes. The open world isn't even worth talking about. It's clearly here because somewhere along the line someone was like, oh we should have an open world. Some people might not mind it. People like me will find it horrendous and nobody on earth, literally no one on earth will say it was some amazing experience. Combat and progression. Here, finally, we get to something the game does pretty well. Very well, mind you, but pretty well. The progression is actually quite well done. In fact, it's like surprising at how well done it is when you look at it against the rest of the game. It's well balanced and thought out and the upgrades themselves are generally pretty interesting. The weapon crafting and upgrades are all very good. They will get an A for that. It's the best part of the game. But all of that is just a way to make combat interesting and their things are decidedly more mixed. Here is one of the big problems with combat and atomic hard. At a basic human level, killing robots is less fun than killing living things. This is why the beginning of Gears 4 sucks. We'll go over the balance and mechanics of the game in a second, but I think this is something that's not really understood by a lot of people. There's a reason that games have a bunch of gore and blood, because play is almost always simulated violence. Watch kittens play with each other. Play tug of war with your dog. Watch your two pit bulls play in the backyard. Almost all play amongst mammals is simulated violence and turning demons or Nazis or bad guys into bloody pulp is deeply satisfying on a lizard brain level. Getting back to play old games from before blood was allowed is simply less fun than sawing a locus in half in Gears of War. One of the core reasons Fallout 76 is combat is less fun than Fallout 4 or 3 is because you lost the slow motion gore explosions from the earlier games. My wife loved Mortal Kombat as a kid. The other day she was watching my son play the newest one and was amazed at the insane violence and she was like, yep, that's it. That's what makes these games good. Killing a walking toaster and watching them fall to little pieces will always be less interesting than sawing something in half with a chainsaw or making a raider explode in Fallout 4 because we respond to simulated violence just like your pit bull does. The most fun things to fight in Atomic Heart are the mutants, specifically because ripping them up is more fun than breaking a microwave with a stick. As I played, I complained to my son about a lack of enemy variety. But in fact, there is an impressive amount of variety in the game. So why did I feel like there wasn't? Because fighting living things feels different, but my mind just lumps robots into one big basket. The game gives you an impressive arsenal of guns and powers, but robots can only be so interesting to fight. But there are other really serious problems with the enemy design and combat design of Atomic Heart. The game wants you to use melee. It starts out with very limited ammo and several of the guns recharged by using the melee and almost all the enemies are exclusively melee. But the way enemies move makes melee fighting extremely annoying. Enemies will not stay in front of you. Almost all of them are melee fighters and they all attack through you. So every time you're hit, the enemy continues on behind you instead of staying in front of you. I like do not understand why the game is designed like this. I don't I don't get it. It's like so much different than every other game and so, you know, horrendously terrible. Every fight with melee weapons has you constantly spinning the camera to find the enemy again. I don't speak Russian, so I don't know what this thing is actually called. But you fight this play bush boss from the trailers seriously about seven times and is so disorienting because it won't stay in your field of vision. It attacks and its momentum will always always take it behind you. You spend an absurd amount of time spinning the camera trying to get enemies back into your field of vision. It's still often somewhat fun because the powers are fun to use. So like it has its moments, man, it really does. But it is also extremely tiring because of how enemies move. And then there's the knockdown. I said many times that I love absolutely love getting knocked down in games. And sometimes people in the comments like kind of get on me about that. But I get it. I get it in some situations. A big boss in Dark Souls knocks you down with one of its highly telegraphed attacks. Fine. But here again, atomic heart decides it needs a mechanic from another game. Some enemies in atomic heart have the Sekiro perilous attack thing. Man, after Sekiro did this, it's popping up in tons of games for no particular reason. This works awesome in Sekiro because it perfectly fits the dance aspect of that game. There's a few different attacks. All of them require a specific response to turn around on the enemy. But an atomic heart, these attacks require you to dodge or be knocked down. Sounds fine in theory, right? Except in atomic heart, these attacks come out just as fast as their regular attacks. Often there's barely any time to react at all. And these are horde fights. There's no horde fights in Sekiro. And even worse, these attacks come from off screen. There's a very slight audio cue sometimes. But well, here's the audio cue in Sekiro for perilous attacks. Here is the audio cue in atomic heart. And again, in atomic heart, you are often absolutely surrounded by enemies. So much so that the telekinesis ability is mandatory. In some fights, you will be chained into knockdowns. And a mechanic that works fine but is still annoying in the third person is awful in first person. Just absolutely horrendous. Having Sekiro get knocked down is annoying. But it's fundamentally different than having your first person camera smashed down on the ground. There's simply no way this went through testing without a bunch of people saying, hey, getting knocked down all the time is horrible. Tone that shit down, please. Oh, hey, do you know what else the combat in atomic heart has? The worst QTEs I have ever played in a game. I'm talking 2004 style, instant fail, instant death QTEs. Do you know in most games that use QTEs, they are highly visible and usually right in the center of the screen and often fairly generous? Well, in atomic heart, they are so small and hard to see, you are guaranteed to die from them several times. The final boss fight starts with a three part instant fail death QTE. Look at this shit, man. How did anyone think that was okay? Seriously, how does anyone, anyone think that is good? It's horrendous, just absolutely dreadful, terrible shit. Let's talk about that last boss fight because it literally combines every single terrible thing about this game's combat, which actually I guess is kind of good game design. It takes everything you've had from the whole game and puts it in there. It's just terrible though. It is a ridiculous slog of constant dodging. The boss is always, always attack past you, so you have to continually spin the camera. It has those instant death QTEs. The bosses themselves are absurd bullet sponges. They're small and moving all over the place so you can barely track them and they have multiple knockdown attacks that come from off screen. You'll be knocked down over and over. You'll spin the camera around. You'll dodge over and over just to shoot them for a few seconds. And of course they're robots so you feel like you're shooting a refrigerator and not a living thing, which is not fun. At times the combat can actually be enjoyable like I said, but like everything else in this game, the big things work, guns, enemy variety, powers, progression, all that is fine to good. But the little things conspire to make it feel bad. How finicky and annoying it is to loot every single corpse. Having to spin the camera all the time, knockdowns, enemy health. The fact that robots don't bleed. All that takes a combat system that could have been really great and instead makes it alternate between pretty good and horrendous. How much patience you have for annoyance will decide whether you end up thinking this combat is good or passable. I do not have patience, I just don't. World and story. Also politics. A huge part of the hype for this game was certainly down to the setting and art design. And on this front, I don't think the game can be criticized at all. The art design is excellent and the setting seems like a really interesting idea. But even there we've got some issues. I am a big believer that we are not doing enough in Ukraine. It annoys me that we seem to be deterring ourselves after all this effort to hit to national prestige in America and the West that would occur. If Ukraine loses this war is unacceptable. We should be giving them the long range missiles they need to hit Crimea on the promise that they won't hit Russia proper. And we should be giving them the F-16s that we don't even need anymore and that Ukraine very, very much needs. I give the central bank of Ukraine about $100 a month. I'll put that link in the description. But the Ukrainian central bank has an account you can contribute to that goes directly to the Defense Department and includes a bunch of listings of what they've actually done with the money, which is mainly by all the stuff they need to keep on fighting. I say all that because there was a pre-release controversy about this game. Munfish is a studio of Russian devs. The business is now in Cyprus, but the company is mostly Russians. It was funded by some government agencies in Russia, and they refused to comment on the war or even call it a war. As a result, many Ukrainians have asked and continue to ask for the game to be boycotted and removed from online stores. I understand this when your cities have been destroyed and hundreds of thousands of your citizens have been killed or wounded, fighting off a completely unprovoked imperial project from the country that spent the last 250 years denying you exist, banning your language, purposely starving millions of your people and accusing you of being Nazis. You're not going to be in the mood to hear about a game from Russians that seems to be set in a Soviet utopia. I understand, but I disagree. We knew nothing about the people who made this game pre-release and their refusal to comment on the war is something I do not want to demand. We can assume that many, if not most of these people, still have family in Russia. Many of them still need to be able to return to visit that family. It is illegal in Russia to call the war a war, unless you're a hardcore nationalist, then it's apparently OK, but it's definitely illegal to speak out against the war. I don't think it's fair to hold people to heroic standards. Games cost a ton of money to make. Surely they assumed a huge portion of those sales would be in Russia itself. It would be better if they were heroes, but they're just developers and business people, and it's almost impossible to do business in Russia without government funding. The Russian government is far more involved in business and tech than Western governments are, and there is far less independent investment to tap. If you boycotted the game because of Ukraine, I understand your decision. I personally felt that individual developers shouldn't have to be heroes to sell their game. Now, we'll get to the actual story, which is just nightmarishly garbage shortly, but I want to spend a moment saying that the politics of this game or rather the lack of politics feels weird to me. This is a game set in a utopian Soviet Union, which is an extremely interesting idea. The early communists, like the Nazis in many ways, were trying to build a utopia. Lenin and Trotsky and Buchanan and Yuzhinsky and all the rest justified their brutality on the belief that they were building that utopia. Communist ideology was centered on the perfectability of man. One of the underlying principles was that almost all of society's ills was based on economics. Dialectical materialism is basically the principle that all of society's conflict can be boiled down to the clash of opposing forces and ideas. And crucially, that these clashes are almost all based upon material needs. Therefore, yes, the revolution would require the dictatorship as a proletariat. It would require violence and repression. But once true communism was achieved, once the scientific rationalization of the economy finally eliminated the class for resources and everyone was equal and comfortable, none of that would be needed anymore. The gulags would close. The secret police would be disbanded, criminality, drunkenness, violence, all of it would disappear once economics had been solved and full equality had been granted. This is attempting idea, which still has some reverberations in the modern left of which I guess I'm a part and is an extremely interesting premise for a game. What would happen if it had actually worked? In reality, of course, it had no chance to work because, A, people simply aren't smart enough to manage huge national economies, make all the right choices and achieve full, perfect distribution of resources. And most importantly be material needs are not, in fact, the primary driver of human desires. A man becomes king, not because he wants a pile of gold. The pile of gold is a perk of the job. He becomes king because he wants to rule or he's a nationalist and wants to expand the nation or he has a mystical belief in the superiority of his people. Some people are motivated by material needs, but most people are motivated by narratives. Russia is currently fighting a war in Ukraine, not because the Donbas has a bunch of gas and coal. Russia could have bought that gas and coal thousands of times cheaper, even if the war had been won in like three months. Russia is fighting this war for the mystical destiny of the Russian people for national greatness. They're fighting the war for the story. And not for the stuff. Having said that, what would the USSR have looked like if they had actually achieved full communism because they invented robots? And this is where the story gets muddled because we don't really know. There's a tremendous, absolute mountain of text and audio logs in Tomahawk, a truly impressive amount. And they seem to be there because the shock games also have text and audio logs. But the writing in these logs is so bad and they do little to almost nothing to flesh out the world or address the really interesting points that could have been made in this setting. You see, the writing in Atomic Heart is best described as childish. Text and audio logs are almost all stupid and stupid really is the best word. One of the best things about the fallout is the text and audio logs even fallout for with its very bad main story is full of excellent writing in the terminals. There are powerful stories that make you think in there. Atomic Hearts audio and text logs are the perfect place to flesh out the politics and economics of this world. There are some a couple about robots taking people's jobs, but we don't know how people actually live. Most of the logs are about like weird little interoffice rivalries. The ones about politics are almost all about how members of the Politburo are turning ballerinas into prostitutes. Seriously, that's what they're all about until the robots take the jobs and then they use the robots as prostitutes. Now, this is a fine story that could have been interesting, but the writing is so crude and low quality that ends up being pretty cringe. As to the actual politics of this utopian USSR, there is almost nothing. They still don't like America. They believe in communism kind of. But there's like zero actually about communism here, which is weird, man. The story is just not interesting. And in fact, it feels like it's being very, very careful. And you cannot make good art or good stories when you're being careful. See, Far Cry 5 and 6. Here's another weird thing. The only person involved with the government that you see in this game is Molotov. I have to obviously assume that this is meant to be Vyacheslav Molotov, the right hand man of Stalin, foreign minister in World War Two, and negotiator of the infamous Molotov ribbon trove packed with Germany. You think the alliance with the Nazis might come up, but no, it does not. Surely you think that at least make Molotov look like, you know, Molotov, but they don't. Molotov is a distinctive looking dude. He has glasses and a mustache. He's the kind of guy you could draw a crude cartoon of and know who it is. But here is the game's Molotov. Why? Know what else we don't know about this game? Who is the general secretary of the USSR? It never says. Is Stalin alive? Did Stalin exist? There's nothing in this game about Stalin or the purges. Is Khrushchev alive and in charge? Was there still destalinization? The USSR was one of the most intensely political societies in world history. The entire country was one massive, intense political experiment. And yet there is nothing about politics in this game. There's nothing about Stalin, about Khrushchev, really about Molotov. Just nothing. As such, it ends up feeling a bit like Soviet apologism. The actual atomic heart is a plan to infiltrate the U.S. with combat robots, which will take us over. That's interesting. Too bad it's barely talked about. Near the end, you see that all the robots in science was made by experimenting on people, but that's not really presented as a political issue. It's less about how brutal Soviet society is and more about how shitty science is, which is odd. The whole idea of a utopian Soviet Union not working because in truth, power drives people more than stuff would have been cool. Or, you know, really digging into how experimenting on people to make their robots to achieve true communism, that also would have been cool. Unfortunately, the writers of atomic heart are simply not smart enough people to write that story or they're too afraid to write it, which is just as bad. And the best way to show this is to finish this all up by talking about the overall story, which is awful, and the shittiest, most annoying protagonist in gaming history. Easily worse than for Spoken Girl, which is an amazing accomplishment. One might think that the voice acting in atomic heart is terrible, and it is. Though really, only the player character, which is a real problem, seems odd to get really good English voice acting for the villains and just a disaster for the player, but whatever. But the thing is, even the best English voice actor on earth could not save this game because the dialogue that was written for the player character is horrendously terrible. The developers recommended you play with Russian voices. Interesting because it defaults to English. Also a big problem because the subtitles are terrible and barely visible. Also a big, big, big problem because the game is constantly, constantly dropping dialogue and story shit on you while you're fighting. By a few hours into this game, you will hate the character you are playing as. Not because he's evil, but because he's just an asshole. A total asshole. He's constantly treating people like shit, making terrible jokes, blowing people off. He's just like just a miserable, terrible person. He's always calling the glove an annoying asshole, despite the glove never being anything but perfectly nice. In fact, the glove is very clearly not only the most likeable character in the game. He's also the best voice actor in the game. Then there's the weird and constantly icky sex stuff. Listen, man, I love Bayonetta. I have no problem with sex appeal on games, but atomic heart is gross. The upgrade machine is the most cringe inducing shit I have ever encountered. There's a never ending stream of stuff about prostitutes and sexual and yendo, and it's written just so badly. All this badly, badly hurts the tone of the game. But I can overlook even that. It's hard because it is truly terrible, but it's only kind of gross, not actually offensive or anything. Although there's a character that borders on an offensive gay stereotype who is the one who turns all the ballerinas into prostitutes. So I mean, that's pushing right up to the edge of what I can deal with. But OK, I'm not the kind of guy who is heavily offended by opinions I don't agree with. What I'm actually offended by is terrible story writing. This story is so insanely muddled, it is crazy. So the Soviets built robots and then the capitalists of the West sanctioned them for some reason, but also they wanted the robots. So they still buy the robots, even though they themselves have sanctions on the robots because they really wanted the robots. Then the Soviets actually have all of the robots have a secret combat mode that will take over America and shut down all of their nuclear power plants, which is the atomic heart of America. But actually, the game isn't about that at all. In fact, it's just kind of a thing that's going on in the background. The character that you, who are very possibly an American dude, is playing after finding out that robots are going to kill the entire American military in a completely unprovoked attack for no reason at all says, well, maybe that's not such a bad thing. I mean, the robots will only kill soldiers, right? It's only when the glove tells him that robots might also kill non soldiers that he starts to kind of think that's not cool. Still, he's not all that upset about it. I remind you that in this universe, the USSR and America are not at war. The West has sanctions on the robots, which is presented as being a bad thing, but there's no war. But what the actual story is about is something called collective 2.0, which will link all people to one network and allow them to control robots with their minds. But this is also a secret project that lets one person, the inventor, control all people with his mind. You get to see an entire underwater facility that the character says looks like rapture that is filled with the bodies and mindless husks of the mind controlled people from the early experiments. Interesting idea that they're going to talk about free will and how to really have a utopia. They need to be able to control people, get out of the line. But again, the game isn't smart enough to deal with that. In fact, we don't ever get why there is a mind control thing in this utopian Russia. Sechenov talks about science and how both communism and capitalism are bad kind of, but it doesn't make much sense. Now, spoiler for the ending. Now, I highly recommend you not give a shit and let yourself be spoiled because you'll save yourself the anger I felt. But still, spoiler and coming now, three, two, one. OK. At the end, you suddenly get to choose the first time you really get to choose anything between getting Sechenov and just walking away. You've learned that you've been mind controlled the whole time and the game gives you the choice of confronting the guy who did years and years of human experiments on people to build a mind control network as well as created an army of secretly killer robots that were exported to the West to conquer America, which will also lead to untold civilian deaths and the end of America's independent political life. That sounds like a bad guy to me. Killer robots conquer America, make it be ruled from Moscow, mind control, dead civilians, horrendous deadly experiments on the unsuspecting Soviet people or your other choice is to walk away from this old lady who's actually your mother-in-law that you forgot and the glove who's a scientist who also did some bad things, but has done nothing but offer perfectly reasonable advice the entire time. And if you do the obviously objectively correct decision, the game has a twist where the glove turns into a monster and kills you and Sechenov, at which point the game suddenly makes Sechenov like all nice as if you're supposed to feel bad. He literally just tried to kill you. He built killer robots. He experimented on his own people. He's trying to cover up the deaths of thousands. He's building a mind control network. And this game has the fucking balls to try to pull a switcheroo where confronting him is the wrong choice because the glove is just pure evil. Literally, he says, you're evil. It is the most piece of shit, poorly written, pointless, cheap twist. I have ever seen in a game, just a total mess. It left me actually mad. I really were to save to check out the other ending, which is also bad. Listen, I don't care if the game doesn't have a happy ending, but have it makes sense and conform to the game's own story. You can't try and make the player feel bad for this piece of shit. And the good ending can't be that you do nothing and walk away and let everyone else suffer. The writing of this game is easily the worst I've seen in years. It's got a ton of story and none of it makes a lick of sense. The audio and text logs are garbage. The plot is convoluted and stupid. The characters are either idiots or unexplained. I cannot stress enough just how terrible the world building and story of this game is. Just unbelievably garbage, man. Wrapping up. All right, that's enough. Listen, there's actually enough stuff here that if you have game pass, you should give it a go and see what I mean. There is absolutely a good game in here somewhere. Actually, there's like five good games in here somewhere. Each individual part has promise, but literally nothing in the game succeeds totally. This is a gold star lesson in game design, man. It's better to do two or three things really well than 10 things. OK, combat could have been great, but killing toasters isn't fun. And enemies are annoying to fight unless you use the telekinesis club, making it basically mandatory, in which case it's kind of all right most times. Puzzles are sometimes good, but also often very frustrating because movement is janky and shit often just breaks and the game insists, insists on having a platforming that it's bad at. The world is an amazing setting, but the writing is so, so, so terrible that it's totally wasted. Voice acting is a mess. Quality of life is a mess. The art design is universally great, but you spend a bunch of time in a bland open world, too. It's hard to judge this game because a lot of time and talent went into making it. The progression and combat very much feel like triple A stuff at times and triple A production values can overcome a lot of shit. But there are so many fucking lockpicking minigames and so much slow climbing and so many bugs and so many annoying knockdown attacks. No patches can save this game. But the developers hired actual writers next time and, you know, like focused, just focused on a couple of things. I can see them one day making a great game or at least a good game. Sadly, Atomic Heart is not that game. All right, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.