A newly released trailer for first-person action RPG Atomic Heart showcases strange aspects of its bizarre and horrific Soviet-era landscape. Atomic Heart was first announced in 2018 and slated for release sometime last year. Still, it has quietly slumped into an extended state of development limbo, causing most fans of its initial trailer to forget all about it until now.
Atomic Heart is an action RPG that takes clear inspiration from games like Fallout, Bioshock, and Prey. It’s a first-person experience that sets the player in a strange and frightening alternate-history setting. The player is brought to the heart of the Soviet Union; in a world where advancements in technology that didn’t exist during the era of the actual USSR have already been made. These include things like the internet, holograms, and robots. This results in many deranged and terrifying science experiments that the player would have already had a chance to confront had the game released in 2019 as planned.
To breathe new life into the project (and get players excited once again), developer Mundfish has released a brand new gameplay trailer for Atomic Heart, which displays the utterly bizarre Soviet experiments you encounter. Giant robotic worms prowl the landscape, some of them even fly through the air. The environment is littered with suspended blobs of water that the player can swim through. On the gameplay side of things, the player is also seen to use telekinetic abilities. The clip of these powers in action will likely feel familiar to players of last year’s Control. Not only is the player seen flinging objects at walls with a wave of a hand, but they also channel Marvel’s Thor and summon their hammer to them from a great distance away.
As evidenced by the success of The Outer Worlds last year, there’s plenty of demand for sci-fi alternate history. Outer Worlds had the benefit of pedigree in the form of legendary RPG developer Obsidian Entertainment. Atomic Heart, however, is being put together by a little-known Russian studio, Mundfish, whose only other project is a VR shooter that released in 2018. Small indie studios like Mundfish are undoubtedly capable of producing excellent products. Still, from everything we’ve seen of Atomic Heart, it seems like the height of ambition for such a relatively untested developer.
What’s been shown of Atomic Heart looks very promising, and this new trailer is no exception. Expectations were high from the start, and while the yearlong slump that followed hasn’t been good for maintaining hype, it’s hard to not get exited by this new footage. No release date has been provided now that the initial 2019 window has been missed, but preorders are still available on Mundfish’s website. The title has a great deal of potential, and after watching the trailers, it’s understandable that someone would jump at the opportunity to get access to this game as soon as possible. But given its rocky development history so far, it remains to be seen if Mundfish can pull off this ambitious project and fulfill the potential of Atomic Heart.
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Source: Mundfish
