Atomic Heart as the beginning of the revival of Russian game development.

Today I was lucky enough to see the end credits of the game “Atomic Heart”, the passage of which took me a little longer, I started playing, left for a while and then started playing again! Despite this story, for me personally the project generated only one thought “Finally"..

I’ll explain everything now, but you need to start from the very beginning to understand how successful this project was and whether it worked out?!

So, the game was developed by the Russian-Cypriot studio Mundfish, founded in 2017. During such a short existence, the studio managed to bring to life another project, Soviet Lunapark VR, exclusive for Windows was released on June 1, 2018, despite the fact that it was busy working on its future hit on many charts, Atomic Heart. The game was released as an adventure shooter with horror elements and a first-person view for virtual reality devices HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. The main character of the game is the Soviet special forces agent P-3 (in the future Major Nechaev), who, after an unsuccessful landing on base 3826, must complete a secret operation. The game features a Soviet futuristic setting and battles with various robots and other characters from the world of science fiction. And as a prequel to a younger, but more successful game, it turned out very well! Yes, the graphics left much to be desired, which in 2018 was a statement of a second-rate studio, but it’s worth remembering that the game was developed and released during the breaks between the development of the main game and the picture can be called good, so here we can only once again praise the developers.

So, we sorted out the ancestor, and before the euphoria from the game released on June 1 had passed, on July 27, 2018, the studio released the debut trailer for Atomic Heart, which currently has 4.5 million on Youtube. views.

It showed us the world around us, amazing graphics, a small fragment of gameplay, weapon customization and a bunch of robots. And all the action is filled with Soviet songs, which couldn’t help but rejoice! Of course, having watched it now, you understand that the developers still had to abandon some mechanics. For example, that we cannot lock doors with third-party objects so that the enemy does not get to us, and the weapon customization itself was slightly redrawn in the release.

However, the trailer was very well received by critics and the public, which gave Mundfish the message “We are moving in the same direction.”.

The game was released on February 21, https://nonukonlinecasinos.uk/review/golden-genie/ 2023 on PC, Playstation 4/5, Xbox One and Series X|S. And made a splash. However, there were some pitfalls… This is OUR domestic game, but for gamers from Russia and the CIS countries the new product was not available on Steam, and it could only be purchased through the VK Play platform (This means another launcher). This is politics, we will not touch it.

Well, I won’t say it’s smooth, but we approached the game itself carefully.

In the first seconds of gameplay, we are made to understand that we are in a developed society, stuffed with technical breakthroughs and bold decisions. I’ll say right away that I won’t go into details of the plot, since the game is already a year and a half old, I’ll only occasionally refer to it.

The scene with the car at the very beginning was also for a reason, we were shown majestic landscapes, a large map and, as always happens in an ideal world, it collapses… I really enjoyed watching everything go to hell. From a production standpoint, it was superbly written. Only everything was fine, we are a great nation with technological superiority and a minute later everything is in ruins, and we have to fight off the mustachioed robots Vovchikov, whose purpose is to carry heavy loads, sweep sidewalks and give tools to cool specialists. But instead they crush our comrades and ordinary Soviet citizens… And this is the whole Atomic Heart. Action shooter with elements of corridor horror, I would call it that. As the plot progresses, we understand that this was not an ordinary glitch, but an interesting outcome awaits us with traitors, and they turn out to be those whom you don’t even suspect, and you listen to them throughout the entire game.

On this I think we can finish the plot, I indicated the main thing and created a little intrigue.

Gameplay. In addition to the dynamic first-person view, mechanics such as the creation of a polymer shield from a glove (which, when fully upgraded, can reflect a laser and cause mirror damage to the enemy), raising enemies above the ground and many other features of the HRAZ glove are very memorable. A lot of different weapons, from axes to grenade launchers, and all this is also being modernized. The gun is very memorable, with its power and range. We worked with stealth here, but there are nuances that cannot be ignored. When you walk down the street, where there are a bunch of robots and you shoot the one who fights off them with a pistol, others will not hear anything, but when you disassemble one for parts in front of a circling daisy (or camera), tons of metal will attack you, from which you will still need to fight off for about 20 minutes.

Ammunition and first aid kits. I wanted to highlight this in a separate subsection, since stocks are a different story here. The first thing I’ll note is that the arsenal is very small, in which it’s not always possible to fit everything you’d like. If there are 5 types of weapons in the arsenal, there will only be free space for a couple of first aid kits and 2 sets of cartridges for 3 types of firearms. And you need to keep an eye on their replenishment (they will not drop from killed robots) since you don’t always understand when a boss battle will begin, during which there will be nowhere to get cartridges, and there are battles with a bunch of robots, and the cartridges are gone! Or come up with combinations of a couple of firearms, one melee weapon, and use the rest for supplies.

Now let’s talk about the "place of power". That’s what I call a place where you can save and replenish your ammunition. There are a lot of them here, but it’s better to go into all of them, because autosaving is rare here and if you skip such a rest room, you can roll back quite well in the passage, especially after the battle scenes.

I won’t talk for a long time about character leveling. It exists and it’s pretty good. When you start playing the game, you try your best to dodge and hit a regular robot, but towards the end of the game you go into a crowd of opponents to have fun scraping metal to the music. It took me 15 minutes to complete the same twins in the finals, without a single death and without using a first aid kit. However, I will say that I had a fully upgraded polymer shield and health, and the weapons were an RPG, with full upgrades, an asterisk (at the first stage I only worked with it when I had to pass the twin in the corridor) and a gun. This is a life hack for you to pass!

Results. Now the time has come to explain what this pathetic “finally” means. I really liked this game, I was very delighted, exactly what I wanted to feel when I waited and then bought this game. Finally, our domestic studio has released a project that is hitting many charts and that EVERYONE, without exception, wants to play. I especially liked the voice acting and the now famous PIES… The denouement was very unexpected for me, BUT I’m glad that they explained to me as a player who is who. When I watched the credits I had no questions left about what KHRAZ is, what eventually happened to the world, who the traitor really is. I really hope that I was able to fully reveal my emotions today, after passing through, and I will certainly return to this universe of Enterprise 3826 more than once to hear that there are 30 seconds left until the full… Well, you know.

Thank you Mundfish for giving us this wonderful game.

Thank you for reading this to the end, I hope you like and repost the article, leave your opinion and experience in the comments.

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