Atomic Heart (Armageddon) with ChevRage 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amXK0U_y28c
So I played a little bit of this, not enough to get to the part where it opens up though. It has the opening you'd expect, where it allows you to stroll through the utopia for a while before throwing you into the dystopia. Kinda like
BioShock Infinite actually. The original
BioShock almost instantly starts off at the action by comparison, and it has a much tighter intro to boot however.
The setting is pretty cool at least. Like a vision of the future from the 50's, except in Russia (or the Soviet Union in this case) instead of the US that we get with Fallout and BioShock. I am definitely looking forward to seeing more that the game has to offer on this front.
Now I'm not very far into the game, but some of the complaints posted above seem valid. The protagonist certainly comes across like a douche. Maybe he's a bit more appealing with the Russian dub, which I haven't tried yet, but I doubt it. There's quite a lot of dialogue in the game, so much so that it almost seems like the devs were worried that people would get bored if the characters weren't commenting frequently on things you pass by. The FOV thing is real too, but apparently Mundfish knows about it and is releasing a fix; until that point there is a mod that allows you to increase it but I haven't used it yet.
But while the devs don't seem used to making games with this much budget, there isn't really as much Russian jank as I expected. Yeah sometimes the dialogue gets cut off by you entering a new room, and the audio logs will be muted as the characters present in the room will react to stuff. A couple of times I got killed by setpieces that I couldn't have known were going to happen in advance. Maybe they expected players to proceed more cautiously or something. AND I saw the same vendor dude selling his trinkets with the same dialogue like three times in different places in the very beginning. There's definitely jank that's for sure. But generally speaking the visuals and combat have been pretty good so far.
I've only faced a couple of enemy types, but the melee combat has so far felt weighty and responsive. You can even briefly see the "skin" peeled off the robots from where the axe has hit them. It seems like you also get killed the moment an enemy attacks you from behind, even if you have full health. The dodge you get is quite generous too, but most of the time I ended up dying because I got cornered somewhere without realising it. It was hard enough that I felt like I needed to use the shotgun with its limited ammo for some fights, just to give myself some breathing room.
There was also a stealth kill that you can perform, but I haven't had much chance to be very stealthy yet.
All in all, I'm definitely up to play more of the game. Maybe I'll feel differently about it once I've hit the open world part, but for now it's interesting enough to make me want to continue.
