Atomic Heart: The Final Preview

ign.com:

After nearly five years since its stunning announcement trailer, we’re now just one month away from the launch of Atomic Heart, the strictly single-player first-person shooter that thrusts you into an alternate history Soviet setting and tasks you with taking on an army of angry androids. The good news is that after going hands-on with the first couple of hours of a near final build of the game, this bolshevik BioShock seems as though it could well be worth the wait – its superpowered combat, fascinating story and spectacular setting all appear to be clicking seamlessly into place to form a cohesive whole, blinking into vibrant life like one of its many deadly assembly line creations.

The opening moments of Atomic Heart’s reportedly 25-hour campaign takes you from the sun-kissed streets of Chelomey City floating high among the clouds, all the way down to the shadowy subterranean depths of the ruined Vavilov facility, where a violent robot uprising has wiped out almost all human workers. Weapons and skills are doled out fairly slowly in this initial stretch, and with only a fireman’s axe and limited shells for my shotgun I found myself favouring stealth wherever possible – so it’s just as well that the earliest upgrades you unlock are the abilities to track enemies through walls and shock the Dandelion surveillance cameras in order to avoid alarm-raising detection.

On the occasion that I did alert a guard to my presence, the stiff challenge presented by Atomic Heart’s early enemy types came as a bit of a shock to my system (or indeed, a system shock if you’d prefer). These resilient terminator types ignore cover in favour of making a beeline to deliver you a beatdown, and even if you manage to circle-strafe and dash in