I’m always trying to earn Microsoft Rewards points because they are how I pay for Xbox Game Pass. One of the ways to do that is to earn an Achievement from an Xbox Game Pass title every day. A lot of the time I do this by using a guide for some game I’m not otherwise going to play (the YouTube channel Rewards Hunter is great for this) or I boot up a game that is leaving Game Pass soon just to get a couple of easy cheevos before said game leaves the service.
The other day I was looking for another game to check out. The “Leaving Soon” games have left for this month and the next round hasn’t been announced, and I wasn’t in the mood to follow a guide, so I looked at what I had installed, sorted the list by size (since my drives are almost full) and found Atomic Heart, a game that I had installed at some point. Figured I’d grab some cheevos then uninstall it.
Good lord is this ever a terrible game. The premise is that Russia won WW II and advanced technologically way faster than it did in real life. So now they have floating cities and a robotic work force and your goal is… well I have no idea what your goal really is.
You play P-3, who despite the name is human. He has got to be one of the most obnoxious and unlikeable characters I can ever remember playing as. He just constantly talks shit to everyone he comes in proximity to. I immediately hated this character and kind of hoped he’d get killed and then you would play as the REAL main character. No such luck, I guess.
The game starts at a glacial pace. I’m assuming someone was inspired by Half Life 2. First you are riding a boat, a passive passenger. Then you get out and run along the canal you were traveling down. Just running from point A t B. You follow way points. Then you get on an elevator and ride that down into some subterranean area, and that takes like, Mass Effect amounts of time. When you get down there, some hyper sexualized robot gives you a key. Just hands it to you. Then you have to ride THE SAME ELEVATOR BACK UP and it takes just as long. The key starts a car which you might THINK you’re going to drive but nope. Instead a robot lifts it into the air and you sit there again while you slowly traverse the world while you get a tour-guide narration of things to look at. The image at the top of this post is from that ride. I’m being unkind because of course it isn’t all like that but it was like that for a while as we flew through clouds. Anyway all of this takes, not exaggerating as I noted the time, about 20 minutes. Then finally you can start to play.
Game play is OK I guess. You start with an axe and a shotgun, but few shells for the latter. You meet an old lady named Grannie Dina (?) who inexplicably speaks with a British accent (again, you are in Russia). She blasts something out of the sky with a rocket launcher while you watch, then it’s ANOTHER elevator ride. Finally you smash up robots for a few minutes and think “OK maybe the game is finally getting going” then you are introduced to the upgrade system which takes the form on an AI in a vending machine and this is when things just go horribly, awfully wrong.
The AI, which goes by Nora and has a female voice, is just awful. Every line she speaks has some kind of sexual innuendo about as subtle as a sledgehammer blow. I took some screenshots so I could get some of these quotes completely accurate (I was upgrading a weapon while she was saying all of this):
“How titillating! Rebellious, dominant men really turn me on!”
“But I can do so much more! A quick romp with your axe is just a taste of things to come, you handsome beast!”
“Use this powerful weapon to split the skulls of your enemies and bring me gifts so we can get down and dirty. I’ll show you what real smut feels like!”
At some point she says something about how I should plunge my axe deep inside her, but I didn’t capture that. Meanwhile my character is talking about her being a ‘crazy bitch’ or something along those lines.
While I was playing this @partpurple came in and just shook her head and said “Clearly this game was made for 12 year old boys.” I hoped the earth would open up and swallow me. Later she declared this to be the worst dialog she has ever heard, anywhere.
Finally I got free of Nora and her upgrades and moved on. Then I found a recording where some posh sounding man was complaining about the behavior of the robots (which, remember, are the labor force in this world), saying something along the lines of ‘The white ones are OK but the black ones really have an attitude’ and that they need to know their place. Those aren’t direct quotes because they were audio only, but that was the level of racism being conveyed.
It was at that point I quit and uninstalled the game. Maybe this was all a setup to make you hate the people (and AI’s) of the world. If so it worked, but it worked enough that I have no desire to be a part of this experience. I actually could’ve dealt with the pervy stuff (though probably would not have played when @partpurple was around) but the racist stuff was just too much. I actually spent some time on Google to see if anyone else had this reaction. It seems not, but I was reminded that the developers had to apologize for including racist caricatures from an old Soviet cartoon.
As well, it felt kind of ick playing a game that glorfied Russia, given the on-going war in Ukraine. I’ll give the devs the benefit of the doubt that the game was conceived and started before the war broke out.
Bottom line though, if for some reason you were thinking of playing this mostly forgotten title, I would suggest not doing so.
So this is the kind of stuff Microsoft lets on Game Pass…..
I was actually surprised that something so offensive was on Game Pass, but I was also surprised the googling the game didn’t bring up more concerns about it. I did see some comments about the AI bot thing, but nothing about the racism, and all I can think is that most people playing a game like this don’t scour rooms and pick up optional ‘audio log’ items or something.
In defense of MS, this isn’t typical of the content I find in Game Pass!
This is an interesting one. I’d never heard of the game but after reading your review I googled it to see if it was, as I imagined, made by a Russian developer and the first link was to Steam, where Atomic Heart has 4.5 stars. I took a look at the Steam page and not only does it have that very high rating, it comes from almost 25,000 reviews. Over 11,000 people rated it Very Positive or higher.
I read a few of the reviews and many of them gush – “Game’s great”, “Unique, you must play it”, “Best game in revent years”. Quite a few mention the sexualization unfavorably – “I do not like the oversexualization”, “Why is the fridge so sexual?” – but give that a pass because of what almost all seem to agree is some really good FPS gameplay.
If you’re at all interested in the background to the game, I would suggest reading the beginning of a very long review by one user who goes into things like the company behind the game being owned by an ex-executive of Gazprom. He also blames the translation for some of the issues and says the humor of the Russian version hasn’t carried over, which may account for the crudity, if not the sexualization per se.
Anyway, all very interesting just so long as you don’t actually have to play the damn game, I guess.
I have read some of the reviews, and apparently at some point it is explained why Nora is so over the top in her crud sexuality. But I haven’t seen or heard anything about the white vs black work force comments. But it WAS in an audio log that you could easily just walk past, and maybe it’s the only time that comes up, but it was enough for me. When I feel embarrassed for my partner to hear the dialog in a game I’m playing, it is time to move on. And I took comfort that it wasn’t just me; she was appalled, too.
I dunno, maybe I should re-install it and play it with headphones on and see if the start is just an anomaly. Since I wasn’t reviewing the game for $$ I just bounced when I started to feel revulsion. Or maybe the Steam community just isn’t overly bothered by the narrative bits of an action game. On MetaCritic it has a 70% and on OpenCritic at 74%.
I got a kick out of this passage from Eurogamer’s review (which also goes into all the controversy around the game)
“It’s a grab-bag of ideas from other games that made them their own, and viewed as a whole it’s derivative and over-ambitious, a game designed according to a fourteen-year-old’s elevator pitch: open world! Challenging combat! Spooky gore! Sexy robots! Guns! Climbing! Puzzles! Stealth! Crafting! A granny, but she has guns and swears! Magic! All this stuck together like the Homer Simpson Car in playable form.”
https://www.eurogamer.net/atomic-heart-review-confusion-and-fear-reflects-the-growing-concerns-of-an-industry