You can just walk around in circles dashing out of the way of telegraphed attacks or make enemies get stuck behind knee-high obstacles. It’s worth experimenting with the different ammo-type guns, cartridges that add effects like shock and burn, and combinations of glove skills that can freeze or toss around enemies, but it’s a bit of a hassle to get to a station to change loadouts and manage different loadouts for enemies that aren’t all that threatening.

So most of your points are better spent on character upgrades, which leaves about two-thirds of the skills as undesirables. Energy weapons don’t need to use ammo, and melee attacks charge up energy guns.

All of them can be customized and upgraded by turning in loot from slain enemies, but too many options feel irrelevant, like reducing weapon sway, or aren’t as exciting, like simply increasing your damage done, compared to the character upgrades that add extra dashes or make you immune to damage if you’re hitting an enemy. Your arsenal consists of melee weapons, ammo-type guns, energy-type guns, and glove skills. There isn’t much to the horror aspect because you have a special ability that lets you see dangerous entities through walls and has massive range, but the atmosphere and sense of security is used against you to keep things amusingly tense. Protagonist P-3 constantly berates the circumstances he’s in for being lame, annoying, and unimaginative, like repeatedly being sent on fetch quests to retrieve a number of items, his AI companion never shutting up, and things being too conveniently inconvenient. The story during gameplay is engaging except when too much attention is brought to it. It works, but it feels as if my morbid curiosity was taken advantage of instead of being served a well-crafted story. The rest of the narrative is equal parts mysterious and obvious, but it relies heavily on spectacle and plot twists to keep you engaged during the cutscenes and forced-walking segments. In present-day 1955, the USSR attempts to launch a new device that will allow humans to control robots with their mind, but the plan is sabotaged, causing all robots to turn on the humans. Atomic Heart takes place in an alternate history where the Soviet Union wins World War II and becomes a utopian superpower leading innovation in all fields of science, but most importantly robotics.

What is atomic heart about