Atomic Heart - Half Life with Russian Robot Clowns

[LowCostMonkey]

  

11 hours ago, Majora said:

The protagonist has some of the worst, most ill-fitting VA and dialogue I've seen in years. You've got this really creepy, at times beautiful looking game and then him just constantly word-vomitting all over it.

 

I saw some people earlier suggest turning language to Russian but that seems to turn all the menus/UI to Russian as well? Is there no way just to turn the VA to Russian? 

 

 

Absolutely this! I was really trying to enjoy this but the protagonist is such an overwhelming prick that I just couldn't stand it any longer and uninstalled it. 

[dvdx2]

I quite like the main character- the quirky dialogue keeps the game going, especially in bits that are abit quiet and boring.

tbh I’m starting to struggle abit with this now; the upgrade system initially has to be the most confusing things in a game ever. You seem to hoover up tons of resources, but you need so much to do anything meaningful with the weapons. It also has a lot less gunplay/combat than I would have liked. 

[squirtle]

Not far in, but yes, I wish the main character would shut up. I turned the VA off and the subtitles on. Easier to ignore them.

[dvdx2]

Lost the will to live with one of the rotating laser puzzles - there is definitely decent potential in this game but I’m struggling to find it - is it a puzzle game, an fps, an adventure game - it doesn’t really know…..

[Transient Curse]

I'm surprised people have had such a strong reaction to he character voice, it just feels like a pastiche of everyman action heroes, which I think are inately slightly ridiculous. 

 

The game itself, I'm enjoying, it feels nicely old school to me, a bit clunky in places but I would welcome more of these sorts of things. 

[Tomdominer]

The reason that I personally find him insufferable is that the main character seems to constantly be rude to his talking glove Charles with no reason, motivation or explanation. The glove provides information, helps him gather resources and even restores his health, and the main character just seems to shit on him at every opportunity.

 

Also, apart from the main characters lack of any real redeeming personality traits, the other issue I find with the dialogue is that there is (what I assume to be) jokes and other observations that have been lost in translation. The exchange between P-3 and Charles about the "cookie" key is one of the weirdest dialogue exchanges I have ever heard in a video game, or any piece of entertainment. "It even locks like cookies, right? Charles, do you like cookies?".

 

Wat.

[Majora]

Yeah, I hate everything about the dialogue to the point that it's spoiling the game for me. I hate the VA, I hate the weird attempts at humour that don't land, I hate the fridge, I hate how incessantly everyone talks, it all just feels so amateur and totally at odds with the rest of the game. It would be improved tenfold if everyone would just shut the fuck up.

[Mikes]

I ended up coming back and really glad I I. I've had a lot of fun, getting stuck on random rocks notwithstanding, but now I'm close to the end, chose which oath to go down, faced the first boss and..... the old school film cannister you picked up in the big cut scene before is stuck to my glove hand and I can't see anything through it when I'm aiming.  Ffs

[Majora]

Got to the first open area and I'm ditching this. Despite trying to convince myself otherwise I'm simply not having a lot of fun. I like the music and the visuals are nice in places but that's really all the good things I've got to say about it. 

 

An extremely messy and disappointing experience. Give the trailer editors a raise because they made this look so much more interesting than it really is. 

 

A very strong early contender for most disappointing game of 2023.

[NecroMorrius]

I’m not defending this game particularly but have we all forgotten when every game was a first person shooter with a brash chatty protagonist? It was either that or a completely silent one. Cast your mind back, past Troy Baker, past Nolan North. Was it good? No, not really. But it’s not unprecedented. 
 

Anyway, playing this feels a bit like playing the Call Of Duty parody that EA released to market Bulletstorm. But not on purpose 

 

 

 

[Majora]

I never used to play any of the Bro shooters so perhaps that's coloured my perception of the writing in Atomic Heart. In the FPS genre I've mainly stuck to the likes of Half-Life, Bioshock etc

 

Writing aside, it's just not been an enjoyable experience for me. The combat is dull, it doesn't control nicely or fluidly, it's buggy, I keep getting stuck on geometry and it can't seem to make its mind up as to what it wants to be. The open area being full of security cameras and regenerating robots was just the push I needed to let go and move on.

 

If I had paid £60 for this I would have been pissed.

[RubberJohnny]

The first open area definitely soured me and I nearly quit, but I dropped it down to easy and perservered and am glad I did, there's a lot more 'dungeon' environments on the main path through the story (and the open bits are small but pretty hand-crafted) and I love the test chambers.

 

Easy is maybe a bit too easy, but medium was really surprisingly tough in what it asked of you even for an experienced gamer playing very efficiently, there were real hectic bossfights and plenty of times when I just completely ran out of ammo in what was essentially the tutorial section, which in a game with no quicksave meant you could lose progress.

[CarloOos]

On 03/03/2023 at 00:08, Majora said:

I saw some people earlier suggest turning language to Russian but that seems to turn all the menus/UI to Russian as well? Is there no way just to turn the VA to Russian? 

You need to change the language on the main menu, you can’t do it in-game. 

I seem to be in the minority in that I’m finding the dialogue hilarious, it totally adds to the charm. I started off in Russian, where the VA sounds more sarcastically dry, but once I got to the horny vending machine I switched over because I just had to know how that scene played in English, and I’ve kept it in English since. I played the Stalker/Metro games in Russian but the atmosphere of those games is very different to this. The whole game feels like an exaggerated pastiche, and the mad crass dialogue plays into that. 
 

I’ll take try-hard sweary nonsense over the impenetrable lore-wank of most JRPGs any day.

[NecroMorrius]

I think the biggest problem with the combat is the dodging, which feels awkward. I stuck another hour into this today and I'm going round filling up canisters for some reason. There was an extraordinarily slow gondola ride for some reason. I'm not not enjoying it, but it's in a detached "WTF even is this" kind of way. I still can't grasp why you'd call it pro-Russian, admittedly the gags and messaging are really hamfisted but the whole joke seems to be that Russia gains this incredibly technology and doesn't have the imagination to use it, right? The individual scientists are excited to use it, but the top brass are forcing them to use it in tedious ways resulting in weird results, and then punishing them when it goes wrong, which allows it to run amok without the designer to control it. It's not really pro-anything, except nice graphics. It's clearly a game made by a team who REALLY like several first person shooters and wanted to blend them. But it does have a few ideas of it's own and it's a visual treat if nothing else. The fact that all their social accounts are gibbering in broken English only adds to the mystique.

 

Anyways it's got a FOV slider and frame generation now which is nice. Getting 160fps (the max my monitor can hit) at nearly-4k with everything on max and it looks really lovely. Feels alright too.