A while ago I posted a little something about a game called 'Atomic Heart' about which I was none too pleased. I called the game all sorts of unpleasant things, from clumsy to amateurish and theorised that I might not even make it to the end. But then I decided to google how many quests there were and noticed that, since the game's quests can be as short as clearing out a single destination, I was already half way through the game. And at the point... I mean I just wanted to see why there was that low contingent of weirdoes out there who damn-near insisted that this was the game to blow your socks off? I heard people call it 'incredible' and whilst my typical reaction is to implore these people to try out some better games to see what actual systematic mastery looks like (as opposed to 'dart at a board' design philosophy) maybe there was something I didn't see straight away.
And after pushing through the game to the final credits I have to reflect back on that one review comparing this game to modern day DOOM and remark "Wow- that's still nonsense!" But seriously, the biggest revision I would make upon my initial impressions would be on the gameplay- because whilst the limited tools of the beginning matched with the dull melee and the out-of-place ammo scavenging scupper those early hours- a lot of these pressure points start to alleviate by the mid to late game. Especially when you start loading up on enough ammo to make the ammo scavenging design essentially pointless, once again raising the query of why it was ever implemented in the first place if it doesn't fit the design of the game and forces the player to engage with shoddy melee for several hours before they let loose?
When you start getting enough tools to equip a decent arsenal that you upgrade to be specifically useful, then you start getting to the point where spotting an enemy doesn't immediately draw the biggest sigh you can possibly muster- because you actually have some options and can play around with your prey. The open world still stuffs itself silly with endlessly respawning trite in place of genuine level design- but we've already assessed that the open world is a lost cause- less said about it the better. In particular I feel it's worth praising the cartridge system which allows the assignment of limited-use elemental buffers on all your traditional weapons making the actual raw shooting feel a lot more dynamic and interesting. It's really quite clever- however it does highlight another quirk of modern damage-type based shooters I've come to despise recently.
I'm talking about the 'damage buff' element types. In this game it would 'Polymer' which comes up in gameplay as a substance squirted onto enemies in order to heighten the amount of damage they take from elemental effects- just like how the purple goop in Borderlands 2 works. But just as with Borderlands 2- the existence of this substance ends up limiting gameplay opportunities for the player unless they actively choose to be less effective in a game with pointlessly artificially restrained resources. Once you've got it, every fight starts with a Polymer jet stream over your enemies before anything else, bringing an otherwise unnecessary aura of 'sameness' to every encounter with undermines the otherwise decently varied enemy design. It's a conceptual problem however, and I think I already know enough about Atomic Heart to figure out that conceptual considerations were not this team's forte.
Many seem to believe that the abject pathetic-aspect of character dialogue alleviates as the game goes on, and to some degree I think they're right. The incessant nattering of Char-les, utterly inappropriate to the tone and undermining environmental storytelling doesn't go away, but the protagonist becomes less obnoxiously dickish to everyone. He still is a dick, just less of one in every sentence. Upgrading the dialogue from unbearable to ignorable. It still never becomes good and highlights another giant problem- Atomic Heart doesn't know how to tell a story.
Literally the entire crux of the narrative's plot, the major character motivations and where the player's thoughts should be, are dictated out-loud through seemingly random conversations that Char-les brings up out of the blue. These conversations are drawn out and placed, once again, as though by an amateur- to such a point where big three minute arguments trigger during a 15 second stroll from one location to an obvious boss arena- meaning that a player who wants to actually follow this narrative is forced to stand listlessly on the edge of the arena for three minutes whilst their watch natters away seemingly forever. Perhaps there would be more natural opportunities to spark meaningful exchanges like these if the open world wasn't slapped together by a madman in a rush- but here we are. And even if that were the case- we're still talking about a narrative literally read off the script for us- talk about wasting the medium.
On the rare occasions that we actually do get cutscenes I think it becomes pretty obvious that Atomic Heart had no cinematographers on staff. Which is not in itself a great crime for an indie studio, but it just highlights the absolute bizarre discrepancy between the quality of all the art assets in the game and the near-experimental bumbling of practically every other department! Characters bobble awkwardly on shots held too long, with strange too-zoomed-in angles that hold too long and intention is devoid from any of it. If these scenes were meant to illicit emotion, the only emotion would be bewilderment. And maybe that is the intent- but that certainly wouldn't fit with the schizophrenic tone. The only actually well shot scenes are those involving the Twins, because you know these developers aren't going to miss a well placed shot admiring their eye-poppingly curvy ballerina robots- no matter how utterly weird and unexplainable their actions are. Not that I'm angry about that, per se- I would have preferred seeing those twins in more scenes in fact- they seemed to focus the staff somewhat...
Atomic Heart seems to be the product of under-testing, were I to guess. A title that came together in the late stages of a very experimental development period, wherein the team were trying to figure out what it was they even wanted with the game. After which I suspect they lacked the resources to test out the entire game (which might explain the bugginess the game still boasts even after all this time) or just lacked the concrete vision to know what sort of experience they wanted their game to effuse- which leads to an experience I will charitably call "lobsided" and less so charitable plaster "an unfocused and frustrating mess". I liked Atomic Heart in the end, despite itself. But I would not recommend it to anyone when Bioshock does everything it wants to do neater, more cleverly and with an unforgettable narrative that changed gaming as a whole. My score doesn't change.
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