Early fights are melee focused, and the difficulty is nearly infuriating because it’s easy to see how much better at this these droids are, dodging your attacks and knocking you away with relative ease. The robots I faced off against, while appearing to be a low-tier enemy, were tough and smart fighters with an uncanny ability to ambush me.

This is good, because you’ll want to keep your brains about you for the combat. Looting was oddly painless due to a hand implant that would let me hoover loot out of every drawer of a filing cabinet at once, inhaling detritus from around the room like some sort of hand-mounted Kirby. In the facility I found myself in for 80 per cent of my hands-on playtime, I was exploring this bunker, listening to voice notes, talking to dead people via their creepy brain implants and trying to work out how to fight the robots stalking me through the corridors.

If this is the utopian capitalist society, it doesn’t seem like it.Įither way, it’s hard to think about that Soviet supremacy when you’ve been hounded across the countryside by robots and then tossed into a deep dark research facility by video gaming’s best octogenarian – Granny Zina, who covers your escape by spraying an AK47 at the approaching ‘bots and then toting a rocket launcher just before you descend – and forced to fend for yourself with little more than a fire axe and an empty KS-23 Shotgun. Everyday robots look slightly misshapen and inhuman, while the fancy metal assistants are all chrome and polish. This bleeds over into the characters, too. Atomic Heart has exceeded its quota of both hammers and sickles, embedding them everywhere in both the marbled halls in the first part of the preview and the darkened bunkers I was later forced to explore. The art style is distinctive within video games, owing a debt to those classic Soviet propaganda posters.

Atomic heart robots