Atomic Heart

Atomic Heart is a first-person shooter video game with role-playing elements. Weapons include conventional firearms, energy-based weapons, and melee weapons. A wide variety of enemies are featured, most of which are robots; mutants are another type of enemy consisting of human corpses animated by genetically-engineered plant-like organisms called sprouts. A crafting system allows the player to piece weapons together from metal parts that can be detached from robots or taken from household appliances.

Ammo in the game is scarce, so the player also has the option to use rechargeable energy guns. Quick-time events are featured in the game.

Atomic Heart takes place on the grounds of Facility 3826, the Soviet Union's foremost scientific research hub in an alternate history 1955, located in the Kazakh SSR. In 1936, scientist Dmitry Sechenov developed a liquidized programmable module called the Polymer, sparking massive technological breakthroughs in the fields of cold fusion and robotics in the USSR, freeing much of the populace from manual labor. When World War II broke out, the Soviets quickly gained the upper hand, but just before Nazi Germany was defeated in 1942, the Nazis secretly unleashed the Brown Plague virus, leaving millions dead and creating an international demand for Soviet robots to compensate for the resulting worker shortage. As part of the Soviet Union's post-war reconstruction program, Dr. Sechenov created a wireless, networked artificial intelligence called "Kollektiv 1.0" that linked his robots together for greater efficiency.

Sechenov later developed the THOUGHT, a neuroconnector that integrates Polymer into the human body, enabling direct interaction with robots. Designed to launch alongside Kollektiv 2.0, it was intended to usher in a true post-labor era. However, the launch resulted in a catastrophic failure, plunging Facility 3826 into chaos.

Mundfish Studio was founded in 2017. Its key figures are the company's president Robert Bagratuni, CFO Evgenia Sedova, art director Artem Galeev, and producer Oleg Gorodishenin.

Bagratuni and Galeev have known each other since the early 2000s, having worked at advertising companies. Bagratuni focused on marketing, while Galeev specialized in computer graphics. After the economic downturn in 2008, when the advertising market collapsed, the share of video games increased. Sedova and Bagratuni met at the company Newmedia Stars.

Atomic Heart received "mixed or average" reviews from critics for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions, while the PC version received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator website Metacritic.

IGN praised Atomic Heart for being "deeply ambitious, highly imaginative, and consistently impressive", though criticized its writing and "tedious" elements of gameplay, such as fetch quests. PC Gamer called it "one of the oddest" AAA games. They felt it took primary influence from BioShock, but criticized its combat and progression system as inferior, while being conflicted towards the story and characters. Similarly, Polygon felt that Atomic Heart failed to eclipse BioShock through its gameplay and attempts to tackle multiple themes at once.