Atomic Heart + full DLC review: highly ambitious RPG FPS, but felt like it was made in the early 2010s:
With the sequel on the horizon and the final DLC sale packaging the entire experience for just £20 in 2026, I thought it was finally time to jump in. Oh boy. I vividly remember the release window where people absolutely shat on the game for its story and protagonist. I honestly thought those complaints were overblown. They were absolutely spot on. The writing is exactly as bad as everyone claimed.
The absolute worst opener and structurally garbage narrative:
The pacing is an utter disaster right out of the gate. You are forced to sit through a 10-second unskippable boot movie every boot-up, followed by an excruciating 20-minute walk-and-talk segment that puts the most bloated Sony formula titles to shame.
The game wears its BioShock and Deus Ex inspirations proudly on its sleeves. Unfortunately, it completely ruins those aspirations with a narrative that constantly shoots itself in the foot. Even if we are extremely lenient and blame the atrocious English localisation, the fundamental structure of the dialogue is pure garbage. It absolutely reeks of a directionless development team. Conversations flow bizarrely, emotional beats miss entirely, and characters constantly talk past one another.
The cutscene direction suffers from the exact same amateurish approach. Most cinematic moments seemingly exist just because a director saw a cool shot in another game and wanted to copy it, completely ignoring whether it actually served the scene. Throw in remarkably poor sound engineering and generic, mismatched audio effects, and the whole narrative presentation feels completely hollow.
A grating protagonist who out-manchilds Duke Nukem:
The writing reaches absolute rock bottom with Major P-3. The dialogue sits comfortably alongside the catastrophic writing of the Saints Row reboot and reaches the sheer insufferability of Forspoken. The English voice acting is horrific, and the man literally out-manchilds Duke Nukem.
The developers can hide behind the excuse of the character being written as an abrasive idiot for lore reasons all they want. A canon excuse from the writers does not make having to play as him and listen to him complain for 40 hours any less grating. Every single time the story actually starts getting interesting, P-3 opens his mouth and steers the whole thing straight off a cliff with an unbearable line.
Feature creep and a half-arsed gameplay loop:
When it comes to the gameplay, Mundfish clearly just looked at what other studios were doing and tried to cram it all in. The core loop is filled with ridiculous feature creep, turning the whole experience into unrefined mush.
You get a subpar RPG system, generic elemental abilities, mediocre gunplay, clunky melee combat, driving, parkour, puzzles, QTEs, a generic open world, and dialogue trees with zero meaningful branches. The game does not master anything. It lacks basic polish across the board. The physics engine was blatantly not built to handle platforming or parkour, making those sections incredibly awkward to control. Instead of meaningful exploration, the vast majority of your time is spent vacuuming up resources and solving tedious filler puzzles designed solely to waste your time and artificially pump metrics.
Mediocre combat and rigid metal targets:
Combat is thoroughly mid, but the most glaring issue is the enemy feedback.
Fleshy mutants and humanoids: These actually provide visual and mechanical feedback. You know when your shots are connecting.
Metal robots: Half the roster is completely rigid. They do not flop over, they do not ragdoll, and they lack any satisfying audio crunch when you blast them to pieces.
The boss battles are incredibly forced, and this problem gets significantly worse in the DLCs. The design philosophy for the expansions is blatantly obvious and lazy. The game throws a brand-new gimmick at you and effectively forces you to use it or die, stripping away any real player agency or creative combat solutions.
Unoriginal music but brilliant world-building:
The soundtrack relies heavily on remixes of old Soviet pop songs and classical opera tracks. They sound perfectly fine and fit the mood well, but I cannot give the developers massive credit here since the standout pieces are completely unoriginal compositions.
Where Mundfish actually did a bang-up job is the environmental design. The heavy focus on Russian culture and the integration of ballerinas as a major part of the world-building is brilliant.
The modern audience kool-aid and the marketing genius of the Twins:
Looking back at the media outrage in 2023 over the sexualised Robot Twins is absolutely hilarious today. Game journalists lived in a 'modern audience' bubble, crying about ESG checklists and outdated tropes, completely ignoring what actual players wanted.
Mundfish ignored the modern industry bullshit entirely, and that unapologetic design massively helped this incredibly mid game to be memorable. The Twins became a viral sensation, got endlessly memed, and provided millions in free marketing. Those character designs literally built the fanbase required to sustain four DLCs across three years and secure a greenlit sequel.
Dlc 1 Annihilation Instinct: a creatively bankrupt what-if scenario:
Annihilation Instinct offers a "what-if" continuation based on the game's alternate walk-away ending. Narratively, the focus shifts heavily to NORA the overly aggressive AI fridge. On paper, this could have been an interesting psychological look at rogue programming and AI obsession. In execution, it was clearly developed too closely alongside the main game and carries over every single core flaw.
The pacing is immediately destroyed by a ten-minute walk-and-talk sequence set in blatantly copy-pasted areas around the Mendeleev Complex. The new mannequin-style enemies are genuinely creepy, but the boss fights completely ruin any built-up tension. The main encounter against the Colossus BEA-D is a miserable, triple-phased slog against incredibly boring ball-shaped robots. The expansion fails to justify its own existence, suffocating its narrative potential under exhausting, repetitive combat and the laziest final boss puzzle design the game has to offer. The developers even threw in an immortal, randomly attacking talking goose purely for shock value, which perfectly highlights how utterly directionless the writing actually is.
Dlc 2 Trapped in Limbo: trivialising mental trauma with internet humour:
Trapped in Limbo is where my patience completely evaporated. Narratively, this expansion is supposed to deal with the severe mental trauma of P-3's fractured psyche. Following the catastrophic climax of the true ending, P-3 is trapped inside his own subconscious, desperately trying to reconnect with the digital remnants of his dead wife. This should have been a surreal, psychological nightmare exploring mind control, grief, and a broken man's guilt.
So how exactly does Mundfish handle this incredibly heavy thematic burden? By turning the game into a cheap mobile runner where you play as a furry animal sliding down candy-cane tracks. You spend the entire DLC collecting gingerbread apples and gold coins. It is profoundly insulting to the game's own lore. The developers took a serious narrative revelation about severe psychological manipulation and trivialised it with quirky, out-of-touch 2010s internet humour. The platforming is clunky, the sliding mechanics are dreadful, and the sheer tonal whiplash completely destroys any lingering investment you might have had in P-3's mental state.
Dlc 3 Enchantment Under the Sea: forced gimmicks and zero emotional weight:
This expansion serves as the canon continuation of the story. P-3 escapes Limbo and heads to the underwater Neptune Research Center to recover the Beta Connectors. More importantly, the consciousness of his murdered wife Ekaterina is now quite literally trapped inside his new glove.
Pairing the protagonist with the digital ghost of his wife should be an emotional goldmine. In reality, the writing completely fumbles the concept. There is absolutely zero chemistry between P-3 and Ekaterina. The dialogue remains structurally garbage, completely failing to sell the tragedy of their twisted reunion. No matter how aggressively the writers try to force their banter, it just feels hollow and irritating.
Mechanically, Mundfish goes full BioShock but pads the runtime heavily with reused architectural assets from Chelomey. They also introduce the Whip, a new grappling hook toy. The boss fights are the worst of the bunch specifically because they strip away your agency. The massive MOR-4Y crab boss is a prime example of this restrictive design. The encounter essentially forces you to play entirely around the Whip gimmick, heavily punishing you for trying anything else. You spend the majority of this DLC aimlessly walking around searching for items instead of experiencing any meaningful narrative progress.
Dlc 4 Blood on Crystal: a mind-numbing culmination
So we open with a literal scene-directing copy-paste of a James Gunn 'cool, quirky' slow-mo battle with a mixtape blasting in the background. It absolutely reinforces the core mentality of this entire development team. They have zero creativity and zero innovation. Taking inspiration is fine, but this entire game relies on just blatantly copying other media.
Of course, as per usual, we get slapped with the standard DLC-only gimmicks that serve absolutely no purpose other than wasting your time and causing immense annoyance. You are constantly forced to swap powers using the new CHANCE module purely for arbitrary puzzle purposes and to counter elemental Polymorph enemies. Combine this with a severely limited arsenal of weapons, and the combat becomes a colossal chore. The fights are incredibly boring because the designers simply spam a bunch of enemies into a box-shaped arena. It gets unbelievably tiring and dull.
In a bizarre twist, the revised NORA, who now acts as your glove sidekick, is actually better at being a wife character than the robot Ekaterina ever was. Honestly, this DLC is so thoroughly mind-numbing and such a massive waste of time that I could not even stomach playing for more than an hour per session. I genuinely could not be bothered to finish the last third of it.
✅ The Verdict
So, is the Ultimate Edition package worth £20 on a deep sale? Yeah, I suppose so. If you have somehow managed to avoid playing any of its direct inspirations, there is a decent amount of dumb fun to be had here. The visual design is genuinely brilliant, and the unapologetic aesthetic is undeniably memorable.
However, I absolutely cannot stress enough how aggressively this game sabotages itself. Major P-3 easily ranks as one of the most painfully designed protagonists in the history of the medium. You are forced to endure an unbearable manchild for dozens of hours while slogging through an experience completely devoid of genuine imagination or creativity. There is zero true innovation here. Mundfish simply took the fundamental mechanics of BioShock and Deus Ex, slapped a shiny Soviet paintjob over the top, and stuffed the runtime with pointless padding and tedious puzzle rooms to artificially inflate their player metrics.
This severe lack of creative identity makes the upcoming sequel incredibly predictable. I honestly could not care less about where the franchise goes, but the reveal trailer for Atomic Heart 2 at Summer Game Fest showed exactly what I just talked about. Now that movement shooters and Mechs nostalgia are dominating the market, what do we see in the trailer? Grapple-hook wall running and massive mechs. It is the exact same creatively bankrupt mentality: look at what is popular and slap a Soviet paintjob on it. Unless the second game actually manages to massively improve on this directionless, feature-creep development style, it will absolutely be another thoroughly mid, bargain-bin game. I might force myself to look at it three years into the future when it goes on a massive sale.