Atomic Heart Beginner’s Guide: Tips & Tricks You Should Know

by Mike Alexander / Articles, Editorials, Slider Posts / 08 Jan 2023

Mundfish is a completely new game development studio. It was founded back in 2017 by a couple of people with big dreams who went to work immediately on their magnum opus. Most people try to get a few games under their belt before they take on the blockbuster video game industry, but Mundfish is feisty, and they wanted to make something to rival the industry’s biggest games right out of the gate.

Their first project has just hit the market, and it’s definitely something. I wouldn’t say it stands up to massive games like Fallout and Bioshock (the games that inspired it), but it’s still pretty impressive. Maybe you’ve heard about this game over the past few years, it’s called Atomic Heart.

Oh yes! That one, with the insane robots and impossibly high production values. That’s right, it’s here, and it can be a pretty tough game to play for a number of reasons. I’ve played quite a bit of Atomic Heart, so if you’re digging into it and think you could use some help, let me give you a few tips & tricks in this Atomic Heart Beginner’s Guide.

L is for Loser

Within the first few minutes of starting Atomic Heart, you will unlock CHAR-LES’s scanning function. It’s assigned to a button, but P-3 holds his left hand up and makes an L gesture to activate it. So 90s!

Aside from calling deranged robots losers, this scanning function is incredibly useful, and I would even say it is critical to your success in Atomic Heart. It doesn’t use any resources, but it shows you all of the collectibles, interactables, and enemies in an area, even through walls. It might even be overpowered.

So, my first tip is to scan everything, as often as you can. It makes the game less pretty, sure, but it’ll help you spot that hidden supply crate in the corner!

Tools of Destruction

One of the upsides of Atomic Heart is that it gives you a huge selection of weapons pretty early on. However, there should be an order of succession in the weapons you rely on in any given combat encounter.

You have, of course, your basic guns. These use ammo, which is not terribly plentiful and requires precious resources to craft. Normal guns are typically pretty powerful, which is very helpful, but finding yourself in a boss encounter with no ammo because you spent it all on the grunt bots is a bad feeling.

So, you should prioritize your melee weapons first, then your polymer powers, and then your battery-powered weapons before you turn to your shotguns & pistols. This will give you the best experience by using every aspect of Atomic Heart, and it will make sure you have plenty of ammo for when you need it! Plus, those polymer powers are super cool, and I forgot to use them for like ten hours.

The Yellow (is) King

The game tells you this in a quick tutorial tip, but it’s easy to dismiss and even easier to forget about it when the game actually starts. If things in the environment are highlighted yellow, Agent P-3 can interact with and climb them. This opens up your traversal options quite a bit, but spotting these pops of yellow in environments is hard because there is so much going on ALL THE TIME.

There’s no real way to get around it, so here’s my tip: clear out areas (especially in the open world) little by little, and then go back over it to see what kind of trouble you can really get up to. There might be a hidden area that can only be accessed with some climbing, which you would have missed because you were too busy dodging, swinging, and shooting at rampaging robots!

Big Brother is Watching

Speaking of the open world, those damn flower cameras are all over the place. They’ll probably see you before you see them, but I’ve found some success in shooting them until they explode and then running away. If you leave it intact and stick around, you’ll raise the alert level and draw a bunch of enemies to your location. That’s something you want to avoid as much as possible, because it’s shockingly easy to get overwhelmed in Atomic Heart.

Speaking of shocking, you could also just use the Shok ability on the cameras. It has the same effect as long as you run, and it won’t summon those pesky Pchelas.

Don’t Forget to Dismantle

Whenever you have to deal with NORA (I know, I’m sorry), don’t forget that you can also dismantle the things you have in your inventory. If you’re low on some kind of resource that you need to craft an important weapon or upgrade, check out your inventory to see what you can get by breaking down some extra supplies.

This is super helpful, and the game does mention it briefly, but I forgot to do it for almost half the game. Dismantling supplies makes getting upgrades for tougher sections much, much easier.

Don’t Bother Being Sneaky

Atomic Heart makes a point of telling you that you can use stealth to get around and take down some enemies, but it’s pretty difficult or even impossible in some areas of the game. There are robots all over the damn place, and as soon as one sees you they all know where you are.

My recommendation would be to fight the ones you can, and haul ass to the next objective when things start getting out of hand. It’s saved my skin more than once.

Mike Alexander

Mike has been playing video games since he was able to hold a controller, having been fascinated by Sonic 2 on his mom’s Sega Genesis. That fascination and passion for the art form has grown exponentially nearly 30 years later, and he doesn’t see that fading away anytime soon.
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