Atomic Heart [split topic]

[Blue Jam]

please post about it in the Prey thread, I loved Prey and would like to hear more

PREY THREAD:

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=59846.0

MOONCRASH THREAD:

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=67496.0

Yes, @Jim_MacLaine, please do. Or start a new thread. I could discuss these games all day.

[Jim_MacLaine]

Gave it another go.

Binned.

[RetroRobot]

Been waiting years for this and its finally out.

Don't typically care about stories in shooters but the main character is such an unlikeable bore that I stopped playing after an hour. His dialogue is like what some Andrew Tate watching teenager thinks sounds cool, but then also garbled by shonky translation. It's like he's written to be a Duke Nukem style character but in a setting it doesn't match and without any of the wit and charm.

Sorry for a whine but fucking hell it's so bad.

[RetroRobot]

Woah you fuckin dickhead robot time for a cigarette fuck off Charles hahahaha I hate being in this Video Game TM

[Falkner Hinton]

I played it until the Queen(?) showed up and shot some flying robots, but I hated the main character and in about half an hour of playing it all it let me do was walk along some very scripted corridors for 5 minutes and swing an axe about.

Hard pass.

[RetroRobot]

Also the devs really thought that fridge was funny huh

[Blue Jam]

Would be funny if Charles was based on King Charles and its fingers were too gouty to handle a gun.

[oggyraiding]

I think the opening 30 minutes or so are incredibly self indulgent. Spend ages sat in a boat looking at the world, do a bit of walking, spend ages in a flying car looking at the world. The world looks nice, but the opening just dragged on and on. Played about 2 hours beyond that, I'm enjoying it somewhat. I think the melee combat works okay, the dodge mechanic making it feel a bit deeper than Bioshock's wrench or Half-Life's crowbar.

The fridge is weird and unfunny, and (as has probably been mentioned), after an hour or so the fridges you encounter stop being weird and horny and instead just sound robotic. Also the player character is awful, "crispy critters" is a stupid catchphrase.

[Blue Jam]

I rather liked the combat myself. It was fun to twat the moustachioed robots with no gun and just an axe and a taser glove, bit like Prey in that you have to conserve ammo and get creative with the combat. I just wish it would have let me roam across a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland at leisure doing a lot more twatting of robots.

The throwing mechanic left a lot to be desired. Why was it so weak? As an elite KGB officer you'd expect to be able to twat the fuck out of things by chucking sofas about the gaff, I just felt like I was one of my neighbours' cats having one of their wimp fights. I do love a good sofa-chucking mechanic, why couldn't Mundfish have paid a bit more attention to Prey and Control?

[oggyraiding]

Is there a specific throw button? I was picking up buckets to throw to distract the cameras, but I could only do a pathetic underarm throw, not like Half-Life gravity gun where you can throw the shit out of things.

[Blue Jam]

It's only possible to do a pathetic wimp throw, yes.

[Jim_MacLaine]

Yeah, I thought that was a bug as it was so pathetic, especially after having to look up how to activate the scanner as I was pressing both shoulder buttons simultaneously to no avail.

[oggyraiding]

I have decided I don't like the game. I have no HP restoring items, and I'm in a situation where I take on 10 robots. I can beat them using my remaining shotgun ammunition, but then I have to go through an area with another 10 robots, with no HP restoration items and no ammo. If I die I go back to the initial 10 robots. It's not fun.

[oggyraiding]

It's not like a Resident Evil game where managing resources is an interesting part of the game, it's just overly punishing shite.

[RetroRobot]

Crispy critters

[Moribunderast]

It's weird, whilst every criticism brought up in this thread is absolutely fair and true, I'm currently enjoying the game well enough. Yes, the main character is fucking loathsome and annoying, his robot glove is too vocal, the sexy fridge is almost unbelievably unfunny and the story lacks the character of the games that inspired it - BUT, I'm enjoying the gameplay well enough. I have no issue with games being linear so that's fine for me and the combat is decent enough. The game looks pretty and the enemy design is fun. I'm not terribly far into the game and it's certainly one I wouldn't recommend given the writing but as a free Gamepass thing to break up things before I jump into another Yakuza game, it's fine.

[falafel]

Watched a bit on YouTube. Don't think I've ever seen such a yawning gap between the promise of a trailer and the reality of the game itself. The protagonist is unbearable. I have played some pretty terrible characters in games before but I think I would have to draw the line at being asked to identify even tangentially with whatever that is.

[oggyraiding]

In a way I think the protagonist is so shit, it goes full circle and he's actually, as the kids say, based. Like Jack from Final Fantasy Origin, they're trying so hard to make a protagonist cool and edgy that it's almost admirable and it's definitely grown on me.

[pk1yen]

Did the opening bits of this the other day. It was so clearly originally a VR game they adapted back to a regular FPS.

Cutscenes are full of annoying full-motion first-person headbobbing, and that bit where you have to stand still and hold a key while an NPC does some fighting. Also the finger-movement to open up the scanner, and some random cutscene where you have to pick up a tool and hand it to a doctor. All standard VR bits that just feel completely out-of-place as passive cutscenes.

EDIT: Oh, and what felt like ten solid minutes of sitting in a car looking around at scenery while some robot narrates what you can see, which would have been okay in VR (pretty if dull) but fucking interminable in a console shooter.

[Blue Jam]

Did the opening bits of this the other day. It was so clearly originally a VR game they adapted back to a regular FPS.

Cutscenes are full of annoying full-motion first-person headbobbing, and that bit where you have to stand still and hold a key while an NPC does some fighting. Also the finger-movement to open up the scanner, and some random cutscene where you have to pick up a tool and hand it to a doctor. All standard VR bits that just feel completely out-of-place as passive cutscenes.

Heh, that seems so obvious now you mention it!

EDIT: Oh, and what felt like ten solid minutes of sitting in a car looking around at scenery while some robot narrates what you can see, which would have been okay in VR (pretty if dull) but fucking interminable in a console shooter.

To me that seemed a bit of a rip-off of the title sequence of Prey, where you fly over San Francisco in a helicopter, except that has a nice 80's-style soundtrack (also by Mick Gordon) and a couple of nice little details, like seeing Morgan's foot tapping to the beat if you move the camera down, plus

Spoiler alert

the TranStar HQ being modelled on the Talos 1 space station, and the bit where the "windows" blank out for a fraction of a second, revealing that they're actually screens and Morgan is in a simulator

[close]

Plus it's also quite short:

[Cold Meat Platter]

The combat in this looks really really shit from videos I've seen and everything else seems annoying and/or boring.

on the fence atm

[Moribunderast]

I've now encountered three different areas of this game where, if I die, the game continually freezes upon reload attempts until I go back to an earlier save and re-do things to get me back to the point where I died. So that's fun.

I still, despite the awful writing, am having a mostly good time with this. That said, I'm playing it for "free". If I had paid $90 for it I'd be quite displeased, I imagine.

[Jim_MacLaine]

The only positive for me was the retro soviet aesthetic and I didn't see much of that before I binned it.

[Mister Six]

Heh, that seems so obvious now you mention it!

To me that seemed a bit of a rip-off of the title sequence of Prey, where you fly over San Francisco in a helicopter, except that has a nice 80's-style soundtrack (also by Mick Gordon) and a couple of nice little details, like seeing Morgan's foot tapping to the beat if you move the camera down, plus

Spoiler alert

the TranStar HQ being modelled on the Talos 1 space station, and the bit where the "windows" blank out for a fraction of a second, revealing that they're actually screens and Morgan is in a simulator

[close]

Plus it's also quite short:

God, Prey is so great.

[pk1yen]

God, Prey is so great.

It really is.

I think I've forgotten enough about it now that I can replay it without going through the motions. (Also never played the DLC which I heard was good.)

[Mister Six]

The DLC is brilliant. It's basically a different game with the same mechanics and engine. You have to learn to play it in a very different way, prioritising different things.

[Clownbaby]

Did a thread about this a wee while ago after seeing a lot of intriguingly eerie development/aesthetic snippets coming out for a couple of years. Now the thing's out and we're seeing more of it, I'm a bit disappointed by how much the mystery has disappeared. I don't think the disgustingly arrogant main character helps at all.

I haven't bought it yet, I'll grab a used copy at some point because Kremlin rumours and that. The finished product looks a lot more ordinary than I was hoping it would. Might set the dialogue to Russian, so if the cunt keeps spewing cringe one-liners, at least I won't know what he's on about. Knew it seemed too good to be true.

[oggyraiding]

That early footage, when people were saying it's a fake game or vapourware, were really intriguing. I think the final product has a great aesthetic and visuals, it's just a subpar shooter with subpar stealth/mild survival elements. Reminds me of We Happy Few in a way. Cool concept, bad execution.

[Clownbaby]

That early footage, when people were saying it's a fake game or vapourware, were really intriguing. I think the final product has a great aesthetic and visuals, it's just a subpar shooter with subpar stealth/mild survival elements. Reminds me of We Happy Few in a way. Cool concept, bad execution.

Oh god, We Happy Few was horrendous and it seemed like such an interesting little oddity in the making. Another shame. The. You've got the fucking Hello Neighbour games that clearly don't care about making something of actual quality because 12 year old boys and streamers will play/defend it anyway.

I'm so bloody sick of the sheer amount of games which obviously died right after the aesthetic/concept was conceived. Atomic Heart sounds like it's not near as bad as that but I still wish that more game devs with the visual flair had as much dedication to making something equally as enjoyable to play.

[Moribunderast]

I'm about ready to bin this. Only really held there by the sunk-cost fallacy because I'm about 2/3rds in. So many little technical annoyances, on top of the awful writing. I have no idea what's going on in the story and don't particularly care. The combat has now gotten annoying as the open-world areas have SO MANY enemies that chase you endlessly, cameras everywhere that alert them and no save points readily handy. It's a bizarre choice - when you're in a main hub (underground) area there's save points every other fucking room but when you're in the open bits where there's a million enemies and you're tasked with getting by (via barely-working stealth or kinda-adequate gunplay) all of them for ages, there's nothing.

I am apparently about to encounter a boss. I checked the walkthrough because my last play ended with me wandering around for 30 minutes in the open-world, getting killed and getting sent back to the start of the chapter. This boss is apparently a melee boss and I have already "dealt" with one of those. If this one is anywhere near as annoying as that one, I'll venture to Wo Long instead. I normally force myself to finish a game once I'm this far along but I'm not going to aggravate myself unnecessarily with this one. The writing and characterisation have already failed. The gameplay is flagging. All that's left is the setting. If the gameplay gasps it's last gasp, the lure of Russian Bioshock aesthetics is not enough alone.

CRISPY CRITTERS!