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I've been playing Atomic Heart this week, the 2023 fps that was billed as sort of a Soviet style bioshock, because I played Atomfall last week and it bored me to tears. And in the sense that the combat is kind of shit - you can do fun things if you want to fuck around but the optimal strategy is very straightforward, it is like bioshock. In bioshock the optimal strategy was to upgrade your wrench and health and abuse the research camera buffs, and only bother with plasmids with the big daddies. In atomic heart the optimal strategy is to just ignore the enemies and bolt for whatever objective you are after.
The frustrating thing about it though, is that the first four hours of the game are designed specifically for a avoidance play style, but once you leave the science complex that strategy straight fucks you to death. The first four hours basically teach you to scope out an area, find all the enemies and then take each one down without immediately pulling the rest, and by the end of the complex you are actually pretty adept at it, you get into that puzzle style game loop where you are trying to find a path that lets you kill everyone in one smooth chain of kills, and it's fun and does feel bioshocky.
But the second you leave the complex all that goes straight out the window - now as soon as an enemy spots you you may as well restart, because everything in a five mile radius just alerted and is coming for blood. Technically this isn't the case - you only alert other enemies if you kill one in front of a camera, if you just kill one only the enemies in line of sight will come for you. But the thing is when you kill enemies little repair drones get spawned to repair the bot you destroyed. And if you kill the repair drone another one comes and another - I sat repeatedly killing those drones once and they did stop spawning after the tenth one went down. They do the same for the cameras. And repaired enemies don't drop more loot. So you have to keep moving, and the security camera drones inevitably see you and then you are done.
Putting all this together, and wasting an hour testing the limits of the respawn system, it became clear the carefully planned approach was completely unviable. Not only do the repair drones mean you have to spend five minutes taking down each camera or enemy plus their ten repair drones, but doing so would bankrupt your ammo reserves due to loot not respawning with the enemies. You could combo the energy gun and the machete that recharges your energy too I suppose, but then you have to wait even longer for the drones to get in melee range. So I figured I'd tackle it the other way - bee line for the objective and see how far I could go before something killed me, and adapt from there.
Well the answer to how far can you go before the enemy kills you appears to be 'forever'. I ran straight to the tower I was supposed to visit - some moustache robots, saw robots and mortar robots saw me, but once I was on the tower elevator they couldn't touch me and by the time the game had finished explaining its plot points they'd forgotten about me. I went back down the elevator and bolted to visit the baba yaga lady and again caused plenty of ruckus that had completely died down when the exposition was over. And as I was reminiscing about times gone by back in the science complex where the cutscene gating had been annoying me by messing up my killing spree, it hit me - just run past all the enemies always. Or fuck it, why not just play something better?
I don't understand how I am supposed to play this and it feels like two different dev teams were making similar but distinct games that Mundfish stitched together. Which is a pity, because there was clearly a lot of effort and thought put into the world building and while it does have some familiar tropes playing out, it also has some rarer quirks, and a pervasive sense of that Slavic 'no fucks given' philosophy. The sexual element is particularly interesting from a meta perspective - clearly the devs were not anticipating the way younger millenials and zoomers would react to aggressively sexual dialogue sans either the safe consent-focused attitude of the 'playersexual' (excuse me while I vomit in my mouth) philosophy and it is grimly amusing reading reddit threads about it, watching poor kids torn between celebrating female sexual openness and complaining about feeling violated. Which is surprising, since they made the protagonist like that too - full of quips and jokes about every situation, and capable of bantering with everyone from his glove to baba yaga, but whenever he starts interacting with the sexy vending machine he's pissed at her for being gross and trying to avoid conversation at all costs.
But the alt history angle of the game is cool in its own right - it's set in a universe where the Soviets discovered an advanced technology they call the polymer, which is like a nanotech liquid that basically took the resource cap off the Soviet tech tree so that by the fifties the USSR is a post scarcity marvel. The science facility you roll through at the start gives you a glimpse at the progress - aside from the advanced robotics on display you also see them doing advanced genetic research and splicing, and using the polymer for teraforming, 3d printing, working in extreme temperatures and the kollectiv, which is using the polymer to upload everyone's consciousnesses to the cloud and allows you to instantly learn things by downloading them from other people's experiences (although sadly it's not as direct as pressing your forehead against someone else's and learning all they know). I think I already know where the plot is going to gokollectiv is mind control but I do want to see more of the world. So my hope is that someone here has already played atomic heart to completion, and they can tell me a way to play it that doesn't require endlessly backtracking to clear out areas I have already run through once I've upgraded my power level, because that's how it's looking. Any takers?
Was the kollectiv bit meant to be bolded? Or spoilered?
Spoilered. It's pretty obvious but it's only two years old and I expected more people might want to check it out.
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I saw a review of this and it piqued my curiosity, might pick it up when it's on sale.
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