It’s a literal parade of red flags as foreshadowing. The Soviet Union is about to unveil a human-robot neural interface known as “Kollectiv 2.0”, allowing humans to control robots with their thoughts. You play Major Sergey Nechayev, codename P-3, who is a sort of special forces agent-slash-troubleshooter for a Soviet scientist named Sechenov, and arrives at the utopian Facility 3826 on a sunny day in 1955. In a nutshell, Atomic Heart is a cross between Bioshock and Half-Life – featuring special guest appearances by Fallout and Portal – set in an alternate version of the Soviet Union circa 1955, where thanks to the wonders of Soviet Super Science (widely regarded as considerably less evil than Nazi Super Science, although still not without its issues) the USSR is enjoying a golden age full of robots, computers, and advanced biomechanics. Welcome… to the (Soviet) World Of Tomorrow! I’m quite fond of Soviet firearms and consumer goods, because their rugged simplicity appeals to me – along with the fact that you can buy Soviet wristwatches and cameras on eBay for very reasonable prices regular readers of my writings here may have even seen pictures of my Poljot Strela cosmonaut’s watch or my Vostok Amphibia diving watch as illustrations in previous stories. EA even went as far as to retroactively remove Russian teams from its sports titles like FIFA.Atomic Heart combines two of my many interests – in this case, retro-futurism and the Soviet Union. The games industry as a whole took a very firm stance against Russia over the war, with near enough every major publisher pulling their games from sale in the country. It’ll be interesting to see how Sony, Microsoft, and Valve respond to the request. Oleksandr Bornyakov, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation, has said that he will be sending a letter to Sony, Microsoft, and Valve requesting that digital versions of Atomic Heart not be sold in Ukraine and for its distribution in other countries to be limited.Īside from the allegations of harvesting player data, Bornyakov claims that Atomic Heart’s development was Russian funded, and that any money made from its sales could be used to help fund Russia’s war against Ukraine.Īt the very least, he asks that Western players avoid playing Atomic Heart, adding that Mundfish has failed to make any statement condemning Vladimir Putin or the war.

Russian robots atomic heart