You mainly achieve this by smashing your way through tons of wonderfully retro-styled robots (and a few plant-zombies) using a combination of dieselpunky firearms, brutish melee weapons, and polymeric (basically tech-magic like Bioshock’s Plasmids or Prey’s Typhon Powers) superpowers. Someone’s reprogrammed the worker robots into combat mode, they go berserk and kill just about everyone, and it’s your job to get to the bottom of the conspiracy. But rest assured that as with all the great single-player shooters–which Atomic Heart can certainly hold a light to if not quite match–shit soon hits the giant turbine fan, and you’re having to fight your way through a veritable robo-pocalypse. For a while it’s almost alarming seeing a depiction of the USSR that’s so glossy, so flattering–like one of those aspirational propaganda posters showing a man ( or, more aptly, a robot) looking to the distance while an out-of-shot sun casts those radial beams from the corner of the picture. Like the Half-Life train ride back in 1998, or the descent into Rapture in Bioshock in 2007, Atomic Heart’s opening feels immensely confident, no doubt bolstered by the inherent peacocking pomp of the Soviet Union. As alt-histories visions go, this is right up there with that of MachineGames’ Wolfenstein games. Look to the distance, and you see that your hovering town is just one of many, and the air is buzzing with automated machines zipping through the clouds and down to the Earth far below, where the various sections of a Soviet science facility wrap around a beautiful lake district. You, a scientifically enhanced stooge of the most brilliant mind in an alt-history Soviet Union in the 1950s, are walking through a parade celebrating the technological might of the Soviet nation a procession of charmingly retro robots parades through the immaculate streets of a Russian township, impossibly hovering high above the clouds on drone-like rotors. The early going in Atomic Heart has all the gravitas of a shooter that’s destined for greatness. Lacks alternative ways to fight (or avoid) enemies.
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