Focus Entertainment and Mundfish announced that Atomic Heart will release on February 23, 2023. The Cyprus-based indie developer released a new trailer for the first-person shooter on Wednesday, giving fans a quick tour of a sci-fi world set in alternative Soviet Union Russia in 1955.
In Atomic Heart, the majority of Soviet labor is being performed by AI robots after they beat Nazi Germany in 1941, and Professor Dmitriy Sechenov developed neuro-polymer, an advanced piece of tech that would link humans and robots together, and allow people living in the USSR to control the robots remotely by 1955 thanks to the Collectiv Neural Network. By the time the game begins, the KGB sends special agent P-3 to investigate an abandoned robot factory called Facility 3826, only to discover that it’s being overrun by robots on a murderous rampage due to a global system failure.
Players will have to get very strategic in their gameplay, as fully autonomous robots breed unpredictability. They will have to adapt their fighting style accordingly depending on the enemies they will face, use various hacking methods to avoid getting killed by other robots if spotted by one of them, and upgrade their weapons to gain the upper hand on the robots.
Atomic Heart was first revealed in 2018, with trailer reveals and information from Mundfish being few and far between. It’s said to be a combination of BioShock and Fallout because of how twisted the alternative reality of Soviet-era Russia is, and because of the robots rebelling against their creators and causing mayhem, but Mundfish CEO Robert Bagratuni told IGN at the time that he compares it to Black Mirror in terms of story and Bloodborne on the combat front.
Atomic Heart will launch on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. It’ll be available on Xbox Game Pass at launch.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?