Aftershock: Atomic Heart impressions

Put about 4 hours into it yesterday. Had a couple freezes that forced me to quit out but otherwise it ran ok, even on my 8 year old rig.

Its basically a less interesting Bioshock with a different setting. I suppose it sits more firmly in the Bioshock Infinite camp of Columbia than it does Rapture when looking at it. You have an axe that acts like the wrench and guns that you don't get piles of ammo for which I guess is more like Rapture. I also have the left hand of power which starts out with a electric power almost exactly like Bioshock. So far I've fought pretty much one enemy and a variant of the same enemy. They're a little spongy and the first person melee is about as frustrating as it usually is in these games. You can upgrade your weapons and such in a similar manner to Bioshock as well. Though that upgrade machine you may have heard of already is a trying experience. Thankfully once I got a little further in it seemed to change and stop doing the thing. I won't spoil it.

The one thing I do like a lot is how you can hold the button down to pick items up and just walk around a room and vacuum stuff up which makes grabbing the large amounts of materials quick and painless. Unlike Bioshock, you use a myriad of different materials to craft upgrades as well as new weapons. You have to find blueprints in order to craft certain things, which are shown on a map only when your at a crafting station.

Alongside these crafting stations are usually a save point. The game has auto save and manual saves can only be done at these machines. Its not too frustrating since you can zip back pretty quickly and it sort of feels like a penalty for save scumming.

So far I'm getting that type of fix. I played through all the Bioshock's again last year and have been craving more of that since. I don't expect to be blown away by anything in this game but it'll be a fun enough one of these. If your also in the mood for one of these I'd give it a shot. I might suggest not going with the english voices as they are not only weirdly not russian but also not great to listen to.

Edit: I also put a couple hours into the System Shock demo on Steam the other day. Never played the original. Its pretty cool.

I have Game Pass, so I figure I'll give this a try once I'm finished having an absolute blast with Like a Dragon: Ishin! All I've really done is read some of the more annoying discourse tangentially around the Wizard game, and watched the trailer. Either way @spacemanspiff00, right out of the gate this sentence rang very true and was pretty disappointing: "Its basically a less interesting Bioshock with a different setting." because boy is that what the trailer sure LOOKED like.

When I do jump on this I'll offer some of my own impressions, but until then thanks for starting a thread!

Nintendo STILL hasnt released the remaster of Advance Wars because of the war in Ukraine, but this company decides to put out its second Soviet Russia focused game this close to Defense of the Fatherland Day and the one year aniversary of the invasion of Ukraine.

I'll go ahead and pass on this one forever

I haven't played one of these since Bioshock Infinite and I find the Soviet aesthetic far more interesting than the americana of Columbia. After about 4 hours I'm having fun despite a myriad of bugs and a lot of overall graphical and gameplay jank. The looting mechanic is great as is the visual design and soundtrack.

My biggest frustration is with the terrible English acting as well as the tiny and sporadic subtitle implementation. I've been trying to play the game in Russian, but a lot of the subtitles are too small to read and sometimes subtitles don't appear at all. This has led me to play it in English audio which is embarrassingly poorly voiced and overall detracts from the immersion.

Was looking at this on PSN...so there's supposed to be 4 DLC's coming for this game?

Yeah, the least they could've done was have the protagonist do a Russian accent. Or really, really play up the fact he's playing a Russian dude Inglorious Bastards style.

Played the first hour or so, and it really does not live up to anything. The combat feels bad and the writing and voice acting are absolutely abysmal. The trailers that had come out of the last couple of years made the style seem more frenetic and wacky than it actually is, and while not being as full vatnik as many feared, it still seems to be taking a less critical view of Soviet kitsch than it should.

The obvious comparisons are the Bioshock games, which go out of their way to let you know as soon as possible that the utopian worlds you get dropped into are hypocritical and fundamentally rotten, which then allows those games to use either americana kitsch or old timey American exceptionalism as aesthetics which reinforce whatever commentary is going on. In Atomic Hearts, you get not only through the opening but also the first level without having the kind of turn against old Soviet utopianism which is required for this kind of story to work.

It's easy to see where the twist villain reveal will happen if/when the game gets around to it, but the fact that it spends so much time being uncritical towards an obviously corrupt setting is just plain inept. I went and looked up those old trailers, and the game that is implied by those things still looks like a deranged romp I would like to go on. This isn't that game.

As for the dialogue, holy crap is it the worst possible version of itself. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it makes me think of a line from that Netflix show GLOW, "He's more sexist than racist." So there's that at least. If I had to play a game where the protagonist talks way too much with their sassy arm accessory, I would take Forespoken over this thing any day of the week.

Has anyone played far enough to say if it actually does The Twist and become critical of its setting?

@omgfrfr: Feel free(I say encouraged) to leave and never come back if that's how you feel about the site and its community. Not even sure why you made this account in the first place.

@omgfrfr: You oughta be over on IGN then. They seem more like your kinda crowd. Then again I don't really understand your types that waste time on worthless shit posting.

FYI that person makes a new account every few weeks to say some slurs and get banned. Just flag them and the mod team will take care of it.

I agree with the general sentiment that AH seems pretty boring overall, at least in the first few hours. I really did not expect the writing to be as godawful as it is. Rarely has a game given me such thembarrassment from the writing as this. The combat seems okay--certainly better than the Bioshocks--but it feels incredibly shitty on kb/m. It seems to be a mouse acceleration issue (with no way to turn the setting off), so if you're gonna play on PC, use a controller.

Started playing it today since it's on Game Pass. Came in with low expectations and did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did. The atmosphere is spot on and very much reminiscent of Bioshock and the newer Fallout games. I started playing it in Russian thought with subtitles because I heard the English VA is bad and I can understand quite a bit of Russian so that helps. In Russian, there were some moments which actually made me chuckle.

The only thing I didn't like was the weapon selection which seems to be tiny

Yeah, I'm with Borgmaster on this one; I was interested because the trailers made this seem like an actual romp through twisted AI-hellscape Russia, with some considerable fun being poked at the kitsch. From what folk are saying here, that is not what this is, and what it actually is interests me far less than the trailers did. Paired with the dodgy ethics, I'm sticking this one in the bin.

Well, he went out swinging.

Haven't seen this sort of top shelf material since I was last on 4chan circa 2007.

Sigh… the internet really is a terrible place. Sometimes I think we would be better off without it.

So far, I would say I’m impressed by AH’s art style. It’s shades of Bioshock, Fallout and Wolfenstein. I put it on Russian since everyone said the voice acting is horrendous (I’ll admit it is hard to read the subtitles, but I’m not here for the “talk-ie” just the “do-ie”). We’ll see what happens, as I am only through the opening hour. Overall, I just love Cold War era content and want more of it, although I’m not a fan of it being on the Russian side of things (although that does make the dystopian disaster more palatable).