Have you ever played Legendary? How about Turning Point: Fall of Liberty? If you haven’t heard of these mid-tier gems I don’t blame you. What about Hour of Victory, though?ꦡ Okay, at least I tried. I guess you needed to be in a certain time and place to experience al🦩l the mediocre shooters the PS3 and Xbox 360 had to offer back in the day. It was a time when games didn’t take as long and were cheaper to make, meaning unknown studios and publishers could produce half-baked yet original ideas that many played, but few bothered to remember. Except me.
I was starting secondary school as the Xbox 360 and PS3 were making a splash, and, with little money to our names, my siblings and I often raided rental shops and pre-owned bins in search of whatever games we could. Such a strategy often surfaced bangers like Blacksite: Area 51 and Homefront, forgettable budget shooters of the day that tried interesting things while never having the resources to compete with the big boys. Those d𝔍ays have passed us by, 𒁃but every once in a while a game comes along to remind us of simpler times.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Atomic Heart feels laughably out of time from the second you take control. Our protagonist Sergey Nechayev sails along the peaceful artificial rivers of Facility 3826 as advanced robots cater to his every whim, pouring out fresh glasses of soda and offering exposition on the city currently unfolding before us. Every line of dialogue feels monotone and perfunctory, delivering details we need to know and characters we’re required to meet that transforms its otherwise compelling world into a bleak rollercoaster ride. You don’t even have a chance to ground yourself in this place before it starts throwing things at you, with Sergey spawned i💜n an already moving boat dishing out exposition in mere moments. Atomic Heart wastes no time getting started, an ironic ambition given how bloated its runtime tends to be otherwise.
When you are actually given control, Atomic Heart turns into a bootleg rendition of BioShock Infinite. You will find NPCs conveniently positioned around specific androids and gameplay ideas poised to crop up later, offering a context to familiarise ourselves with them as random citizens stare in awe at everythꦆing the Soviet Union is now capable of. Our main character also refuses to shut his mouth for even a second, reacting to anything and everything like he’s never seen it before despite apparently working for the Union and his way up to the rank of Major. His performance direction feels like it came from someone who doesn’t understand how the act of emotion is conveyed through English, and thus serious moments and more dramatic observations are delivered with unintentional hilarity. It turns the whole thing into a big joke.
We’re also waiting for the penny to drop, for the armies of obedient robots to experience a glitch in their programming and go on a murderous rampag🦹e. There is no tension to be seen in Atomic Heart’s world building because the crescendo staring us in the face is so glaringly obvious. I bet this hulking big robot is the big daddy equivalent, and the ones flying above me will become an immediate, missile-firing nuisance the moment I need to escape. It all feels trite, and doesn’t seek to build on BioShock’s greatness so much as mimic it to the point of creative bankruptcy. It’s a tribute act that arrives 15 years too late imbued with an oddly misogynistic perspective on the people and politics it hopes to deconstruct and critique.
Mundfish has crafted a visually spectacular world ripe with imagination, but much of it is pilfered from bet🌞ter media. It stands atop the shoulders of giants and meekly claims a hollow victory as it teeters and comes worryingly close to falling off. Its marketing materials leaned out of politics and into the many BioShock comparisons while failing to realise that Rapture and Colombia never hesitate to put their flawed ideologies under the microscope and take them to task. I’m curious to see Atomic Heart through to the end in case it delivers a late-game skewering of the empty slogans it moves through, but right now it struggles to avoid feeling achingly out of time. Open exploration and gunplay pulls from Wolfenstein and Singularity, Audio logs and terminals are a dead ringer for Alien Isolation, and pretty much everything else is from BioShock. It fails to push its original mechanics far enough in any direction as it awkwardly returns to genre tropes again and again.
It’s ironic how the BioShock comparisons that helped get Atomic Heart’s name out there in the first place have become its critical downfall. The first round of teaser trailers appeared to showcase a tense survival horror with minimal combat and a rich atmosphere, the primary focus on unsettling imagery mixed with an eerie silence destine༒d to be ruined by awkward dialogue. The final product is a bloated open world shooter with awkward storytelling and stolen imagery that mimics the B-tier shooters of a much older generation with none of the charm or circumstance that allowed them to shine on their own terms. I miss the times of flawed shooters that weren’t afraid to try new things and poke fun at themselves, but you can’t usher in their return without taking into account how much the medium has changed.
