Atomic Heart

Atomic Heart lives on its look: a first-person shooter with retro-futurist machinery, Soviet-flavored art direction, and a strong taste for spectacle. By our assessment, that presentation is its main draw, because the environments and machines do a lot of work even before the shooting starts. The cost is that style has to carry a lot, and the game has to earn attention in combat and pacing as well. In practice it plays like a shooter that wants to be watched as much as played, with exploration, weapon use, and oddball enemy design taking center stage. It sits closer to an audiovisual showcase than to a plain, systems-heavy shooter, and that is also where its ceiling is.