Atomic Heart has done very well for Mundfish and publisher Focus Entertainment. The game’s Steam debut sees it rushing past the Steam Deck and Hogwarts Legacy as the best-selling item on Valve’s marketplace.
As you can confirm from this screenshot, CSGO had also already outpaced Hogwarts Legacy in the sales charts. (You can double check their positions by the time you read this here.) Other games in the top ten included Apex Legends, PUBG, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, Destiny 2, Borderlands 3, and interestingly, the 2015 release of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege.
Early fan reviews for the game are also positive on Steam. Out of a total 2,034 reviews, 1,819 reviews are positive.
According to Pledge Times, the reasons for Atomic Heart’s popularity include its good optimization, something Mundfish did one better over Avalanche Software for their launch of Hogwarts Legacy. Also cited are the game’s scenario, the soundtrack by longtime Doom composer Mick Gordon, and the game itself.
A quick read through the Steam user reviews reveals one common sentiment; Atomic Heart is Soviet BioShock. That statement is probably going to resonate more for someone who was born or lived or lives in Eastern Europe than for gamers in the rest of the world, but much like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro games, it’s interesting to see the ways video games reexamines that world, seemingly commonly through the lens of science fiction.
Soviet Bioshock AKA Sovietshock is also a good encapsulation of how this fictional universe seems to recapture the ugliest and most unsavory aspects of the Soviet regime’s cultural zeitgeist. However, Bioshock isn’t really a realistic depiction of 1940s America, with its gross caricatures of what Americans were like. The same thing can be said of Atomic Heart and its wild reimagining of the Soviet world.
There is also a lot of talk in the reviews of the Robot Twins, the Hajime Sorayama like female presenting robots that feature prominently in the game’s advertising. Both have brown braided hair, wrapped around their heads like small crowns, and one is wearing a brown jacket. You can pretty much imagine what gamers are saying about these robots, so no need to repeat any of that here.
One notable complaint you can see even in the positive reviews is the lack of a FOV slider. Some players are recommending to use 3rd party program Flawless Widescreen to solve the problem, but of course, these are the sort of accessibility features that are expected in these modern games when they launch.
Atomic Heart seems to have been popular regardless, but hopefully Mundfish addresses that sooner rather than later.
Atomic Heart is also playable on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
