Atomic Heart wants desperately to be like Bioshock Infinite. Everyone knows this. Everyone says this. It oozes it from the first seconds of the game, pushing you through an idyllic world-building hallway in a floating city before everything turns to shit and the havoc begins. There’s even a fucking lighthouse. It’s so obvious it’s actually pathetic. The Bioshock series (itself deferred to System Shock 2) is sort of messy, wrapped up in gestures towards depth, both narratively and mechanically, that are ultimately flat. And this hit an apex with Bioshock Infinite, a game I truly despise, which was utterly vapid and utterly hateful. When it comes to depth, these are the equivalent of a Road Runner tunnel painted on a wall. So what of Atomic Heart? What happens when you imitate an imitation?

There’s that famous Putin quote, “Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.” I doubt I will ever really understand this sentiment; I’m not Russian and my ancestors left there long ago. But Atomic Heart is the most I’ve ever seen it manifest. The game is fascinated by Soviet aesthetics, the socialist realism, the hammers and sickles, but rejects the values that formed them. Marx statues and Lenin busts are easy to find, but they’re just set dressing. It loves the utopic visions of Soviet communism, but is disgusted by its own nostalgia. It is trapped pining for the aesthetics of past without its politics. It wants badly to be able to be superficial.

I struggle to explain the exact way this game is so facile. At first I say that Atomic Heart isn’t sophisticated enough to really have an ideology, but that’s not true. Everything has an ideology, and this game often makes it very clear where it’s coming from. So, maybe it’s not sophisticated enough to have a message. Okay, maybe, but it definitely seems to be trying to. So I just land on this: Atomic Heart is not very smart. It really, really thinks it is. But it’s just not.

Dumb games aren’t intrinsically bad, but I think Atomic Heart is. Like, look, aesthetics count for more than most of us want to admit. And, if nothing else, Atomic Heart has a stunning visual style. The robot designs are creative and eerie (and sometimes horny), and the environmental design is almost Seussian at times. That’s why this game’s trailers blew up: it looks sick. If this game was all looks and middling gameplay, I wouldn’t be writing this. Hell, I might be doing a cheeky review of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, instead. But it’s worse.

The problem is that this game never shuts the fuck up. It’s annoying bland protag never stops talking. The glove never stops talking. It does the time honored faux pas of complaining about mechanics it makes you perform. The motherfucker keeps saying “crispy critters” like he’s trying to make it a thing. I tried to play the game with Russian audio but the constant chattering made the game almost impossible even with subtitles. The game is very much interested in its plot and its plot fucking sucks. All of its twists are predictable and none of its ideas are new. Some twists are cribbed directly from Bioshock. I’m withholding some of the absurd spoilers, but there are a few moments that had me laughing to myself, saying, “I hate this game.” And god, it really is not that original. It’s the most run of the mill sci-fi plot you could have cooked up for this game. Its beats are so obvious and so rote. I think the glove literally quotes Animal Farm at you. It’s so fucking annoying. The messages, vapid as they are, are hammered repeatedly and obnoxiously, conveying its shitty politics piecemeal. And its politics really are shitty. There’s the undercurrent of nationalism and of anti-collectivism. This is not to mention the way female-coded robots are sexualized, and the apparent presence of anti-Ukrainian propaganda. I’ve even been told there’s a racist caricature hidden away somewhere in the cartoons that run on loop in this game. It is dripping in bad vibes.

And you know, I’d love to sit here and virtue signal about how I reviled the game and hated every moment, sneering “mid” and patting myself on the back. But I’d be pretending. Because there are fun moments to this trash heap. Like, yeah, it’s a 2010-ass game in a lot of ways (linear, parkour, quicktime events, minigames), but with a post-boomer revival combat sensibility (fast, hard, lots of enemies) and I don’t think it really quite works all said. I could get into it, but I won’t. Regardless, there’s glimmers. Even beyond art assets. In particular, there are some unique mechanical elements to the robot ecosystem. Granny Zina is cool (it would have been a better game if we could play as her). And I actually really liked most of the conversations with the corpses. There are brief moments, when they finally choose to shut the fuck up, where I had genuine fun. But those moments felt rare, where I was left to my devices to revel in silent aesthetics and mechanics, in a constant deluge of its overbearing sci-fi shenanigans and questionable choices, and by the end, all I could remember was the muck.

But doesn’t this all remind you of something? An alternate history sci-fi game, that had really impressive trailers to garner interest, with a very strong art direction admittedly steeped with nationalist visions of the past, that is an extremely watered down immersive sim, that is so enamored with its cliched plot about free will filled with garbage politics, where the game pontificates about agency while robbing you of it and espousing empty platitudes about power, with constant dumb twists and undercurrent of misogyny and centrism, resulting in a game that is inexplicably lauded despite all its glaring flaws and horrendous pretensions?

Atomic Heart wants desperately to be like Bioshock Infinite. And the worst part is, it’s succeeding.