Atomic Heart is a pretty unique game, and not just in terms of its setting. While the core gameplay mechanics will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s played Bioshock or Wolfenstein, some aspects of this title can be a little confusing or even infuriating at times. The developers certainly made a few interesting choices in their attempt to innovate a tried-and-true formula.
Atomic Heart does a pretty good job at holding the player’s hand during the opening hours but offers no way to revisit tutorials, so you’re mainly on your own afterward. Don’t worry, though, because the tips and tricks found below will help you figure out what to do and what not to do while exploring the game’s beautiful, but often dangerous world.
10 Weapon Types And Elemental Damage
Weapons in Atomic Heart are split into three categories – melee weapons, ballistic ranged weapons, and energy ranged weapons, all of which can be upgraded with mods. Ballistic weapons are the only ones that require conventional ammo and also the only ones that don’t have an alt-firing mode or a special attack, although they do make up for it by allowing ADS. Energy weapons are the complete opposite as they don’t allow you to aim down sights but have alt-firing modes and don’t require ammo.
In addition to physical damage, weapons in Atomic Heart can also deal elemental damage. Energy weapons always inflict electrical damage while the Fat Boy rocket launcher always deals explosive damage. Other weapons do regular physical damage, however, they can be upgraded with Cartridge Modules and then equipped with fire, ice, or electrical cartridges to inflict elemental damage of the corresponding type. However, keep in mind that cartridges get depleted pretty quickly and need to be replaced often. Cartridges can be freely switched between weapons at any time and can even be applied to melee weapons.
9 Ability Combos
Certain abilities work best when used in conjunction with other abilities or elemental effects. For instance, you can use Mass Telekinesis to lift enemies into the air and shock or freeze them while they’re floating helplessly. You’ll need to be quick, though, because enemies will drop once you switch abilities. Alternatively, you can inflict elemental damage on floating enemies at a more leisurely pace using your weapons.
Meanwhile, Polymeric Jet can be combined with Shok or Frostbite to deal elemental damage or even stun certain enemies for prolonged periods of time. While there’s no fire-based ability in the game, you can ignite Polymeric Jet using a weapon equipped with a Fire Cartridge. The combat Polymer will burn for some time after being ignited and will inflict damage to everything in the area, including yourself. Best not to step into the fire. Electrifying the polymer will yield a similar result, however, you can safely walk on frozen Polymer.
8 Keep An Eye On Your Energy Meter
Energy is one of your most important resources in Atomic Heart. As mentioned previously, it acts as a power source for energy-based weapons and gets depleted surprisingly quickly if you’re not careful. While regular shots only deplete a small amount of energy, charging a special attack will drain a huge chunk of it. Your character restores lost energy over time, albeit at a very slow rate. Melee weapons restore energy with every hit and are a great way of supplementing your natural recharge rate.
If you’re planning to focus primarily on energy weapons, it’s a good idea to spend some of your Neuropolymer on upgrades from the Energy Management tree. Among other things, you can add extra Power Cells, increase your natural energy regeneration rate, and improve the amount of energy restored by melee attacks. It’s worth noting that using abilities doesn’t deplete energy, so feel free to use them as often as you want.
7 Respec As Often As Needed
Speaking of abilities, Atomic Heart is more generous than other games when it comes to allowing players to experiment. Players can use a resource known as Neuropolymer to unlock new skills and abilities at one of the many upgrade stations scattered around the world. You don’t have to worry about respec penalties in this game, so feel free to switch around your skills and abilities as often as needed. Simply select an activate skill or ability and hit the ‘Return’ option to receive back all the Neuropolymer you spent on it.
Atomic Heart also uses a similar system for weapons. You can craft weapons, consumables, ammo, or cartridges using a combination of materials like Metal Parts, Superconductors, or Energy Modules. There are eight types of materials in total. Anything that can be crafted can also be disassembled and there are no penalties for doing so. You’ll get all the materials you spent whenever you disassemble something, including any materials spent on upgrades. Don’t be shy about disassembling ammo for weapons you’re not using or consumables that you have an excessive amount of.
6 Scan Enemies To Reveal Vulnerabilities
Scanning is a useful tool for navigation and for spotting lootable objects through walls. Perhaps even more importantly, scanning can also be used to identify enemies and reveal their vulnerabilities. Similar to enemies in games like Horizon: Zero Dawn, enemies in Atomic Heart are resistant to certain elemental effects and vulnerable to others. Robots tend to be vulnerable to electrical damage, biological enemies tend to be vulnerable to fire damage, and so on.
Exploiting these strengths and weaknesses is particularly important when fighting strong enemies, such as bosses. While the Lore section of your journal lists various details regarding the game’s enemies, it doesn’t list their resistances and vulnerabilities. The only way to find out about them is by scanning enemies while you’re in the field.
5 Don’t Skip Testing Grounds
Testing Grounds are similar to dungeons, and you’ll run into quite a few of them while exploring the world of Atomic Heart. Unlocking the entrance to a Testing Ground generally involves solving some sort of puzzle, and you can expect even more puzzles once you’re inside. Although some of the puzzles can be pretty annoying, it’s worth taking the time to solve them in order to progress through the Testing Grounds because you’ll find some very valuable items inside.
There are three chests hidden away inside every Testing Ground, each containing one or two weapon mods. You can find generic mods simply by exploring the world and looting all the chests and objects you run into, however, many of the best mods can only be found by exploring the Testing Grounds.
4 Think Outside The Box
You’ll spend quite a bit of time in Atomic Heart solving puzzles and minigames, whether that be snapping your fingers to unlock doors or manipulating platforms with electricity and magnetism. While some of these inventive puzzles and minigames are an absolute joy to solve, others are incredibly annoying, and solving them often requires thinking outside the box.
Environmental puzzles tend to be the most complicated of the bunch. Make sure to scan the area whenever you get stuck on one of these since you can sometimes reveal hidden mechanisms and wires that are difficult to see with the naked eye. Oftentimes these puzzles will also include some sort of platforming element, but it’s worth noting that in some cases the platforms are only there to mislead you. The solution to many of the game’s puzzles is not always obvious so don’t be afraid to use every tool in your arsenal as you try to figure it out. Dash-jumping and Shok are especially useful.
3 Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind
Stealth is a thing in Atomic Heart but don’t expect to be able to sneak around through the entire game. There are Dandelion cameras pretty much everywhere and outdoor areas are usually monitored by Hawk drones. The game takes place in an authoritarian regime after all, so heavy surveillance is to be expected. Shok is your best friend when dealing with cameras since one quick zap can disable them long enough to allow you to pass through undetected. Alternatively, you can just destroy them, however, doing so will more often than not attract unwanted attention.
Make sure to keep an eye on the Alarm Level if you decide to resort to violence, and hide if it rises past level 0. Once the Alarm Level reaches 2, pods filled with enemies will drop near your location and you will be overwhelmed in no time. Hawks are significantly worse than cameras since they have a much larger radius, although you can temporarily bring them down for maintenance using nearby control towers. Once a Hawk is down, you can climb onto it and use the connection cables as zip lines to quickly traverse parts of the map or bypass certain obstacles.
2 You Can’t Kill ‘Em All
You’ll learn pretty quickly after stepping foot into the open world that enemies reaper shortly after you kill them, and this applies to most of them. As soon as you kill a robot, repair drones will be dispatched from nearby hubs and will begin reconstructing it. You can stop the process by taking out the drones, but they’ll just keep coming, so it’s best to move on instead of trying to kill all of them. These drones also repair cameras and while their numbers are limited inside dungeons, there’s an endless supply of them in outside areas. The hubs that dispatch drones are invulnerable and generally passive toward the player. However, if you decide to attack them, they will instantly deploy a squad of attack drones that can deal a fair bit of damage. Luckily, they go down just as easily as the repair drones.
Some of the organic enemies in the game display somewhat similar behavior. Namely, you’ll sometimes run into enemies called Mothers that deploy hostile Sprouts at regular intervals. In this case, you can kill the Mothers to stop more Sprouts from spawning. Sprouts are more dangerous than they might appear as they can possess nearby corpses and turn them into Mutants.
1 Go For A Swim
Much of the advanced technology found in Atomic Heart revolves around Polymer. This exotic material powers machines and even some of your abilities, but has plenty of other applications as well. You can sometimes find unrefined Polymer while exploring the world - in both outdoor and indoor areas - and it turns out that the protagonist loves to swim in the stuff.
Although it may seem dangerous from the outside, Polymer is perfectly harmless so don’t hesitate to jump in whenever you encounter it. In fact, whenever you come across Polymer in the wild it’s usually connected to some sort of puzzle and the material can even help you reach inaccessible areas. Once you’re inside, you can emerge from the Polymer at any point by simply using the dodge button.