Finished it, overall I think it's just a shitty bootleg bioshock with crappy open-world traversal. Just about everything feels pretty clunky, from the combat to platforming. Story is so badly delivered and shifts in tone a lot. I do like the setting and robots though. 6/10 on a good day.
Played a few hours and it's an interesting setting with good looking environments and models. Don't care too much for the story or all the chatter, and gameplay is OK I suppose. Just seems like Soviet Bioshock to me.
Comparison I did using TSR for upscale from 67% resolution and downsample from 133% resolution. Native resolution here was 3840x1080. Imho the 67% here is looking pretty decent, seems super playable.
You can but having to keep it pressed just to pull stuff out is so annoying. Anyways, I am trying to get canisters for some tree or crap. It is so boring. Such a cool setting but they made the whole gameplay just downright crap.
Played it on game pass. By the end of my second play session, also uninstalled it on game pass. Fuck me this game is shit. Like actually awful. I've play most of the bad console port fps, but god damn this just may be one of the worst.
Im genuinely surprised at how high some of the reviews for this game were. None were "high" reviews mind you, but all seemed to suggest it was above average. It is not.
Just installed this on games pass, although looking at the reviews here it looks like maybe I should just pass on it period. Anyway first thing I noticed so far is the game feels choppy. I'm apparently getting 200 fps and freesync is working according to my monitor, but visually it feels more like 60 fps, which is really weird. It just doesn't feel as smooth as a game running above 100 fps should.
Edit: Turns out the problem was some sort of conflict with RTSS which I usually use to cap my frame rate. It seems it was causing irregular frame times leading to choppiness. With that disabled and frame rate target set in the game everything seems to be working properly now.
Atomic Heart (7.5/10) - So, I beat this game a while back and meant to write up a detailed review of it but I just never got around to it. After a choppy start (pun intended) due to RTSS frame rate capping not playing well with the game, I ended up really enjoying it.
I really liked the setting and story line. The game definitely had Bioshock and Deus Ex vibes, maybe with a bit of NOLF mixed in. It was one of those games that was theoretically set in the past, but where there was strangely advanced tech, so some things were old school, like cars and TVs, while other things were futuristic. The humanoid bots were adequately creepy in their appearance and mannerisms---they did a good job capturing the robots gone bad aesthetic. Having the glove serve as a narrator was an interesting choice, although at times that was problematic because he would get interrupted and you'd miss something. In terms of the overall story line:
I liked that the game had a darker ending, with the glove ultimately betraying you. Maybe it was a little obvious that was going to happen (it's always a tricky balance between sufficient foreshadowing and being too clear), but of all games I felt like this one deserved a darker kind of ending, and I'm glad they were not afraid to go there.
The powers and weapons were a little bit intimidating at first, but once you start to understand it I felt they were pretty well balanced. I liked how you could pretty much re-spec at will, both with your powers and weapons. That gave you the ability to change things up if you weren't happy with a power you chose, or if you just wanted to spice things up. It also helped in that some powers were pretty powerful early on, but later in the game when you were overall more powerful they no longer ended up being as useful. General game play/gun play were pretty solid. Not absolutely amazing, but enjoyable and more than good enough to get the job done.
Graphics were good, if not amazing. Ray tracing didn't really seem to do much, so I wouldn't bother with it if you need more performance, but the game looked and ran fine for the most part. I wouldn't describe it as a showcase game you'd play just for the visuals though. Sound design was also acceptable.
Now for a few complaints. First of all, the pacing could have been better. Each level was interesting at first, but they all felt like they were 20-25% too long, so each of them overstayed their welcome just a bit. Also the level design was both branching, in that there were different parts you could explore, but they were also linear, where once you left an area you couldn't go back to it. Unfortunately, it wasn't always clear when you were entering a path that you couldn't come back from which caused me to miss out on some exploration, since I chose the wrong path first. You also couldn't go back to the levels after completing them, even though logically it didn't make sense why you wouldn't have been able to.
The jumping mechanics also were rather clunky. For the most part this wasn't that bad because they weren't usually that heavily used outside of the Testing Grounds. Unfortunately, in the Testing Grounds were you had to perform jumping puzzles, it felt very inconsistent whether your character would grab what you wanted to, leading to many unnecessary deaths. Fortunately, the Testing Grounds were optional, and there was no need to complete most of them since you had plenty of equipment just running the stock game.
The outside areas also were frustrating. The fact that the robots just kept respawning meant that you couldn't ever really fight outside. You could at first, but before too long an alarm would be triggered and you'd just get overwhelmed. Even if you killed all the bots, repair bots would just keep spawning. I guess that they didn't want you to feel safe wandering around outside, but the problem was the respawning/repairing was way too aggressive, to the point you eventually realized that you were better off just running past everything rather than fighting it. I would have liked to have been able to explore a little bit more outside, or at least not have to literally avoid all fights, so that part was disappointing to me.
Finally, there's the game balance. Maybe there's no way around this, but the game just didn't feel that hard. Even playing on the hardest difficulty, while it was challenging at first, by midway through the game I'd acquired enough weapons and powers that it just wasn't that challenging. Ultimately, the only thing that was that challenging was the fact that outside they just threw unlimited bots at you. Maybe part of that was that I was very meticulous going through the levels (my play time was around 30 hours, compared to 16 hours average on HowLongToBeat.com), but it still just wasn't that hard. I suppose it's hard to balance this sort of RPG system in terms of time/difficulty, since they can't make it too hard for those that decide to just blow through, but it was still a minor flaw. In any case, I still enjoyed it despite that fact.
On the whole, the game wasn't perfect, but I still mostly enjoyed it. I'll give the game a 7.5/10, with it being close to an 8/10 if the levels had been just a bit shorter. Although I played it free on Xbox Game Pass, I wouldn't have felt bad about paying as much as $30 for it, but hey if you can play for free on Game Pass that's always a better deal!
