Atomic Heart: Brave, inventive and fun new FPS

A well-established genre in games is the FPS (First-Person Shooter), also known as “shooting game”, while in the matter of narrative, coming from books, the dystopian novels became successful for trying to predict how the future would be and what the downfall of society would be, even if it tried the search for perfection.

By combining the two elements into one, several games have been great successes and also cultivate loyal stream audiences, such as the franchises “Bioshock”, “Fallout”, and “Metro”, among others. And, after these, the most recent “Atomic Heart” appears.

The world of Atomic Heart

“Atomic Heart” is inspired, in narrative and gameplay, mainly by “Bioshock”. The game tells the story of a Soviet Union that is utopian, technological, and ultra-developed, but still not quite perfect. It is a game full of criticism of centralized power figures, the reckless pursuit of progress at any cost, and the vices of world leaders as well as political systems.

In terms of gameplay, it has an interesting linearity and a very well constructed upgrade system, but from the point that the game mixes the linear parts with a “semi-open” world system, it unbalances the sense of progression and breaks the game’s strong points, mainly about the best parts from the early game and, also, in the other more linear parts.

Highlighting this part, the game has an unbalanced difficulty in the open world parts because the alarm system that sends enemies after you exaggerates, and a lot, in the amount of enemies and, even with large amounts of ammunition and weapons, it is very difficult to defeat them at the same time.

And finally, the game’s biggest gameplay flaw is the game’s collision system, which leaves you stuck in corners during battle, and if you are in a duel with an enemy it prevents you from dodging quickly or even dodging at all, and you just suffer to death.

Catch your audience’s attention

By having an engaging story, charismatic characters, gameplay that matches perfectly with an unexpected soundtrack (classical music), well constructed immersion and other features, “Atomic Heart” can perfectly attract the audience for the streams, because it is a different game in an already established genre and, because of that, it draws a lot of attention, besides the themes about already known subjects and, precisely, the audience base of the so-called dystopian FPS, from “Fallout” to the classic “Half-Life”. By creating its own identity and building audience identification with familiar historical topics, the force of engagement is tremendous.

In terms of optimization, I played the computer version and the game requires a lot, but has many configuration options, which makes the gameplay experience much more palatable and possible, but it is good to take into account the minimum requirements of the game when bringing it on stream.

In terms of replayability, “Atomic Heart” has two endings, but this does not necessarily force you to replay the entire game to do them, has several extra challenges to collect more resources and weapons, being more interesting than the open world, which can be the big obstacle to the urge to play again.

The story of the game is good and have charismatic characters, despite some problems and, despite the clichés, the story itself sustains itself in what it intends and is worth much more for the means than for the ends.

“Atomic Heart” is playable with Xbox Game Pass.

Ludovicoluka

I have 25 years, I produce content to internet for 4 years and I like retro games, indies and I’m an enthusiast for new launches. I have as my favorite games Donkey Kong Country 2, Super Mario World, Hollow Knight and Red Dead Redemption II, per example. I like to experiment everything and the more, the better, but I never get sick of my comfort games!