Video Gamers Podcast - Atomic Heart Review - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

CRISPY CRITTERS it’s the Atomic Heart review from gaming hosts Michael, Josh and Paul. A graphically memorable fever dream of a shooter, is this the spiritual gaming successor to Bioshock or is this 2023’s next big gaming disappointment? We break it all down and more in this awesome episode.  Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Toro, Scrump, Gaius, Remi, MarbleMadness, Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q  Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Rise to rewards with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome to Facility 3826, comrades. Please try on this polymer glove and make sure to talk to Nora before you start battling these sabotaged robots. We are the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast, run by three dads who love gaming. I am your host, just getting over a cold. My name is Paul, and joining me, he's a huge fan of erotic robot ballerinas, and I'm afraid to go into any more detail here. It's Josh. Say no more's it oh this parts of this game are great is it because they're faceless and they can't think for themselves josh is that the appeal it's like

i you know like it just it reminds me a little bit of lady demitrescu something about eight foot tall tall women yeah i don't i don't know uh i gotcha and joining josh and me he can be found talking to dead robot corpses begging for a ticket to ride the whirlwind train it's michael that would be me just diarrhea of the mouth just just talking to this corpse because it won't stop talking to me so i'll just be like hey i'll keep talking to you it's just oh man we have so much to talk about in this episode we actually don't have any housekeeping because it won't stop talking to me. So I'll just be like, hey, I'll keep talking to you. It's just, bleh. Oh, man. We have so much to talk about in this episode.

We actually don't have any housekeeping today, which works out perfectly. We're just going to jump straight on into this deep dive. Crispy Critters. I can't believe it's already time for us to cover Atomic Heart. All right. As we always do on these deep dive episodes, we are going to keep everything free of major spoilers. We will give a warning later if we do decide to go into any late game content, although I think this one will be able to keep spoiler free. Also, before we do start the Deep

Dive, we just want to ask everyone out there to please hit that follow button. That way you don't miss any of our episodes. You can also sign up on Patreon, which will let you unlock our Squadcast episodes. Those come out on the first and third Tuesdays of every month. You can go check it out at MultiplayerSquad.com. Those episodes are an absolute blast. All right, Atomic Heart, here's the description according to Steam. In a mad and sublime utopian world, take part in explosive encounters. Adapt your fighting style to each opponent, use your environment, and upgrade your equipment to fulfill your mission. If you want to reach the truth, you'll have to pay in blood. Alright, that's kind of a weird summary. We'll get into some more details about what this game

actually is, but Atomic Heart has been on our radar for such a long time. I feel like we've been talking about this game at least for a year, maybe even longer. What were your guys' hopes and impressions heading up to the release of this game? I hoped it was good. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think I was more hyped for this game than either of you guys. And my hopes for it, I think I wanted it to be a spiritual successor to Bioshock. I've always talked about the art style. I've talked about some of the facilities that they show, how sterile the environments look and crazy the robots are, the weapons, the enemies, and stuff like that. And I really wanted this to be a mix of Half-Life and Bioshock. And so when we looked at the trailers and stuff, I think that's what my brain kind of went. It's like, please let this be a modern-day Bioshock in this weird 50s-era Russian environment with maybe a little bit of the odd Half-Life vibes that you get from that game.

Okay. I thought that it looked like it had really good graphics. I liked some of the stuff in the trailer I saw with the Jedi powers that the glove could do. And then also the open world with a car and stuff like that. I just kind of wanted something fun and inventive, but I really wanted it to dig into this alternate reality 50s Russia with the robots. So that's what I was hoping for. Oh, see, for me, following this game over the years, it was stuck in development hell for such a long time. It was definitely not instilling a lot of confidence. And my excitement for this game really plummeted for a very long time, up until I'd say about a

month before release. And every video that kept coming out just looked so good. We've covered in one episode about how Eurogamer said that it altered their brain chemistry, and I got super hyped for Atomic Heart. So when this finally came out, I was kind of expecting maybe like a lot out of this game. It just looked so weird and unique. I was hoping it would be unlike anything else I've ever played. And that's really what I was hoping for, with really inventive combat. All right, now we always talk a little bit about story first. Atomic Heart, it does have a story, sort of. It's very convoluted. I found it to be very hard to follow. Basically, in a nutshell,

it's an alternate Soviet universe. They've come out of World War II. They're the tech leaders of the world. They have designed these robots that they've been sending out to all the other countries. They're all connected by this neural network that's being upgraded. They call it Collective 2.0. And with that now being released, the robots have gone crazy and they start attacking everybody in sight. Someone's either sabotaged it or something's gone haywire. You get to play as a POS guy who is called Agent P3. He is incredibly unlikable. He is also apparently brain damaged because all he knows how to say is crispy critters. I've seen it.

Literally. Crispy critters. According to biometric readings, is patrol it is crispy critters charles i'm in the hot shop am i gonna turn into a crispy critter if i stay in here too long freaking critters she's a dumb tree nothing like me crispy critters at least the tree doesn't talk. Crispy Critters. Art, labor, and life. Crispy Critters.

Now I gotta deal with another crazy-ass lock. After slipping and falling into a bag. Crispy Critters. State your name and personal access code. Crispy Critters. Invalid name personal access code. Crispy Critters. Invalid name. Jeez, get off my back already. Crispy Critters.

But none of it matters right now. So what does matter, you crispy-ass critter? Oh, Crispy Critters! Ah, Crispy Critters. He is trying to find out what happened to all the robots. As you might guess, there's some twists and turns. On top of that, you've got magical rings that control robots. You've got everybody having a very Russian name.

So if you only speak English, it's kind of hard to follow. You've got names like Petrov, Sechenov, Nicheyev. But no Russian accents whatsoever. None at all. Sound totally American. You've got an old woman who's Arnold Schwarzenegger from Commando. You get to play through dream sequences. There's even a dose of transporting people's memories out of their bodies. Did you guys find this story hard to follow in the moment, or was that just me? Oh i there's times where i go am i getting dumb like you know i'm

getting older right like i get it uh you know i'm well aware of that but then i kind of go man like and i have to kind of like knock on my head and i go come on old noggin like why are you not following along on this story here yeah so it makes me very good to hear paul be like yeah this story is kind of hard to follow and then then I go, oh, okay, cool. It's not just me. I feel like a lot of the story was given to you in dialogue with Cuff. I'm sorry, Charles, your glove. And a lot of your dialogue was like during a loading screen or an elevator ride that was really long.

It wasn't so much in like a cut scene or anything like that, which I think is fine. I'm just not used to that. You know, maybe they did that to save some time and so forth in like a cut scene or anything like that, which I think is fine. I'm just not used to that. You know, maybe they did that to save some time and so forth in the game or save some money, which honestly, I thought it kind of refreshing. But since I wasn't looking for that, and I oftentimes just tune out or go get a cup of water when I'm talking just, you know, to something that doesn't seem to matter, that I definitely had a hard time following the story. I don't know about you guys, but I also sometimes still had Charles talking to me. And I know that we haven't even really explained

who Charles is. It's your sentient glove that talks to you. But I would sometimes enter the next area with the objective, and it would cut off the conversation. And I was missing parts of the story. So when I finally beat the game, I was like, I don't even really know what happened. And so I would read the Wikipedia page, and then I was missing parts of the story. So when I finally beat the game, I was like, I don't even really know what happened.

And so I would read the Wikipedia page. And then I was like, oh, that's what that was. Oh, that was that person. And it all made a little more sense in the end. This is kind of like that movie you have to watch twice, and then it starts to make more sense. Yeah, I'll say this. A lot of times I went, I have no idea what's happening. Like there's, there's these little expositions.

There's these, you know, you, you read people's emails, there's corpses that are talking to you all over the place. And I'm like, do I have to pay attention to this? Does it matter? Like, what if, is this how I know what's going on? But then what I found out is the game does do a decent job of occasionally pausing the combat and the action and giving you that exposition dump to kind of catch you up a little bit. So I went from basically

being like, okay, I know what's going on. I am completely lost. Who is this person? What Russian name? Wait, that's a different person. Who the heck is this person that they're talking about? I don't remember who that is. Why am I going where I'm going? To then all of a sudden, it's like it pauses, it kind of catches you up. And then I go, oh, okay. Oh, I kind of see where this plot is going. Okay, wait a minute. Now I'm completely lost all over again. I'm going somewhere. I don't even remember why I'm going there. I'm confused all over. Wait, there's a new character or was that the old character? Oh, wait. No, no, that's somebody different. No, that's definitely the person I knew before. And then it catches you back up again. At least for me, that was the cycle of like this. I'm just completely confused. Okay, I know what's going

on. I'm completely confused. Okay, I know what's going on. Yeah, it was very, very hard to follow. So let's talk a little bit about Sergei Nicheyev. This is who you play as. He is... Oh, is that us? That is us. You don't even know his name, right? That's what I was saying. I don't know who anybody is, man. I know, because every last name in this game ends with a V, unless it's Stockhausen, who's like the one German character. I was like, thank goodness I at least know whenever he would reference Stock. At least I knew it was the German guy. I was just happy they called us Major most of the time because i'm like that's me when they say major that's me i

don't know my name but major oh man all right how did you guys feel playing as agent p3 i hate myself i thought he was he was all right so here's the thing there's a lot of comparisons to no no let me let me get through it he's a nice guy well so at first i thought he was like fray from forespoken where he was just a jerk to everyone and then i realized he's just being a jerk to robots just brain damaged he's well but he's just being a jerk to robots so maybe he is okay although it did it was annoying at first though because it was it was and again i i don't want to hark on harp harp whatever i don't want to recall for spoken too much but the whole thing is it's like at least he kind of got better as the game went on and wasn't as much of a curmudgeon like whereas fray

and for spoken just the whole game she was awful i i didn't think about because at first i was like i don't like the guy but then i'm like he's just being a jerk to robots. They're not talking to you and guiding you through the world, giving you the information you need. Why is he so mean to Charles the entire game? And I just found that to be rather perplexing. And it did make him very unenjoyable as a protagonist. He is just angry and mad at everything. Yeah. But at least he started getting nicer to Charles. They grew together a little bit, I thought. For me, it's so funny because in the beginning, I hated this guy as much as I hated Frey from Forspoken. Legitimately, I was like, oh my goodness, what is happening?

And then there was this part where he made me chuckle at one point. Maybe it was the stupid crispy critters that he keeps saying. He was talking to somebody. I don't remember. And maybe he freaked out or something. I can't remember what the moment was, but then it was just this like, I think I kind of like this guy in some weird, demented sort of way. Yeah. And then I spent a couple hours kind of going like, this dude is bananas. He's so out there crazy that I'm kind of giggling in the back of my head. And then it just, after that, I went,

no, no, no, this guy's terrible. I hate this guy. This also might be like an America versus Soviet kind of thing. But he has so much faith in the Soviet government that I found it to be laughable, where he was like, no, there is no way that they're planning to do that. This is the government we're talking about. And I was like, oh man, this guy just seems delusional and angry and mad. I did find him hilarious. I have been saying crispy critters, ironically, in real life, because I find it to be the funniest thing in the world. That's the one redeemable quality. I thought that his faith in the Soviet Union was almost satire, like to where it's like, okay, this actually was how Russians were in the 50s with the CCCP. It was like the faith in the party, the party is all. And so it was just this kind of blind

following of that. I don't know if they actually truly had faith in it, though, or if they were scared of it, you know, but he was part of the powerful regime, I guess. So maybe he did. Yeah, maybe. All right, let's talk a little bit about combat. Combat in this game basically is kind of like split in three ways. You've got melee weapons, you've got range weapons, and you have your polymer glove named Charles. And he lets you fight with different abilities, kind of like Bioshock. He's got things like electrical shocks, frozen polymer, that's called frostbite, that freezes enemies that I'm sure you've seen in trailers, telekinesis, things like that. You can also technically do stealth takedowns,

but the game doesn't give you a lot of opportunities to use it. You do take on different types of robots. Some are in the air, some roll on the ground. Others look like people with mustaches. They love to jump kick you in the air. You know, like how many times can we look at you kicking a guy and then getting kicked in the face? I just, you know what? Kick, kick. Let's call it, you know, let's call it kicking impossible. Let's call it, let's call it kicking impossible. Let's spend a couple minutes talking about combat here how did you guys like where did you focus your efforts how did you fight these robots and how did you feel about the combat system my loadout was very different um the beginning of

the game than the end of the game because the thing is the very beginning of the game ammo is not only scarce it's almost non-existent and And so my first half of the game, I spent almost entirely upgrading my ability to do more damage with my energy weapon and my ability to charge that with my axe. Now, about halfway through the game somewhere, you realize that ammo is now plentiful. The thing is, is that you use the same crafting components to make ammo as you do to upgrade weapons.

So the first half of the game, you can craft ammo if you want, but your weapons almost won't get any stronger. Now, about halfway through the game, I switched and this is my final loadout. I had a pistol because you could do amazing damage with it once you maxed it out. Like it was almost better than the shotgun

and much more accurate. And then I used my sword melee looking thing because it was super fast and strong and then use that to charge my special abilities on my dominator. And that was basically what i used um and i did i just didn't want to have to craft too many different kinds of ammo and stuff like that but that's kind of my loadout i i i wanted to test everything right like hey we're reviewing this game let me give it all a shot i defaulted to the shotgun which you

get fairly early in the game more often than not I just felt like it had the most weight out of anything. But Michael touched on a great point that about in the beginning half of the game, ammo is a resource. Legitimately, you have to be careful. You cannot just go guns blazing because you will be out of ammo at that point. And then you kind of go back to melee. And melee is effective in this game throughout the entire game and you know you do get energy weapons that slowly recharge over time so it is kind of like unlimited ammo but man once you're out you're out you gotta have something else to switch to for a while but ultimately i really played a melee focused like game on this one because melee is it is good through the entire game at this point and i don't know if that's a testament to the fact that i didn't care for a lot of the guns

in the game or it's just that the melee was really satisfying and it stayed effective which is not something you find in a lot of games nowadays in a shooter i should say i mean obviously you know if it's elden ring yeah you're meleeing. But in a first-person shooter, melee is not really something you come across. Right. Yeah. What about abilities? What abilities did you guys focus on? Did you kind of use a little bit of everything, or did you focus in on one or the other? Two. Are we talking about the weapons still or the Charles abilities? No, the Charles abilities. I did two things. Two things only. I maxed out body, and I maxed out telekinesis. With the telekinesis, you can move heavier objects, hold things in place.

Because that was the one thing that I found, is sometimes you do have, like other games, where all of a sudden you get overwhelmed. And sometimes overwhelming fights with lots of things on you is harder than a boss fight. And I wanted the crowd control. And I only had enough points by the end of the game to really max out two whole trees. And I had them both completely maxed. Yeah. So you went mostly telekinesis for combat. What about you, Josh? I went with a mix. I tried again. I tried everything except for the shield. I never

once used the telekinetic shield, which is kind of like Neo's absorb, you know, in the matrix kind of thing. I didn't even unlock that. And I know that sounds goofy, but like I, I pretty much rotated through everything to try it out. I finally settled on the polymer jet, which is where you can coat enemies in polymer. And then that augments what happens to them because there are a lot of elemental attacks. You can burn and lightning and freeze and stuff like that and the that ability i didn't touch for a little while because it sounded boring but then what i found out is this actually is kind of nice because i was using shock as another one of my abilities and they're robots right what do you do with robots you electrocute them and like overload their circuits right so i used shock the polymer jet to augment like damage types and then

i used the freeze as like a crowd control because you get overwhelmed in this game very easy and i found that freezing things really kind of helped like within a crowd control sense at that point yeah similar to you guys i focused almost entirely on melee for the first half of the game because the game in the very beginning they only toss one or two robots at a time. They don't hit you with a whole lot until late in the game. I guess when we get to the open world part, you could get multiple enemies. But I decided to go all in on Frostbite, where I purchased every ability in Frostbite. By the end, it actually does a lot of damage. It's not just crowd control, but for as long as they're frozen, it's just ticking off damage continually. So I

found that to be a really good way for both crowd control and damage. And then I started fighting one of the bosses, and that's when I got the little tooltip that said, some bosses are so strong that you can only freeze them if you combine it with the polymer jets so then i started pumping points into the polymer jets so that way you can start to cover them with the polymer then you start hitting with freeze and then some of the bosses you could start to slow down and do damage with the other abilities as well that is that is funny you mentioned that though because when that tooltip came up on my game i was like i don't care i'm not using frostbite but then i thought about it i'm like

i'm in telekinesis it was useless in a boss fight almost completely and i'm like oh might have messed up but i'm sticking with it yeah so the melee weapon that i preferred was the pashtet i don't know which one you guys used um the game, shockingly, only has a total of 12 weapons, five of which are melee. So you only have seven firearms and five melee options. I don't know how you guys felt. The melee options, they were fun to tinker with. But ultimately, I felt like they were kind of similar in a way. They they do have a different like charge up ability but really ultimately you're kind of just playing the game of hit him in the head dodge hit him in the head i i kind of felt like the melee weapons didn't really feel all that different did you guys feel

the same way or differently the biggest difference i had was that if it was fast it was too short if it was heavy damage it was too slow so If it was heavy damage, it was too slow. So I went right in the middle and I used the pachette, which was kind of fast, kind of long, decent damage. That's the only difference I found, was speed and length, really. Let me introduce you guys to Josh's dojo. I will now perform the ceremonial changing of the belts. He will now perform the ceremonial changing of the belts.

Take my belt master i now submit to you every part of myself that's really okay i'm mostly focused on the belt here because the melee weapons in this game kicked butt now paul you are right you know you start off with like a fireman's axe then you get like a sword and then you get some kind of like yeah hatchet and i'll be honest with you those all felt very similar like that that was one of those things where it's like why would i use this small little hatchet versus the big axe oh attack speeds faster like all right you know the charge up attack you you know you hold right click and it charges a big strong attack which does a ton of damage and they're a little bit different but that was basically like oh i'm gonna start here i'm gonna move to this one i'm gonna move to this one where the melee really changed is when you get and i don't remember what the heck it's called because again russian

sounding name but it's the one with the two um like blades yeah like yeah like circular saw blades on it right and that it starts off with just yeah there you go what michael said um but here's the thing so that starts off as a basic weapon. And this is probably where we can kind of lead into this next thing, because there's crafting in this game, there's upgrades to the weapons in this. And I'll be honest, I didn't really focus on that for a while, because it was like, I was kicking butt, the combat wasn't that big of a deal. But when you upgrade the melee weapons, it is a massive upgrade at that point. Right.

And so the saw blade weapon, you ultimately wind up with two saw blades, and then you can fling them out and control them telekinetically. That wrecked everything, dude. I mean, absolutely obliterated everything. Now it drains your energy. So again, you're back to the, you don't have a lot of energy and it recharges very slowly. But I found the melee, once you got a good weapon and upgraded it, to be extremely satisfying. I forgot that I did switch to the Ched's Doshka at the end, at the very end. So one of the things that we didn't mention is that over the course of the game you find recipes

for these weapons but they don't come like automatically after a boss fight you get them randomly out of chess so your order of like what you unlock when could be very different from someone else the thing is that in the first half of the game, you're very reliant on melee. And then once you hit the second half of the game, the ammo is just flowing from the heavens, like Michael mentioned, to where I focused so much on firearms in the second half that I didn't even craft one or two of the melee options because I got the recipe so late. My biggest complaint about the firearms is that the shotgun is the strongest weapon in this game and the shotgun is the it's the first firearm you get and it's the only one that can interrupt enemy abilities so if you get a robot trying to jump kick you to knock you down if you hit him

with a shotgun he flies backward and he doesn't hit you and i was so disappointed that when i finally unlocked the ak-47 which they call something else it's got a r you and i was so disappointed that when i finally unlocked the ak-47 which they call something else it's got a russian name i was like oh this is gonna be like the good weapon right because this is soviet russia and then i had the ak and i'm like this gun kind of sucks so like the shotgun is the strongest weapon in the game and it's the first one that you have i was a little disappointed in the fact that there's only 12 weapons and some of them were not very powerful at all there were some that i never really used i never upgraded the pistols i disassembled so much pistol ammo in this game i can't even tell you how much so the weapons i found to be overall a little disappointing so

when it comes to shotgun my issue when it comes to crafting is that you have different, you have like four different things you can upgrade on weapons, right? You can upgrade the sights, the capacity, the cartridge, the muzzle, and the stock. Wow, five. Holy cow. How did I just recite those off memory? Go me. But the one thing that I found that you can't do unless you go outside super far into the open world is you cannot upgrade the shotgun's ammo capacity you get four shots and you're doing that super slow reload unless you go way off the beaten path and so it was super powerful but it was really annoying to use it and the the pistol i don't you said that the shotgun is i was doing like one shot headshots on almost everything with the pistol when I upgraded all the way. I would argue the pistol is OP for a

pistol. Here's the problem I have with the shotgun. Shotguns, the way they work, they're not supposed to be for super long range, but I was sitting there able to take out cameras from super far away when that shotgun spread would not have killed the camera from that far away. So I thought it was kind of miss made. And so maybe just out of principle, I'm like, no, you're going to shoot that camera from far away with the pistol, the AK,

but I hated the AK like you did. So I just pistled everything. Yeah. The thing with the weapons is, is that Paul, you're right. The later, some of the weapons you get later on kind of suck.

Like honestly, the AK is terrible. The recoil on it's so bad. The spread is so bad. Half a mag to kill one it feels like you're shooting bb's like that's the other thing like when you blast a guy with the shotgun it's got that knock back you see the blast on their body you you feel it the aka it's i felt like i was shooting little bb's at everything that would just fly off in all directions like

an airsoft gun or something and it was just terrible. You get a rail gun later on. And none of this is spoilers. See, I didn't like the rail gun at all. It took so long to charge. And I was just wrecking things with melee at that point. So I'm with you in that I wish there had been better weapons or more unique weapons. Because out of the 12 weapons, you don't use more than one melee. And you're probably really only using two to maybe three of the ranged weapons at that point. So definitely an area where they could have improved the game a lot. Now, that said, I do like that the upgrades really, really mattered. I went and got the upgrade to the magazine for the shotgun.

And it made a world of difference at that point. And you go on these little quests because it says this is where the open world comes in. Hey, you have to go to this facility. And there's three different chests in that facility that have weapon upgrades and they're locked. So maybe you get one for a weapon that you don't want, but it happens to be there. But that was a very good incentive. And it was enough of an upgrade to make me actually go get these things and then the weapons felt a lot better yeah i i can definitely say that the the upgrades in this game do make a difference on all the weapons i again like i didn't use the i upgraded the ak all the way

to see if it got better spoiler sorry guys i know we said no spoilers it didn't the weapon still sucked but i didn't realize that's all you had to do was go off because it says go to like a testing facility or whatever do you just go there and open a chest because i was like i don't want to do a testing thing where you fight a bunch of robots and stuff i'll do that later it's like their version of a dungeon so you go in you solve some puzzles you do some fighting and then you might find like the copper chest and then you explore some more find a harder puzzle and then through that is like the silver. And then you find a hidden area, solve a decently hard puzzle, fight a little bit, and then you get the gold chest, which has

another weapon upgrade. And maybe you don't need the gold chest because that's going to upgrade the AK, which sucks, and you only needed the copper one or something like that. Yeah, you just get to pick and choose what you want to look for. Yeah, because there's no official side quests given to you by npcs the side quests are just simply what do i want to upgrade where do i go and then you can go knock it out well the dead people talk to you they all right we want to take a second to ask everyone to follow us on socials at multiplayer pod there's been a lot of really good video content lately that we'd love you guys to check out we also also have a free Discord server.

We have an amazing community. It's completely free and open to the public. There's a link in the episode description. Now, with all that being said, we're going to take a short break, and we will come right back, and we're going to talk about the open world system in Atomic Heart. Okay, we are now back, and we need to talk about the open world in Atomic Heart. Atomic Heart is open world-ish. It is a very large map. Your objectives from mission to mission are sometimes very far apart, and you have to travel your way around the world. There's a lot of enemies out on the open road. You're going to fight a lot of robots along the way. Also,

once you beat certain bosses, you start to see mini versions of them, kind of like you see in Dark Souls, which is kind of funny. There's also flying surveillance cameras. If they catch you, they're going to call in reinforcements. There's a lot of cameras along the road. They either have to shoot before they see you, or they're going to bring reinforcements. Did you guys enjoy the open world aspect of Atomic Heart? It was interesting at times and a really big missed opportunity at others, to be honest. I liked that it made it feel like this game is big. Yeah. And they give you cars sometimes because you have to drive from this facility over to

that facility. Now, again, going back to the story, zero clue why I'm going where I'm going. All I know is, hey, I got to get from point A to point B and oh, look, there's a car over there. And I will say that it did create a sense of scale. And it's cool to like, oh, I'm hopping in this car and I'm driving. The problem is the driving's not very good. The roads are super cluttered because there's been this robot catastrophe going on the car has two hit points so if you crash into just about anything it bursts into flames um it's it's an it's a little bit of an odd mix because i felt like it did add to the sense of scale in the game and there were a couple times where i was like oh that's cool like look at that

little village down there or something like that so it made the world feel a little bit more complete. But then on the flip side, I'm just like, you can tell that they had a lot bigger plans for the development of this game, and then just had to kind of go, nah, that's all we can really do with the open world. Because Josh, yeah, you see those little communities and you go check them out. And what do you find? Nothing. Maybe some loot. Yeah, that's what I said. Exactly. Or a save spot, maybe. Honestly, more often than not, the only time that I explored the open world was because I needed to find a save station. And I was just looking for

something that was closer to my destination at that point. It really was a giant missed opportunity. But at the same time, it really did kind of improve the sense of scale, and it fleshed out the world building that they did from a visual standpoint only, I guess. I kind of see this game as a not open world game that just has extra running around if you want to, like wasted space. I thought it was interesting because you really can, if you want to, you can go explore the open world, maybe just if you're a completionist and you just want every single upgrade because you want that achievement or something. But like you said, it didn't seem like there was anything that made me want to go there. And the reason why I was so

turned off, because I am the person that is like, please don't give me an open world game. I want it so bad. I want to go everywhere. I want to explore everything. But two things. One, everything was the same. You go anywhere and you're looking at the same thing. Even the different communities, there's the same cars in the street, the same buildings, not like Cookie Cutter, but the same cows. It was the same feeling. But on top of that, the map in this game might as well have not existed. So I didn't want to go to the open world because I thought I'd get completely lost and not be able to find my way back. I felt like Paul playing any game where he has to have a sense of direction, to be honest, because I have a great sense of direction and I got so lost. I'm like, there's no compass. There's no waypoint marker. There's

no nothing. So I'm literally looking at the map like an atlas going okay i have to take the first right then i'm gonna take the third left not the path it's got to be a paved road oh dang it what was that and then i have to stop the car because the car keeps driving and you're gonna crash into something and blow up to look at the map and then be like oh i'm not even close to that road or dang it i missed my turn now i gotta turn around go back i i've never felt so lost in a game. Yeah. At first, I thought, this is really cool because you don't have to open world. You can just go to your destination and do it. And then I realized there's nothing else

in the world that's wide that way. Oh, and zero fast travel. Zero fast travel. There is zero fast... And that didn't really bother me as much because typically, you're going somewhere and staying there for a while. But yeah, no fast travel. The fast travel definitely bothered me, because especially if you want to go find those upgrades, sometimes they're pretty far from where you are. Yeah, very far. It's a several minute run. And I don't know about you guys, I just stopped fighting in the open world. I was like, I don't even care. I'll run into every camera,

and I'm just going to keep sprinting, and eventually I'll just outrun everything. So the open world, I did not find any motivation to go explore because there was nothing to find. There's zero lore. And the only time that you want to explore is if you know where to go for an upgrade. I found the open world aspect to be more of a nuisance than anything else. I thought it looked neat. But even the borders are like, you can see beyond them. And we're just going to give you a laser, like a red wall you cannot pass this it just kind of felt cheap and like they had plans

for an open world and they just axed all those plans is how it felt to me it feels like a uh linear game that just has very very far away mission points and maybe some kill stuff on the way there yeah i i have to bring this up because i'm not sure where this is going to fit into the rest of the the episode but the dream sequences that you get oh that's not part of the open world but it's just part of like the game itself but there's three or four times where this game turns into the most bananas LSD trip I think I've ever seen in a video game ever, man. It's up there. I was just like, what is going on, man? a like a hard right turn into from like from its normal gameplay into this absolutely fever dream bananas just visual acid trip man it is the craziest most jarring goofy wonderful terrifying

thing ever i was running on water like jesus right i was running on water and then i got on top of a submarine collecting apples i don't know what those apples do jumping on the wing of an airplane as a dog that climbs as a dog i think that climbs i think because you can see your like white fur it made no sense i mean you figure out what it is at the very end of the game what you are but you don't know why you were that thing it's so weird this game definitely has like some odd choices that maybe they land for some people maybe they don't for others uh i was definitely expecting this game to be odd and it is very odd you have to give them credit for making such a weird universe all right let's talk about boss oh what is that michael sorry sometimes it's

odds and odd in the best way though like well the first time I saw the ballerinas with their spikes in there, I'm like, this is such a weird game, but I'm so enticed by its strangeness. Yeah. If only they didn't show all the interesting things in the game trailers before it came out. We saw every single clip of those twins. All the cut scenes were in the trailer. We saw all of them.

Yep. They left very little to the imagination for the real game all right let's talk about the boss fights because it plays such a large role in atomic heart i don't know how many there are exactly i want to say around seven ish bosses six or seven ish somewhere around this is good i like not a ton but they all feel very different so what did you guys think overall about boss fights? Fan-freaking-tastic, in my opinion. This is one thing where I'm going to spoil a little bit of my thoughts on this game. The boss fights, I wish more shooters had boss fights like this, dude. They showed the one with the ball. That was the one they really showed off in the trailers and

stuff like that. It is the first boss, so it's not a spoiler. Dude, that fight is every bit as cool as it looks in the trailer, in my opinion. Anytime a boss fight happened, I was just giggling and felt like a kid in a candy store, because I thought they did such a good job with this sense of scale, how deadly these robots were, the chaos. You're getting knocked down. This thing is jumping up in the air and just pummeling you. I died so many times on some of these. They had a ton of health. I was getting low on ammo. It was frantic. It was hectic. It was chaos. And I loved every second of every boss fight. There was one second of every boss fight or of a few boss fights that I absolutely hated, though, is you will be banging your face against this boss, and all of a sudden, a quick time event shows up. And if you do it wrong, doesn't matter where you are,

you are dead instantly. You get one shot, you are dead. No, that is unforgivable. I was going to mention the good first. And I was going to say, I think Josh is right. I think the boss fights are the absolute peak of this game. They're great. But there are two bosses with quick time events where it is instant death and i am sorry there is no place for that in a first person shooter in 2023 it is unforgivable to stick those quick time events on boss fights i'm sorry you cannot give them any grace in regards to this it is a stupid decision well and you don't even see him coming. So you're

not in that mode. All of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm stunned on the ground. And then all of a sudden like, oh, shoot. What just I'm dead. Now, the one thing I can say that I do like is a couple of the boss fights in this game. I'm pretty sure these were bosses I fought. Like the first time you fight the play. It's a boss fight, right? Yeah. But it shows something we talked about in the best game mechanics is that the ability to progress is that as you play the game you get harder and harder things to fight like the play which is like the third or fourth boss you fight in the game later on becomes a common enemy but you've upgraded your stuff so much that you're able to now fight him easier

i love games where it's like okay that was that was hard earlier. Now it's a regular thing because I'm really progressing. And like the mustache guys that just wrecked you in the beginning, not a boss fight, but the mustache aliens. The mustache robots at the beginning were a pain in the butt. Later on, it was like one shot. But the boss fights did that, where if they gave you a boss later on that you fought earlier, it was now easier to fight. I will say that the bosses had completely different mechanics, which I loved. And they were different sizes, and you fight in very different kinds of arenas. Sometimes it's in a wide open field. Sometimes it's in a small contained theater.

I thought that stuff was really neat. If I was gonna also complain, other than the quick time events. My other major complaint is that the strategies on the bosses did have a lot of overlap, where you pull out your best firearms, and you fight and you dodge a certain mechanic, and then you go back to your firearm. There was one fight in particular where the boss would drop grenades, and you would use Charles to grab a grenade, and then you could launch it at the boss, and it took off a huge amount of health. I thought that was really cool, and I wished that they had a little more interaction on the other boss fights, because that really only comes into play on one. I will also say, the second half of this game,

I found to be so easy that the final boss which i won't go into detail because of spoilers i only died on it once and it was because i failed a quick time event because i'm watching a cut scene and my hands are not on the keyboard i'm like oh this is fun to watch and all of a sudden it starts flashing press the f button and then i scramble and start hitting f and i died and then i reloaded and beat it. No problem in this game. If you have enough ammo and heels, you can kind of just fight your way through any of the bosses without a whole lot of difficulty.

It's very true. I will say though that because I haven't given my thoughts on it, but I won't give my thoughts because my thoughts are exactly like Josh's overall. The boss fights were amazing and I loved every second except for the little gripes we had here. I know we griped a little more than said positives, but overall, the boss fights are a great reason to play this game.

I want more boss fights like that. There's not enough. For sure. Yeah. Give us like five more. I don't need 40, like Elden Ring, but at least give me a dozen. The seven, or I don't know if it's six, seven, or eight. It's right around there.

It's just not quite enough. They needed a couple more bosses agreed yeah all right well uh i think we can keep things spoiler free how did you guys feel about how the story wraps up there are multiple endings you don't have a lot of choices there's really three endings one is almost more of a joke ending kind of the same thing that first spoken does where you can just decide to go back to New York and ignore the rest of the game. Did you guys find it satisfying at the end? No, no. The ending was weird. And kind of nonsensical in a way. It followed the story, to be honest. I didn't know what was going on. What the heck is this?

Oh, wait, the game's over? That's it? The boss fight was climactic, but the ending of the game was very anticlimactic at that point. The fight is great. Yeah. And so it was just another one of these jarring things where it's like, I'm in Soviet Russia. No, I'm in a fever dream. I've got this amazing boss fight. The game's over? What? I don't understand the story who is that guy wait that person's gone now like what what is happening when i beat the game i thought i got the bad ending because i beat the game and i'm like is that the bad ending and then i i youtubed the other endings and i'm like

there's not really a bad or a good ending i was like who'd you get the good ending the good ending is actually what paul said where you're just like uh never mind i'm gonna walk away but that's actually the good ending because like which is weird it was really weird i i literally this is the first time i ever had to do that i literally pulled up a an atomic heart ending explained video to be like what did i miss in that ending i don't even know what and also oh that's spoiler i can't say that there's there's a spoiler that i'll talk about with you guys later on or hop in discord and ask me what I was going to spoil later on, guys. But yeah, I don't even know if I know what happened. I don't even know if I like what happened. So here's the thing. Last thing I'll say about Ending Story is one of the main

reasons it didn't really work for me is because there is not very much emotional connection with P3. There are late game reveals about his background and who he is, but you don't know that until the end. And so I didn't have any time or any desire to connect with him. So even when there's certain reveals at the end, I just didn't really care. I think this game would have just worked better if they just said, these robots have gone crazy, and this person uploaded a virus, and they've been fired. We need you to just go in and kill them all. And then I would have said, great. And that, I think, would have been far more compelling. Toss in a couple more bosses. They tried to do more with the story, and I think it just didn't work on almost every level. So, I don't know. That's kind of just what I thought. Plus, like

I said before, everything that was good, you kind of already saw in the trailer. There's clips of the final boss fight. You just don't know it when you see the trailer. But there's even stuff for very endgame that's in there. Any closing remarks before we knock out our segments here at the end of the show?

Alright. I'm good. I just see shaking heads great great for our listeners give us uh give us give us a give us a map next time oh yes i guess you can't do anything oh one thing there were there were puzzles in the game that were actually kind of fun and refreshing it wasn't like super hard and not super repetitive but it was nice to see some puzzle action moving some marbles in the tubes yeah yeah i do like mini games and a lot of the lock picking stuff had mini games it was neat the first like 15 20 times and then it started to get old yeah yeah totally agree all right well guys let's go

into our next segment here let's do some hot takes all right who wants to go first not it uh i guess i'll go first it's a hard segment this was a hard one to find a hot take on actually it wasn't it was just hard to see if this was actually worth a hot take or not but i think the most fun i had in this game was looting i freaking loved looting stuff it was so much fun to go around and just hold down the right bumper and just so the way looting works in this game is you you basically just hold the button down and things fly at you from all the drawers and stuff and it was just i don't know why it was the most comfortable fun thing i've ever done in a video game i went a whole video game with just the looting from atomic heart there you go oh man the looting uh my hot

take is gonna my hot take is gonna sound like it's a dig at michael and it's not because this this was my hot take but even in the previews for this game i i've seen other you know websites and video game reviews and previews and stuff talk about the looting system my hot take is i absolutely hated the looting system in this game. Like legitimately. And I, this is not because you said that Michael, but like, honestly, there, there were a lot of people that talked about, Oh, what a cool way where you just hoover up everything in the room. You don't have to open up each drawer. It was so unsatisfying. All I'm doing is sucking up parts to make ammo or to craft a gun. And they, they, they would just plop everything in a big room so like

you had these loot rooms where i'm just i'm i'm holding f over 20 file cabinets things flying yeah while strafing and i just kind of went there's no satisfaction here at all for me it was so much fun though dude the best part the best part of the loot. Did you ever pay attention to what the loot is called? You know how in RPGs you're always looting things? Oh, it's like metal parts and stuff like that. Yeah, normally you're looting things like essence of water or whatever. In this game, it is metal parts, synthetic material, and my favorite, chemistry, which is just a medicine bottle. So those are the parts.

I will say I enjoyed looting the massive file cabinets. What I didn't like were looting the little desks, because you couldn't do it at any angle. You had to be directly in front of it, or it didn't work. All right, my hot take is that this is the most disappointed I've ever been with any of our Deep Dive releases. I'm not saying it's the worst game. Battlefield 2042 is so much worse than Atomic Heart. But Battlefield, I was a little optimistic, but not very optimistic. Atomic Heart, up to the release, I honestly thought, if this is going to be as good as Bioshock, it's going to be somewhere around number 15 on our leaderboard. And I was really hoping it would

be really high like that. What's really funny is that Hogwarts Legacy really tanked in my expectations, and I was really high on Atomic Heart. They were polar opposites of where they ended up. I thought Hogwarts was so freaking good. I i thought atomic heart was so much of a letdown um i was i was hoping for bioshock and instead i got a bad protagonist worse dialogue than forespoken i even linked you guys an article that said forget forespoken the worst dialogue of the year is atomic heart yeah um the game was rather pedestrian i didn't find it to be innovative in any way shape or form this is just another shooter that had cool bosses but nothing that was actually innovative in the space it was just kind of weird

um but that's it i was i was very disappointed in this one but you're in mother russia sure sure i was waiting for a comment like that all All right, Josh, have you pulled some community reviews to read for us? Of course I did. I do my homework, Paul. All right. So we, you know, that's some of what we thought about the game. You know, we, we discussed some of the different aspects of it and then, you know, you're kind of getting an idea of maybe what we think about this game or in Paul's case, you know, you're, you got a pretty clear view there. Um, but we always go to the community reviews so you can get some other opinions on this game, some positive, some negative. Um, all right. So this first one is recommended 25 hours on record. And the review says, despite the problems, despite the fact that it struggles to find character, atomic heart is

one of the strangest and most special experiences I've had recently a lunatic ride spot on you're a lunatic if you like it yeah so okay this next one is not recommended 18 hours on record and it says i have to be honest i have no idea why this game is getting praised so much the setting and graphics are fantastic obviously but everything else is extremely rough and bad some plot reveals can be seen from 2 trillion miles away. Some are just forced, in my opinion, and come out of nowhere for the sake of being, ah, you didn't expect that. But they don't really connect as far as I think I understand the story. The gameplay is not engaging, and guns feel weightless, and the powers feel weak.

The game peaked with the first boss, which was cool. Everything before and after that was really poor in execution. I could not agree with that review more. That is exactly my thoughts and feelings on the game. Well, Paul, this is why we do what we do right here. All right. This next one is recommended 37 hours on record. This is a perfect example of a seven out of 10 game. The good, excellent performance and visuals, top tier soundtrack, interesting settings and story, and very fun combat. The bad, absolutely pointless open world, tedious exploration due to enemies respawning and cameras on every corner. But still, the core open world design is atrocious. This game would have been perfectly fine as a linear story driven game. Upgrading gear takes five different kinds of materials and the grind is real it has one of the worst main protagonists in recent years and it's a jack-of-all-trades kind of game it does a lot but

very little of real quality so that was a recommended review i was gonna say was that i still kind of agree with that just make it make it a five out of ten and everything else can stay the same and i agree with that one i thought that was the same review you just read but one was i recommend it one was i don't right um and then this last one is not recommended 12 hours on record gameplay was repetitive and full of resource sucking mechanics i felt i had to walk around holding f to loot the story is subpar and convoluted the ending binary and unfulfilling voice acting was math the dialogue just full of sex-related banter i would not buy this again i'd rather just go play bioshock where the gameplay felt more rewarding less grindy and the story is

just better we can all agree bioshock is a masterpiece and this game is not a masterpiece i don't think this is a masterpiece at all no all right guys so that's what the community thinks of this game we always play a little game where you know we guess the overall steam review score of what we think this game is after playing it seeing some of the reviews where do we think that people rated this game paul you are the defending champion michael and i are bound and determined to take you out we're just going to sandwich whatever score you say that is true although now you've influenced me i i shouldn't listen i should just earmuffs when the community reviews start because like i it always is like oh maybe i'm too high on it

don't thank god on this one though i like it so here's the thing i'm sure there's a little bit of review bombing a lot of people called for people to not buy it because some of the money would go to r investors. Totally understand. I think that probably brought some bombing. I do think the game's a little bit repetitive, but it is beautiful. It is different and very weird. I think it's going to be somewhere in the high 80s. I initially wrote down 86, but I'm going to alter it a little bit.

I'm going to say 87%. Ooh. Can I sandwich him? We got to win. We can't let him win again i'm gonna i'm gonna you got me with the two negatives one positive i'm gonna sandwich him on the under and go 86 with his original his original all right well i'm going one over that all right here we go but it doesn't matter you't matter because one of us nailed this perfectly. I'll do it again. No, there's no way it's me, is it?

It's no way it's Paul. It's Michael! What? I never learned. So I was right initially? Oh, no. I can't believe I changed it. When I heard you say 86, I went, there's no way.

Oh, my goodness. That's classic. You should have gone with this guy. Oh, I'm so glad you pivoted off of that. Choked right at the finish line. I can't believe it. Michael, I hope you're ready for something about some giant robot twins or Nora, one of the two here.

All right, Michael. Lead us into this next segment. Hello, Nora. If I give you some chemistry, will you spit out a gun for me? Oh, boy. That was bad. Let's go back to Paul. Paul, over to you!

I use chemistry. You know what, Nora? Let's quit stalling and rush into things. There you go. Thank you. That was really good. Dang it, I was... You're the champion for a reason. I was like, I knew about the chemistry thing, and I was like, you give her chemistry,

and chemistry is like love, so... Yeah, you can give Nora a lot of things in this game i hope i never win again so i don't ever have to go through the heartbreak that i just had the only time on this show that someone else has actually had to redo somebody's pickup line not to redo i just i knew that would be a good one i was gonna say it no matter what michael tell the people what the segment is i don't wanna all right so we're rolling into our make love mary murder this is how we rate the game we decide if we recommend it to you or not essentially make love is like this game was fun you know what we'd say you

check it out once uh murder is exactly what it sounds like don't play this game and mary is like this is a great game you want to buy it while it's at the top price doesn't matter you got to play it right now and so we're gonna go ahead and make love mary murder atomic heart paul you want to get yours out of the way yeah yeah yeah it's a murder so here's the thing shocker i actually really loved the first two hours i loved the way it started out because you could mix in a little bit of stealth. The enemies were a little bit more strategic fighting one at a time, and I really loved that. I think once you get into the open world, the game starts to tank, and it starts to show all the flaws. By the end of the 15-hour playthrough, I felt like

the first two hours were the best. Everything that followed was very disappointing. For me, it's an easy murder. But I will say, I believe Atomic Heart is on Game Pass. I think it is well worth playing on Game Pass. And as soon as it stops being fun, just quit. What about you, Michael? I had fun playing this game. Maybe it's just because you got to understand my perspective. i don't really play shooters and so i guess it probably didn't get repetitive for me because i'm bad at them maybe i just got better as i went but i had to call that was fun i like the weapons i like the upgrades i thought that a lot of things were done well as far as like giving you options to upgrade the glove the gun stuff like that i like the setting but i also love history so i liked the alternate russia type thing uh bad though no map dodging didn't work half the time um i looked it up it wasn't just

me who couldn't dodge sometimes you a lot of times you dodge and that thing would still hit you no matter if it's behind you or not or looking behind i would always double dodge because i bought that ability just double dodge and it usually worked you had you had to and then of course the long elevator uh masking the long elevator rides that asked the load times was ridiculous. That being said, I had fun, so I can't murder it because I kind of want to keep playing it a little bit. So I'm a solid make love with this game. I didn't hate it. I didn't think it was marriage material, but I did have a lot of fun playing it. I get it. What about you josh yeah i get it just call me nora because i want to make love to this game too um this game is a tale of two games though honestly there are parts of this game where i just go what were you thinking like honestly the protagonist is terrible he's so

terrible he wrapped around the planet and became likable for a little while and then went back to terrible again it was just really like, it was like whiplash. Um, so there were parts of this game where it was just a complete miss and I just shook my head and I went, why guys like, dang it,

you know, but then there were parts of this game that just triggered something in the, the weird animalistic recesses of my brain. And I don't mean the crude humor. I mean like they just, it's bananas at times. Yeah. The boss fights are bananas. The are bananas the the fever dreams were bananas like some of the stuff was just crazy and my brain likes crazy sometimes and so it just kind of fed into that like for me at you know a lot um you liked the dream sequence though i didn't some of it was repetitive it

wasn't the best gameplay. Yeah. But it was just this, like, what is happening? Where am I right now? So you found it interesting. What is this? Okay. Yes, exactly.

Gameplay-wise, it wasn't the best. You know, like, yeah, you're jumping on some platforms and you're trying to find your way out of the dream or something like that. But overall, I'm with Michael. I had fun playing this game. I thought it was a very neat experience. It missed on a lot of levels, but the experience of atomic heart is not like a lot of other games, even though it is somewhat of a bland first person shooter. If you're looking at it like

that, but I had fun. It will stick with me as a game that I remember, not for all the good things necessarily, but it is a memorable game. And so for that, I'm going to give it a make love. I'll play the sequel when it comes out. All right. If you two both vote for a sequel, then I guess I'll have to play it. All right. Let's go into our last segment. Let's check out our leaderboard and see where Atomic Heart stacks up. All right, if you happen to be new to our podcast here, every time we do a deep dive, we have to decide as a three-man consensus, where are we going to rank this game against all the other games that we have covered? We already have a total of 90 games. This will be number 91. If you want to check our overall leaderboard, just go to multiplayerpodcast.com,

scroll down a little bit. It's right there on the main page. We've got some stuff on here, just to give you a couple of markers. We've got God of War Ragnarok at 6. We've got Terraria at 20. We've got Deep Rock Galactic at 35. A little further down, we've got Wasteland 3 at 59. Lower than that, we've got Forspoken at 79. What are you guys thinking about this one, since we have two Make Loves and one Murder? I don't think it's probably in the top half, but what do you guys think? Paul, I'm going to jump right to what I think, because I think you might agree with this ranking as well. I disagree.

I'm looking at a spot, and I think this works based on the games around it as well. But I would nominate 56. All right. Let me scroll up a bit. Hold on. I'm still scrolling up. Oh, wow. This is why I'm trying to compromise here. But that is just behind Borderlands, just ahead of Saints Row, just ahead of Deathloop

and Wasteland 3, and just behind A Way Out. Just behind Borderlands 3, by the way, just for the listeners, so you know we're not ranking Borderlands 1 that low. Yeah. Oh, boy. Okay. I like that you've got it above Tiny Tina's Wonderland. I like that.

I like it being above Elite Dangerous. I can tell you that. Oh, boy. Okay. I like that you've got it above Tiny Tina's Wonderland. I like that. I like it being above Elite Dangerous. I can tell you that. Oh, boy. Okay. All right. I feel like that's a fair spot. I like Atomic Heart way better than Saints Row. Deathloop is kind of the comparison for me in it's a shooter. It's a weird world. The story made sense. It's got some... Well, in Deathloop, it did. But I like the shooting mechanics sense some well in death loop it did you know but i liked the shooting mechanics and some of the stuff about atomic heart better in that regard as well so that's kind of like it's in that range for me i'm fine with it what i was looking at as i scrolled down in my mind i was looking at 46 which is far cry 5 which kind of is to me very similar to this game as far as

like well decent shooter nothing too special but then i know it has to be above tiny teen is wonderland my question is with number 54 a way out i think i'd put this above a way out but i'm totally fine with 56 because i wouldn't i just realized i want to put it at 55 just because that russian rock music and russian opera played every once in a while just killed me i loved it. We didn't talk about this, but this is the guy from Doom that did this. No. Yeah, from Doom.

And the soundtrack for this game is phenomenal, dude. It's so good. Yeah. And it soundtrack for this game is phenomenal. It's so good. Yeah. And it's all over the place. Mick Gordon is who did the composing for this game. The best music is when you are activating Nora sitting on the menu. That's the best music in this game. all right let's let's do 56 all right i think it's a little high but i i get it we got to make

a three-man decision yeah all right We'll lock it in at 56. It will be below Operation Tango, A Way Out, and Borderlands 3, and we will have it above Little Nightmares 2, Saints Row 2022, and Deathloop. All right.

Crispy Critters. We're already done with this deep dive. Guys, we almost made it an hour. We are barely going over. We want to say thank you to everyone out there for listening. Please make sure to check out our Patreon page at MultiplayerSquad.com. Our next deep dive is going to take place in two weeks where we will be covering the game Steel Rising, which was a selection by one of our legendary supporters, Scrump. I think that'll be a lot of fun to talk

about. Please make sure to come back and check out our episode on thursday and until then happy gaming everybody until next time everyone crispy critters dasvidaniya everybody