Atomic Heart is a closed-world first-person shooter with role-playing elements, from Russian developer Mundfish, taking place in an alternative historical timeline. It also features four DLCs that conclude the story and improve upon the base game. Fans of shooters with stats that aren't quite immersive sims might be interested in Atomic Heart.

Warning: Because this review deals with all of the DLC, there will be spoilers.



Atomic Heart takes place in an alternate 1955, in a retrofuturistic wet dream of Soviet glory where the communists made cool science goo and robots instead of famine and genocide. World War II came and went, but not before the Nazis unleashed a terrible plague that killed millions of people, thus pushing the USSR to create advanced robots, to replace all the lost manpower, and Kollektiv 1.0, the network that unifies robots all over the world. While they were at it, they also created polymer, the science magic stuff of the AH world that lets the Soviets do just about everything that would be completely impossible in 1955, including desktop computers, gloves that can shoot lightning with SHOK power, and loads of other squishy science fiction elements.


Aside from visuals and some language flavoring, Atomic Heart is only superficially Soviet. There’s no real delving into the history of the USSR except for the historical cliffnotes. If you were hoping for, or dreading, a game that extols the virtues of communism, look elsewhere. The communist utopia works, and that’s all you need to know. The brains behind most of these innovations, Dimitry Sechenov, also created THOUGHT, a special device that lets people control robots with the power of their minds. Now humanity is sitting on the cusp of a new age with the upcoming launch of Kollektiv 2.0, a massive neural network that will wire up all of humanity and not be completely exploitable by a select few at the top of the politburo or anything like that.



The game begins the way most modern games do, with a thirty-minute-long exposition with zero agency. The protagonist, Major Sergey “P-3” Nechayev, gets lore dumps, meets important characters, and learns the basics while meandering around the retrofuturistic paradise, which is bubbling over with joy and mirth due to the upcoming launch of Kollekltiv 2.0. While this is all going on, Sergey is having an ongoing conversation with CHAR-les (Charles), the AI living inside of his magical polymer glove. And then, at last, all hell—and player agency—breaks loose when the robots suddenly go mad and begin killing everyone for no reason; now it’s up to P-3 and his talking glove to explore Facility 3826 to find out what’s happened and fix it. This is also where it becomes obvious that Mundfish were victims of their own ambitions.




The developers frontloaded the game with action, especially the giant borer robot crashing into everything, making huge holes in the environment. I thought I’d be dodging it for a good portion of the game while I avoided crazy trams and other various haywire gizmos. Unfortunately, the really exciting stuff only makes up about five percent of the game, and once it's done, the vast majority is spent in the very large, very banal Facility 3826. It looks like an amusement park from hell with bright, colorful scenery, well-trimmed foliage, and cute flower cameras that bring down hordes of robots. What it really is, however, is a long unpleasant trudge in a walled-off sandbox. The robots never stop coming in the overworld; an endless supply of flying repair drones sees to that. The nature of the overworld makes it a war of attrition. Taking damage is inevitable, and healing consumables take up inventory space, of which there’s a limited amount, so there’s some management involved between guns, ammo, and healing. Capacity can be upgraded, thank God.


The element of danger is fun for a time, but stealth falls apart when you realize how slow it is to creep across the facility. Enemies can be disabled quietly if you sneak up on them, but it requires a QTE event to eliminate each one and just isn't worth it. It’s easier to go guns blazing and keep moving, avoiding cameras when convenient. Sergey can disable them with his SHOK ability or smash them outright, but broken cameras get repaired, so it's a stopgap, and while it is possible to temporarily halt repair droids, it's exactly that: temporary. Disabling repair bots also requires going out of your way to disable every single electronic device in the area, which can impede progress. Fortunately, there are unattended Ladas sitting around the facility waiting for someone to steal them and drive off, and a car makes it much easier to get away from enemies.



Atomic Heart has a lot of different crazed robots and biological horrors that need destroying, and they have different vulnerabilities to exploit. These vulnerabilities are revealed through the scanner that P-3 gets at the beginning of the game. Or, I should say, they can be revealed if you can keep enemies in the targeting reticle long enough. The scanner’s main function is to highlight enemies, loot, and plot coupons among the scenery, something it does far better than most games' highlighters by virtue of seeing through walls and filtering out needless visual details. It's so much better than a tacky outline around an object to separate it from useless props.

AH features a large arsenal with additional exclusive weapons in the DLCs. Sergey starts off with a meager ax and gradually acquires new weapons around Facility 3826. Save for the ax, all of the base game weapons come in blueprints that require crafting at NORA, the psychotic, lovesick AI-powered weapon manufacturer. She has an unhealthy crush on Sergey, almost literally at the first encounter.


The base game features five different melee weapons, three energy-based weapons, and a group of ballistic weapons. I ended up skipping most of the melee weapons since they were only slightly different from one another. Ballistic weapons require their own exclusive ammo, while energy weapons run on some kind of upgradable battery that Sergey has on him. Weapons start out a little anemic and improve once they've had a few upgrades. AH's weapons have several exclusive upgrade paths, like the Zvezdochka, a fun sawblade on a stick, which can be upgraded with either a killer uppercut, or a magical homing sawblade that makes quick work of everything. The special melee attacks drain energy to prevent rampant abuse. Most firearms have the typical iron sights feature, but I rarely used it because it takes too much time to aim when a killer sawblade on legs is trying to carve me up. All of the weapons are satisfying to use, and I never got tired of seeing robots getting smashed to pieces, especially after how times they knocked me off my feet.

When the big Dominator energy gun became available, I recycled my puny Electro pistol, since weapons take up inventory space and you can only have six slotted at any given moment for use. Honestly, there are too many weapons, and it seems that Mundfish agreed with me because half of Atomic Heart's base game weapons are never heard from again in the DLCs. The DLCs introduce a couple of new weapons that are much better designed anyway, like the Secateur, a combination ballistic-energy weapon. Crafting requires a blueprint and enough resources. Some resources are common and found hidden inside trunks, shelves, and drawers, while others are found on the corpses of robots and organics. Ammo and blueprints are also found inside of stashes. Weapons, upgrades, and consumables can all be made once the corresponding blueprint is found.


This brings up one of the most time-consuming parts of the game: scavenging crap everywhere you go. Everything lootable is highlighted; just get close enough and push the “loot” button, and the magic glove does the rest. The glove continues to pull loot so long as it grabs something within a certain time frame, and then it turns off, requiring the animation to cycle before you can turn it on again — since not everything is neatly lined up in a row, this means multiple sweeps of countless rooms. Sergey's backpack has an infinite capacity for resources and any supplies that don't fit in inventory go to storage that can be accessed at NORA.


It’s not something which you can opt out of, unless you want to take on every robot with melee weapons and skip over resources and upgrades. The endless looting combined with the infinite nature of enemies in the overworld make the pacing of Atomic Heart painful. I chose to visit every optional location to maximize my weapons, but I was left wondering if I could have ignored most of that stuff and been done a lot sooner. Upgrading stuff is fun; having to stop constantly to scavenge isn’t. The one mercy in all of this is that AH doesn’t punish you for trying new things. All resources are refunded on weapons and abilities if you go a different route at your nearest NORA booth.


Enemies in Atomic Heart are divided up into two categories: robots and organics. Robots make up the majority, but there are enough organic enemies to consider specializing one or two of your weapons in dealing damage to fleshy things, since you can always switch them out without penalties. Most of the robots in the facility are everyday worker droids that happen to have secret combat modes installed. Humanoid robots, like Vovas, designed to assist in lab work, are also experts in hand-to-hand combat. Agricultural rotorobots with swinging scythe blades slice through flesh as through it were grain. The enemy designs are top-notch, memorable, and satisfying to smash into bits, whether it’s the irritating little turrets that roll onto the scene and start rattling Sergey with bullets and rockets, or the disturbing mutants that infest some of the laboratories.


Organic enemies are human corpses infused with experimental plant life and capable of attacking with various elements, like setting P-3 on fire or leaving behind toxic clouds. Plants are birthed from orifices growing on the walls, from which they seek out dead bodies to infect, or just come at Sergey directly. Individual enemies and small groups are fun to fight; it’s the endless plodding combat across the surface of the facility that takes the fun out of it. Boss fights are few and far between—too few for my tastes; even the ones I didn’t like much were an oasis in a desert. Some bosses are glorified versions of basic enemies, while others are grand and intimidating foes like the Hedgie: a massive survey robot designed to collect rare plants and rocks, which also does a great job of firing explosive projectiles and smashing the human body to a bloody pulp. It’s another area where Mundfish did a good job, though; most of the bosses are massive and intimidating, even if they go down in a heap to the Zvezdochka’s homing saws.


Most enemies in AH have standard attacks and special criticals that they telegraph with an orange, rippling wave effect. That’s the signal to dodge out of the way or take a lot of damage and potentially get knocked down. Dodging in AH is your standard “tap button to dash in that direction” with a limited number of regenerating dashes. Sergey can also dash in midair, helpful for reaching ledges.


I died a handful of times, mostly to bosses or falling to my death, so I'm not sure what to say about the difficulty curve. The standard enemies aren't too difficult on normal, just endless. I had a surplus of healing supplies waiting for me if I ever started running low, except towards the end of the Blood on Crystal DLC. There’s enough variety with resistances and tactics to leave the player needing to swap between melee, energy, and ballistics on a constant basis, but enemies can typically be brute-forced when all else fails, to say nothing of the polymer magic glove.

The polymer glove runs on neuropolymer, the tech goo that lets Major Nechayev upgrade his stats and do all kinds of science magic—which is where the role-playing comes in. Aside from general stat upgrades that include damage resistances, more health, and stuff like not breaking every bone in his body when falling from a height, Comrade Major can also zap foes with electricity, shield himself in polymer, and freeze enemies solid, among other powers. There’s no mana in AH, only a recharge rate for each ability, but you can only have two special powers slotted at any time, aside from the electric SHOK.


Since I found stealth to be a complete joke, combat was constant, so the most useful abilities in AH were crowd control and damage reduction. I became a big fan of the polymer shield and lifting enemies into the air so I could shoot them at will, and didn’t get a lot of use out of things like freezing or coating them in polymeric goo. The goo lets Sergey amplify elemental attacks like electric, ice, and fire; there’s an upgrade that lets him attach elemental cartridges to his weapons to give them additional effects. The DLCs feature different abilities that often can’t be swapped out, in a “what you see is what you get” model, and they’re far cooler than what the base game had to offer. As the DLCs go on, the illusion of choice gets whittled away until there’s almost no choice at all. The final DLC strips Sergey of upgrading abilities altogether. Instead, he swaps them out on the fly at special kiosks as puzzles and combat demand. It plays smoother than the base game because there’s a lot less scavenging around for resources, and since there's no need to scavenge neuropolymer to upgrade abilities, it means more time is actually spent playing instead of looting.



Most of AH goes like this: P-3 has an objective somewhere in the facility and needs to either drive or hoof it to said location, do whatever the quest marker tells him to do, and then repeat in another area while slowly working his way across the countryside searching for a pair of rings that everyone is trying to find. The rings end up being nothing more than a MacGuffin since Sergey throws them into the sea shortly after he gets a hold of them. (One of the DLCs is all about recovering them, oops.) Most of the exposition is provided by ongoing dialogue between Sergey and CHAR-les with occasional messages from other characters and "chirpers," small handheld devices that act as audio logs. Computer terminals also provide additional information, including audio files and pictures that are sometimes used to solve door puzzles.

Aside from that, AH’s attempts to make me care about the world and lore fell flat. The stuff I read on terminals was immediately forgotten and rarely interesting enough to add any telling to the game’s showing. A lot of the audio logs are this way as well; unimportant messages and further lame attempts to be funny that left me groaning. Good lore can add seasoning to good visuals, but none of the filler resonated with me.


The optional content involves stopping by various research “polygons” to get access to special upgrades to weapons in what amount to mini-dungeons. These dungeons contain movement-based puzzles that often require altering the environment in some way—reminiscent of Portal, complete with narration in each polygon explaining the purpose of the tests. The rewards for completing the challenges are sectioned off into three tiers: bronze, silver, and gold, with the best stuff being in the final chest, though I can’t imagine anyone would leave one of these places half-done. Getting into the polygons is a challenge itself, as they’re locked and often require searching around to find an unconventional way to get inside. Other puzzles involve everything from moving glowing spheres through plastic tubes to playing a game of memory. The puzzles are varied though not necessarily engaging, but going into the polygons to do platform puzzles was a relief at times, just to avoid more waves of enemies in the overworld.


Being from a Russian developer doesn’t spare Atomic Heart from the modern Western gamedev curse: P-3 runs his mouth constantly, commenting on almost everything he sees. Sergey is a foulmouthed, ultra-violent goon who shuts down anything intelligent-sounding from CHAR-les in favor of wanting to shoot or smash stuff. His profanity-laced speech doesn’t make him sound tough or edgy, only immature, and I quickly came to detest him. He also has an odd verbal tic—"crispy critters"—which he says constantly. As the game progresses, it becomes obvious that he's been designed to play the role of an obedient stooge who starts to realize that something is amiss, but his "dumb lackey" traits are exaggerated far too much so that it becomes his entire character, though he does start to develop after the base game.


Nearly every important character in the game is quirky with nothing else to define them. Right from the very beginning I encountered a gun-toting, gritty babushka who turned out to be one of the most important characters in the game and a major in the Soviet intelligence agency. Not only did she have surveillance technology to rival the KGB, but she also flies around in a jet-propelled cottage. At one point in the third DLC I had to defend a bunch of talking dolphins from an onslaught of robots while they put on a show in order to progress. In the first half of AH, Comrade Major needs to access a train to get to the other side of the facility, but the engineer robot won’t let him without a ticket. This requires talking to a lot of dead people; this is possible because of the residual memories in their THOUGHT devices. Being able to talk to dead people is neat and one of the few original ideas in the game, but the process of getting a functional ticket is a load of back and forth between pestering corpses for their passes only for the robot to deny Sergey over and over, all the while he gets furious in his overblown, petulant fashion. It’s another thing that's supposed to be funny, but I didn’t laugh.

If the game had been designed around this in a light-hearted, dark humor fashion, that would be one thing, but Atomic Heart goes back and forth between irreverence and the desire to be taken seriously. As such, when the game wants to have a serious, emotional moment, the story beats fall flat because nobody has any genuine substance to them.


After a few big reveals, P-3 is left with one of two choices: confront Sechenov to prevent the launch of Kollektiv, or turn his back on everything and leave. The four DLCs continue the storyline after the main game is finished, and this is where Atomic Heart improves, first, by virtue of not being a bland sandbox, and second, by the benefit of being able to focus more on location and story. The first DLC, Annihilation Instinct, deals with the non-canon ending of Sergey walking away from Facility 3826 without stopping Sechenov. The DLC is an “all just a dream” sort of thing that gets explained later on, and this is where Mundfish realizes that Sergey doesn't have to swear constantly. He begins to grow as a character and even acknowledges—and finally drops—his annoying verbal tic.

Special mention should be made of Trapped in Limbo, which sits at “mostly negative” on Steam for good reason. TiL is a pastel-colored nightmare that plays entirely different from the rest of Atomic Heart. After the canon ending, Sergey finds himself in Limbo, a hallucinogenic world he goes to when the implant in his head kicks in to stop him from losing his mind, or when someone else takes over to make him do bad things.

What this means for the player is surfing off of giant slices of cake and trying to wallride to the next checkpoint while being fed bits of exposition from manifestations of his dead wife and other characters. I fell off so many pieces of cake so many times trying to find the next place to go that I almost quit out of frustration. There’s also a lot of wall climbing and a battle against a gingerbread man boss that requires smacking colorful versions of the robotic enemies into him to do damage. The DLC contains gold coins to collect that can be spent on weapon skins that make your guns look like big pieces of cake and candy, oh goodie! Playing this DLC is like ice fishing: it feels great when you stop, and my advice to anyone who chooses to play Atomic Heart is to skip this DLC entirely and just watch the important parts online—it’s that bad.


Enchantment Under the Sea introduces a whip ability to the glove that doubles as a grapple, giving the player new environment-based puzzles to deal with. It sticks around for the fourth and final DLC and generally makes the game a lot more fun and challenging to play. Enchantment also introduces Sergey's companions, an unlikely group of weirdos who come together to help P-3 and add more silliness to the game, and a very nice weapon, KM-4 Kuzmich autoloader shotgun, with an alternate grenade launcher. Too bad it didn't stick around for the final DLC.
The most recent and last DLC, Blood on Crystal, peeled away the last of the role-playing elements, leaving behind a science-fantasy shooter in its wake. This is the longest of the DLCs, though a mixed bag of strong environments and puzzles that outstay their welcome. I enjoyed my time on the submarine and the return of the plant mutants, but the big, expansive warehouse areas and electric wiring puzzles started getting long in the tooth before it was over. There were several locations that look like map chunks directly lifted from the base game and painted over. I wish I could say that the grand finale was an amazing send-off to a game with a shaky start, but the final boss fight left something to be desired, and the truth is that Mundfish proved they could make engaging bosses earlier on, so I was disappointed. There were some plot twists in the end that I genuinely wasn’t expecting and appreciated, but staring at Sechenov's naked rear while he delivers a lame speech on the future isn’t how you should wrap up a game.

I clocked forty hours total with all the DLCs, doing all the optional content in the base game, while skipping over most of Limbo; no way was I subjecting myself to any more of that torture just to get a bit more exposition or weapon skins.


Atomic Heart appears to be the victim of too much ambition, from developers without a clear idea of what they wanted their game to be and writers unwilling or unable to commit to serious characterization. It would have been a lot better if Facility 3826 had only been a small stop along the way of a more varied base game. AH’s greatest strengths are the visual and audio designs. There are several arena battles set to techno versions of classic Soviet tunes because someone out there must have really liked that part in Bioshock where you fight splicers to Waltz of the Flowers. A selection of techno remixes of classic Soviet songs and original works keeps the action moving, but everything else from story to pacing gets tossed on the back burner. I can at least say Sergey grows as a character, and he grew on me a bit by the end. And while the DLCs (besides TiL) are an improvement, the irreverent, silly tone never goes away. It remains to be seen if Mundfish learns enough from this experience for the already-announced sequel.

If you’re interested in a shooter with a load of style and limited substance, and you have a high tolerance for modern, silly tones, then you might enjoy Atomic Heart. Otherwise, you'll probably want to skip it.

Medieval Crafter: Blacksmith is a blacksmith simulator set in a nondescript medieval fantasy world. The player controls a dwarven smith in first person and is tasked with crafting weapons and armor that serve one of two purposes: to trade with the townsfolk for money or items, or to equip adventurers at his service so they may successfully return from dungeon delving or arena fighting with bountiful spoils.

Tirelessly working at the forge with all your tools is the core aspect of the game and such is made abundantly clear right from the beginning. It knows what it is and does not shy from forgoing anything but a barebones tutorial story just to get you acquainted with the mechanics. You are then let loose in your quest to craft progressively stronger equipment.

Yet even this simplistic gameplay loop seems to have been too ambitious of a goal. For reasons explored further below, to be a blacksmith in this game is a mind-numbing and unrewarding experience in great part due to it being an unfinished product, contrary to what leaving Steam's Early Access stage might imply.

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The main menu greets you with the inside of a blacksmith's workshop, giving you a glimpse into what you will soon be familiar with in the game. A building's interior, the player model, equipment, tools. It's a fine window to have as the first thing the player sees.


The armor sets all look simple and clean, the type that you might find in any regular old medieval setting. The weapons, bar a few exceptions among the lower-tier ones, look very exotic and downright fantastical for the most part, like they're straight out of a cartoony MMORPG. This clash of aesthetics does not mix well, and the first few times I noticed this jarring mismatch in the equipment my fighters were wearing, I actually had to check whether I had given them the correct armor. I did, but it was still hard to believe the weapon and the armor were of the same quality tier. This lack of aesthetic cohesion leaves a sour taste after all the work put into crafting the gear, only to see this disappointing end result.


The texture work is mediocre, with some particular NPCs looking downright unfinished as their half-open mouths and fluoride stares leave me holding my wallet a little bit tighter when making my way to the forge, tiptoeing my way to avoid the JPG puddles lest I be absorbed into the file. And there are some glitched textures such as on one of the hammer heads, which is kind of hard to miss when it's in front of your face.


The animations are also nothing to write home about. One exception is the walking animations; they leave me with no choice but to believe someone spilled oil all over the floor seeing how easily everyone slides across the cobblestone.

But for all these flaws, I must say the visual design is quite decent. With proper texture work and some better looking NPCs, the town square might actually look slightly deserving of being the center of the kingdom as it's supposed to be, especially with the enormous statue in the middle. The village where you sleep, with its occasional broken fences and bountiful green, might have been a good spot to take a breather and relax in. The ancient forest where you enchant equipment might have looked as magical as it's supposed to be, instead of just another patch in the woods.

Unfortunately, the visuals are clearly an afterthought, though thanks to the solid design behind the locations, there's a foundation here that could easily be improved upon.

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Despite there not being much audio overall, what little there is ended up being much more polished than the visuals or the writing. There's a few ambient tracks that are adequately immersive in a medieval fantasy way, helping you feel the tone of the setting. The main activity of the game, smithing, is accompanied with satisfactory sound effects for most of your actions, be it striking, quenching, fanning the flames, etc. And regarding voicing, while the dwarven smith the player controls is the only voiced character, he is brought to life quite well, his voicelines triggering according to what he's doing or who he's talking to. I actually chuckled a bit when I was removing equipment from my elf adventurer and suddenly heard a gruff voice saying, "Never trust an elf."

The only audio-related annoyance I can point to is the loud CLANG sound effect that plays every time you change locations. Not changing the entire zone, no, just simply going from the inside of the smithy to the outside, for example. It quickly becomes excessive.

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As a simulator video game, not much is expected from the literary department, as that's not a selling point in these types of games anyway. And accordingly, there is no story at all outside of the tutorial. The Royal Blacksmith is retiring and the King summons you to learn from him and take over his smithy. That's it, that's how the game starts, no beating around the bush. This retiring dwarven smith then takes you as his apprentice and shows you the ropes. After he's done his job, you never hear from him again, nor from the king or anyone else for that matter. The story is effectively over, and you are free to do as you please. You are then presented with a questlog giving you generic progression objectives that guide you along until you complete all content available in the game.

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On to the meat of the matter. True to its name, this game has you craft medieval equipment in your smithy, primarily using your mouse to interact with the tools at your disposal. This involves acquiring raw metal either from the mines, vendors or as rewards from adventuring, melting it into the appropriate shape, and assembling it together with other materials.

Being a simulator type game, I never expected significant depth to its mechanics. And yet even with these low expectations, the minigames involved managed to surprise me with how horribly simplistic they are. Only forging and sharpening offer any semblance of a challenge. Forging requires you to hit specific spots on the metal to shape it correctly, while sharpening requires a properly angled, even application across the blade lest you lower the rarity. The remainder of the mechanics in your smithy just involve a lot of mindless drag and drop, incessantly and unabashedly.


This would be less of an issue if there were some way to speed up the process, and while technically there are nodes in your tiny skill tree that speed up forge heating and mining, I found the difference to be rudimentary. The overwhelming majority of the crafting process remains a slog. On top of that, the enchantment table is unnecessarily divorced from the rest of the workshop. Making me walk all the way there for that final part of the crafting process each and every time feels like the game was intentionally going out of its way to annoy me with filler segments. At a certain point I just stopped enchanting my gear; the difference it made in the final product just wasn't worth the trek.

All of this process has a purpose: the equipment. The great final product. Where does this product go? Well, it depends on your goal. If you want to make money, which is needed to hire adventurers, buy materials and several other things, you need to sell it. And there is only one main source of money: customers. There are customers that request specific items with specific stats, and there are others that just buy whatever you put on your racks to sell. The former, with its elevated requirements, should naturally reward you more handsomely, right? Well, this is not the case.

Despite having stricter criteria, the customers wanting special orders do not, in fact, pay more handsomely than the ones that just buy things off the shelf. The only upside is that they also offer a small amount of materials as rewards, which is honestly virtually worthless unless they're offering particularly rare materials, and those offers only start appearing much, much later. So for the vast majority of the game, you are actively encouraged to refuse customer orders and just pump out whatever is more expensive to sell and profit quickly. There is no difference between the speed at which items of different price tags are sold. You'd think cheaper equipment would fly off the shelves and more expensive parts would have fewer potential buyers, but this was not my experience. Once again, the game shows itself more simplistic in practice than in theory.


Okay, on to adventurers then. Your hirelings that actually fight in the dungeons and the arena, your minions. You hire them at an increasingly higher price and they each have their own classes and personal traits, the former affecting their base stats and the latter their chance of success in specific dungeons. Yet, in practice, these aspects are mostly reduced to flavor text. Their equipment will make up for over 80% of their final stats, making classes and traits practically worthless.


This simplicity is reflected in how little thought is needed to clear the dungeons, which range from Tier 1 to Tier 5 in order of difficulty, similarly to equipment rarity in order of quality. An adventurer's stats all contribute to a final number which makes up his Hero Power. Each dungeon has a Required Hero Power value, and as long as you hit that minimum, be it with a single adventurer or through a party of up to 3, you clear the dungeon, no questions asked, nothing else involved. No need to care about classes, traits, specific stats (of which there are several) or anything else. Just off the top of my head, even something as rudimentary as needing an 800 fire damage weapon for clearing an ice dungeon would make the adventuring infinitely more engaging than it currently is. As it stands, just make higher tier equipment and you're done.

Not to mention that the Tier 5 (and final) dungeon is beatable with Tier 3 equipment. So not only is the main goal of the game tediously straightforward, there is also no point to crafting Tier 4 and 5 equipment at all, which comprises 40% of the gear in this blacksmithing game. Allow me to reiterate: The endgame gear has no endgame content to be used on. Coincidentally, when browsing items to forge, items of Tier 3 to 5 all have the same rarity color, yellow, and rarity classification, "Legendary", despite there being a vast stat difference between them. This leads me to believe Tiers 4 and 5 were very hastily and recently added to the game with little thought as to how they would add to the experience.

Well, there must be some challenge in the Arena, right? There is, but it's also shoddily implemented. The arena tournament comes in 4 versions of increasing difficulty, each with an appropriate minimum Hero Power required. Problem is, the combatants always scale to your adventurer's Hero Power, no matter the stage selected. So if you picked a 2000 power stage and signed up an 8000 power adventurer, suddenly you're equally matched with your opponents. And since the outcome of the fight is determined by a flat percentage reflecting the discrepancy in Hero Power between your adventurer and your opponent, no matter how much you improve, how good your equipment is, how strong your adventurer is, the enemy will always scale up to your power and make each arena fight outcome a 50-50 coin flip.

I won by exploiting the system and signing up my adventurer without equipment, then equipping him after the opponent had already scaled, but the design choice is still beyond absurd. Or was it even a design choice? Why would you have different arena tiers if the enemy always scales? Might this scaling be an error in the system? Who knows.


Okay, so no challenge in the mechanical aspects of the crafting procedure, no challenge in the end goals of the game itself... surely, there must be something engaging about this title? Oh look, there's a day and night cycle. You have to go to bed after a certain hour, as there won't be shopkeepers or customers around to trade with anymore. Maybe management may be the real game here. Buying materials and selling products, a good shopkeeper may have to balance a tight budget to meet strict deadlines, right?

Well, no. There is no kind of overarching time limit so you are free to endlessly mine metals and just wait for shops to restock. The only kind of deadline to put pressure on you is from customers with specific requests, and those are incredibly generous anyway, not to mention completely optional. So there's a day-night cycle and you have to go to bed for... no reason. I guess +1 roleplay points. Another aspect of the game that could have been far more fleshed out than it is.

Oh and there's a random chair inside the castle that seems to be interactable but is not, surrounded by an invisible wall that staves off curiosity. And it's not hidden either, just sitting there in a huge open room with purple flames. This, along with all other examples provided above, lead me to believe this game was released from Early Access far, far too prematurely.

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Completing the two major goals you set out to achieve, clearing both the dungeons and the arena with your adventurers wielding the fruits of your labour, feels incredibly unfulfilling, and neither the crafting procedure nor the smithy's management feel challenging in the slightest. In a game focused around progression, the only paltry approximation of it is in the numbers and the weapons' appearance. The final dungeon is just like the first dungeon with a higher power requirement, while the final arena stage is functionally the same as the first stage. After you're done with the couple hour tutorial in the beginning, you have every tool unlocked, so there is no difference between the gameplay loop during hour 3 and hour 12. Honestly if you completed the tutorial, you've essentially completed the game, because there is nothing new, different or challenging to look forward to.

It's not all bad, seeing as I scavenged some enjoyment out of the shop and adventuring management aspect, optimizing my profits and progression in as little time as possible in lieu of a hard deadline. That and the vague notion that this was a short game probably pulled me through the experience. And while the journey to finish the questlog was brief, it deserved to be far shorter with how little meaningful content there actually is.

To be honest, I really wanted to like this game. Seeing how you are allowed to have up to 7 adventurers and dungeons could only take 3 participants at most, I was kinda hoping to later unlock some new adventure type that incorporated a larger party, maybe like raids or dragon hunts or town defenses or something, maybe those would be the real challenge and have some new mechanics I can't just stat-check or would force me to consider class synergy of some kind in order to overcome.
But no. Tier 5 Dungeon^tm is the best we got. I like this game's premise decently enough, but it was just not executed well at all.


A lot of its shortcomings would have made much more sense if this were an Early Access title, but it is not. I truly am at a loss as to who might be the target audience for this. The crafting process is both too involved to let the shopkeeping aspect take the spotlight, possibly allowing this to be more of a management simulator, and too shallow to be the satisfying crafting simulator it presents itself as. It feels as if the developers did not know which direction to go with, resulting in a half-hearted mix that is neither realistic and immersive as a simulator is supposed to be, nor is it fun and engaging as a game is supposed to be. The gameplay is not stimulating, progression is shallow and unrewarding, and the world looks like a half-baked amalgamation of free 3D assets. Maybe players completely enamored with blacksmithing will enjoy this more than I did. Even then, surely other titles are more deserving of quenching that thirst.

Overall this is quite the Low Quality game, one which truly makes me feel like indie game developers might be relying on AI a bit too much.

Visuals - 4/10
Audio - 6/10
Story - N/A
Gameplay - 3/10

Overall - 3/10

MOUSE: P.I. For Hire, created by Polish studio Fumi Games, strips away the neon and grit of modern shooters in favor of a 1930s noir filter. It plays out as a single-player narrative experience where cartoon physics are applied to first-person gunplay, using a high-contrast black-and-white palette and big-band music to build atmosphere. Behind the novelty of its hand-drawn sprites lies a traditional first-person shooter loop: fast movement, secret hunting, and an arsenal used to dismantle corruption in Mouseville.

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Gameplay

Protagonist Jack Pepper, P.I., goes through a range of locations, from dark alleyways to a zeppelin owned by a corrupt politician. His cases play out in an old-school first-person shooter style, built around fast movement, dashing from cover to cover, and close-range gun and melee combat.

The game world is structured into areas, with Jack’s office acting as a central hub where he returns between levels. From there, he manages cases through a Crime Wall system, where collected clues are stored and organized. As more clues are gathered, new leads unlock and guide progression to the next objective. Between missions, Jack can prepare by stocking up on ammo, weapons, and other supplies. The Crime Wall ultimately feels like little more than a dressed-up way of unlocking the next level, without serving a meaningful gameplay purpose. It lacks any real deduction or interaction, especially when compared to adventure games like Sherlock Holmes or Broken Sword, where collecting and connecting clues is central to progression.
I found the overworld to be very unnecessary. It adds little to the experience and feels out of place in a boomer shooter. The car controls are also clumsy, and the system would have been better served by simply selecting destinations from a menu rather than driving between locations.

Combat is straightforward, with Jack able to jump and dash until his stamina runs out, alongside a fairly large arsenal of weapons. As the game progresses, encounters become more hectic, with a wider mix of enemy types forcing faster movement and more aggressive use of his tools.
One of the key movement tools is Jack’s tail, which allows him to glide and gain upward momentum near fans. It can also be used to swing from hooks in a manner similar to Indiana Jones. Additional upgrades expand his mobility further, including double-jump boots, a suction-based wallrun upgrade, and Monkey Arms that allow him to vault up to otherwise unreachable areas.

There is also a minigame called Baseball Cards, found in a bar near Jack’s office. It’s a turn-based card game built around baseball rules. Winning matches grants tokens, with 20 required to obtain the minigame’s only real reward: a zapper weapon from a nearby slot machine.

Unfortunately, the mode feels more like a distraction added simply because the devs wanted a card minigame rather than because it meaningfully adds to the experience. While the mechanics are functional enough, matches quickly become repetitive and the rewards do little to justify the time or currency invested into them. Considering the weapon is weaker than the default gun and relies on limited, expensive ammunition, the payoff hardly justifies the amount of time spent playing Baseball Cards.

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Equipment

Lockpicks can open certain doors and safes through a minigame. In its basic form, Jack must manipulate a flexible lockpick to reach each pin without blocking his own path. More difficult variants restrict available moves and also introduce spikes that will immediately end the attempt if touched. Failure seals the target lock permanently.
In my opinion, it’s a complete waste of time and interrupts the flow of the game. One minute you are hectically running and dashing around an arena killing enemies, and then you need to lockpick doors, which kills the pacing, especially in chase scenes where every second should count. It would make more sense for Jack just to kick the door in or blow it up.
Jack also has access to a wide variety of firearms. He starts with a Micer (a pistol resembling a Mauser) and acquires additional weapons over time which can be upgraded. Unfortunately, some weapons feel underpowered, and visual effects can sometimes obscure hit feedback, making it hard to tell whether shots are landing and encouraging more blind firing than precision. I ended up relying mostly on the Micer, James Gun, and Portable Freezer, as they were effective enough to handle most encounters.

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Sound and Visuals

When first booting up the game, you’re presented with various noir-inspired options for film grain and diffusion. The sound degradation settings are a nice touch, ranging from a clean, modern mix to filters like Vinyl and Cellulose Disc that add a warm, crackling texture. More extreme options, such as the Cylinder settings, introduce a heavily distorted, lo-fi quality that makes the soundtrack feel like a century-old recording. The soundtrack fits the noir setting well, with slower, moody tracks during exploration and more energetic, jazz-inspired pieces during combat. The voice acting is consistent, with characters matching their visual design—smaller shrews have high-pitched voices, while larger rats sound deeper and more gravelly. Jack Pepper is voiced by Troy Baker (Joel Miller from The Last of Us), whose performance fits the character well. Unfortunately, the dialogue often feels juvenile and overly self-aware, which clashes with the noir tone. A more serious story would have benefited the game, using its cartoon aesthetic as a deliberate contrast to a darker detective narrative.

Speaking of the aesthetic, the environments are rendered in 3D, while key items and interactable objects are presented in a more cartoonish, hand-drawn style. This contrast works well, with stylized elements standing out clearly against the more grounded surroundings. The game’s black-and-white presentation reinforces its noir optics, and the environments themselves are varied, ranging from dark alleyways and police stations to airships, film sets, swamps, and secret laboratories.

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Enemies

Combat encounters are visually engaging because enemy variety is tied closely to the game’s faction design rather than relying solely on mechanical differences. Cultists, mobsters, and crooked cops all have distinct visual styles that help encounters feel grounded within the world itself. Even when enemy archetypes overlap mechanically, the different faction aesthetics help fights maintain a strong sense of identity and make combat easier to read during chaotic moments.

However, while the game introduces melee attackers, shielded enemies, ranged units, and flying threats, many encounters eventually begin to feel repetitive over time. Several enemy types share similar behaviors despite belonging to different factions, which limits how much combat evolves throughout the campaign. Overall, the faction design succeeds in making the world feel cohesive and visually memorable, even if the underlying enemy variety is not always deep enough to keep every encounter feeling fresh. The occasional bosses do little to spice things up, as each rely on one gimmick and as soon as you figure it out, the fight becomes repetitive and trivial. Still, I have to say that they have nice introductions and arenas.

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Conclusion

MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is visually strong and has a fitting soundtrack, solid voice acting, and varied set pieces. However, it is a very basic shooter at best, and unfortunately, it isn't good. The game is just not worth playing even if the visual presentation is outstanding. You'd be better off playing any of the other indie boomer shooters out there.

Ground Zero is a retro clone designed by Malformation Games in the style of old Resident Evil games by Capcom. Anyone who’s been wanting a classic, fixed-camera survival horror game with ammo and health management will be interested in this.
While the name of Resident Evil lives on, things just haven’t been the same since the release of the fourth game oh-so-long ago. The franchise has undergone even more drastic changes since then that make the over-the-shoulder camera innovation from RE4 look quaint. No, the days of low-res corridors, slow door-opening cinematics, and corny dialog are never coming back to mainstream, and in their absence a cottage industry has risen up to make money off of your childhood memories. Malformation Games is one of several developers looking to deliver the survival horror goods with their new title, Ground Zero.


In 2030, an asteroid impacts Daejeon, South Korea, spreading radiation and biological contamination across the country. The Transcontinental Union Military (which is totally not a replacement for the UN) decides to send in two specialists—Jang Seo-Yeon from South Korea and Evan Fielding from Canada—with no additional support of any kind, to find out what’s going on and solve the problem. After the opening cinematic, you get treated to the first of several branching paths.


I decided to go with the beach and enjoyed a leisurely stroll along the shore, fighting mutant dogs. From the shore I went through a beached ship. The dialog indicated that the beach path was quicker, but more difficult—a subjective matter.
For those not in the know, the gist of the typical survival horror game works like this: nearly every room is displayed from a handful of fixed camera angles that change depending on where you're standing. Monsters often lurk in said rooms, usually out of sight to make life challenging. Attacking most enemies is as simple as point and shoot. Ammunition and healing are almost always at a premium. Saves are limited to special rooms and, depending on the game, require a special item (i.e., ink ribbons) to save, adding to the resource management.

Ground Zero has its own take on this. Ammo tends to be scarce at first, but to make up for it, you can perform timed, critical shots by holding and releasing the proper button at the right moment; this kills weaker enemies with one round. I get the feeling that the Malformation devs didn't like running out of bullets. This worked out pretty swell for me most of the time since it let me avoid knife fighting or having to bolt past enemies to conserve bullets. It’s obvious the devs intended players to use it, because before I started investing heavily into picking off monsters that way, I was always getting dangerously low on ammo. So, if your sense of timing is off, you might be in for a bad time. Also, sometimes enemies that hit the floor aren't always dead. A quick tap in close range will finish them off with an execution maneuver, complete with a small cinematic.


GZ also introduces dodging and parrying to the mix. Tapping the dodge button lets your character dash out of the way of oncoming attacks at the cost of stamina; once it runs low, the heavy breathing starts and the dashing stops. It's a much nicer alternative to awkwardly running past monster strikes or circling around oncoming projectiles. Characters can block oncoming attacks by holding down the appropriate block button. Parrying requires a timed block coordinated with the enemy’s attack, but the window is fairly generous on normal difficulty. One of the few times I died was in the process of learning how to time my blocks. I also made the unpleasant discovery that not all attacks can be blocked. A successful parry opens up the enemy to a melee riposte, a great way to save on ammo if you don’t mind standing there parrying an enemy until it dies. Counterattacking an enemy to death is also a good way to get a perfect genome DNA sample.


Everything you kill can be scanned for DNA; the better the sample, the more points you get. You can spend these points later at automated shops conveniently located around the wasteland that sell everything your survivalist heart could desire: guns, ammo, supplies, etc. You can also sell anything you don’t need for additional points. The caveat is that riddling monsters full of holes leaves you with degraded samples. Getting a perfect sample requires taking it out in hand-to-hand combat; pity, then, that the survival knife is a truly terrible weapon. Still, it's a nice way of rewarding skillful play and on harder modes every extra point will count. I found myself taking down as many enemies as I could with counterattacks to squeeze as many points as I could from enemies.


Knife aside, the game offers quite a few fun weapons for killing the biological terrors you’ll encounter, far more than your typical RE game. Some are only found depending on the paths you take in the game; at one point I had my choice of going through a hospital, which would have had more medical supplies, or a police station, which promised me more weapons. I was in no danger of running out of healing junk, so I hit the PD and walked away with several shiny new guns and armloads of extra ammo.


Of particular note are hand grenades. I can’t say I’m a fan of them. The nature of the fixed camera means I was never sure of where they’re going half the time. I also didn’t want to hit myself with them, and it takes time I never had enough of to line up the toss. Flashbangs don’t last long enough to be useful, though I did manage to take out a few groups of zombies with some regular grenades. Otherwise, grenades ended up being sold at the shops for more weapons and ammo.

Ground Zero follows the tradition of the save room, complete with a save item. Once the save station is on you can save as much as you want, and the save item is almost always nearby, which almost invalidates the purpose of having a save item in the first place. The entire point of having ink ribbons in RE was to put pressure on the player to decide when to save since there was an upper limit on how many times he could do so, but this made more sense in a hub environment. GZ also autosaves at key points in the game, but the hardest unlockable difficulty removes this feature. Save rooms also contain safes that are all but identical to RE's item boxes that let you store all your extra junk, except they require you to solve a math problem first. On normal puzzle difficulty, none of the puzzles were hard, but, if you have trouble, there are two ways to open safes; a safe-cracking explosive will blast it at the cost of losing whatever bonus items are inside, and a cypher can reveal part of the solution. Since I never had any trouble on normal, safe-crackers and cyphers ended up being vendor trash. Safes are linked through a pocket dimension, so what goes into one is available in all.


From about the time I finished the police department, ammo conservation was a complete nonissue. Once one weapon got low, I could switch off to another and keep going. My timed-crit skills were impeccable, and I had enough ammo between all of my weapons that I could clear every room of monsters. I also had more than enough genome points to buy out every store of its ammo. In short, I think normal difficulty was easy in disguise.

In lieu of Resident Evil’s colored herbs, Ground Zero uses a set of colored serums and an injection system. Green is for health, red for stamina, and blue for antibody (poison cure). The syringe holds up to three doses of a serum, but they all get used up in one shot. Serums can be mixed together to extend their effects, but the real strength lies in putting three of the same kind together for a permanent upgrade to your stats. Three health serums give a permanent boost to health and damage resistance, three antibodies make it harder to get infected, and so on. The game makes this system clear when it first introduces the serums and the main idea here is that you’ll want to hoard your precious healing items while avoiding damage at all cost to inject yourself at the last minute. However, I noticed that I'd capped most of my stats by a bit over the halfway mark and I could take quite a beating before I needed to heal myself again. I ended the game with a safe full of extra serums, but I'm sure on a harder difficulty this would become a life-or-death situation. The syringe doesn't take up any inventory space and is another example of the developers obviously disliking an element of classic RE, namely, how healing items hog your pockets. GZ still has traditional medical kits and the serums themselves take up item slots, but it's very nice to be able to have a full heal on standby without needing to lug around extra junk. It's also important to note that inventory space can be expanded, provided you can find the upgrades.

Ground Zero doesn’t bother trying to separate itself from its roots. In fact, it seems to try to check every single box it can before the game is over. I had my choice of the hospital or a police department, and RE did both of those. Later on, a segment of the game takes place on a moving train while being attacked by what’s probably the tail of a giant, mutant scorpion (like in Resident Evil Zero), and there’s one area where I got jumped by reanimated raptors and had to square off against a T-Rex, so they managed to get Dino Crisis into the mix. GZ is derivative in a big way, but you’re not playing this because it’s a shiny new take on the genre; you want it because you long for the classic survival horror that Capcom left behind.

I found GZ’s story engaging, and there are at least two different endings. The branching paths mean you’ll get some replay out of the main mission. Unlike most traditional RE games, GZ plays in a chapter-by-chapter, mini-hub progression rather than one or two large hubs that last the entire game. I’m rather grateful that Malformation didn’t try to mimic the typical Capcom campiness of the era. Seo is a likable character; Evan is alright, though he does try to take the role of “cowboy” too much in lieu of an American counterpart. There's one more character who shows up later who’s a bit obnoxious by design, and while you can kill her, I’m pretty sure that leads to the bad ending, and she’s fairly low-key. There’s no political grandstanding or woke nonsense that I can see. Once you’re done with the game, then comes the unlockable goodies: clothes, cheats, and new visual modes. Also, you get a new mini-game called Apocalypse Crisis, a time attack gauntlet through various maps that lets you rack up more genome points; pity, then, that I ended the game with a huge stack of them.

One thing missing from GZ is the need to search every nook and cranny for items. Almost everything is out in the open, and once passed by, it will show up on your map, so, even if you didn't actually see that box of ammo when you went through the locker room, which makes it hard to miss extra loot. I did find one or two things tucked in a background prop, but that felt like more of a secret for those who want to scour every room.

There are still things that could be better. Malformation already released a patch to deal with performance issues. The shotgun decides it doesn’t want to do damage anymore even if you have a perfect point-blank shot on the target. I personally found grenades to be a waste of time. Upgrading my knife made it even worse. The map only lets you look at your current level, and this is more annoying than you’d think because there’s a lot of Z-level backtracking in some areas. There was absolutely no reason whatsoever for a vehicle section, namely piloting a motorboat through a flooded city. The vehicle controls left a lot to be desired: pressing right usually made me go left, pressing left usually made me go left, but I could never really be sure when the game would change it up and I'd have to let go and gently tap the stick a few times hoping to get a new bead on which way the mystical spirit of the boat wanted to lead me. To make it all more challenging there are angry tentacles waiting in the water to thrash the boat if you get too close and toxic clouds to race through. Don't get through them in time? You die.

Remember what I said about subjective difficulty? I died exactly five times, ran out of ammo once, and never injected myself with anything less than three doses of a serum, so I was always upgrading my stats until I maxed them. I was only ever infected one time, which required a mad dash back to the save room to use a biohazard kit I’d found along the way instead of one of my precious antibody doses. None of the puzzles are particularly difficult either. My guess is that easy is game journo mode, normal is easy, and hard might be what would have passed for normal back in the 90s. I ended my game with a huge surplus of ammo, weapons, and supplies. Additional difficulty modes are unlocked upon completion of the game, so somewhere in there I’m sure I can find a happy place that makes me hate life. Anyone familiar with this style of game might want to start on hard instead. In addition to unlockables, there are also collectibles for those who want to go all-in: 12 zodiac coins are hidden somewhere in ruined South Korea. I managed to find 5 of them. No idea if you get anything nice for the trouble.

Ground Zero is an excellent successor to the classic Resident Evil style, offers a few nice quality-of-life changes of its own to the formula, and is well worth your time and money.

Mirage 7 is a dark fairytale third-person adventure game blending fantasy and sci-fi elements, developed by Italian studio Drakkar Studios. Nadira, a young girl, journeys through a desert with her pet lizard, Jiji, in search of a lost oasis, hoping to find a way to save her sister.

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Gameplay

Nadira's adventure proceeds through the traditional point-and-click adventure formula: she must find items and use them in combination with each other and the environment to solve puzzles. Her pet lizard companion offers assistance through the "Lizard Eyes" ability, which reveals hidden items in a short range. The ability turns the screen dark blue and items are highlighted in a bright orange. You can use Lizard Eyes whenever you want by pressing left bumper on a controller or the middle mouse button.
Items can be combined through the inventory screen. For example, refilling the canteen, one of Nadira's most important items, is simple: just select waterleaves (the plants used to restore its healing charges) in your inventory and combine them with the canteen. Combat is quite simplistic: Nadira has a dagger to do a basic attack with a click of the left mouse button. She can also dodge with shift, or attack with her slingshot using both mouse buttons, which is also needed to solve puzzles.

The puzzles are on the easy side but still quite nicely presented. For example, you come across two lit braziers with a nearby plaque that describes soldiers who were outnumbered and under attack; they used the darkness to their advantage to save themselves. Dousing the braziers plunges the area into darkness and solves the puzzle.

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Sound and Visuals

The voice acting is generally adequate, though a handful of bit characters with minimal screen time sound amateurish, slurred, or mumbled. On the plus side, Nadira's voice actress is pleasant to listen to, and the mysterious vizier she meets along the way has quite the enigmatic voice.
The soundtrack is good, with a distinct Arabic theme, prominently featuring the oud, a traditional Middle Eastern lute which enhances the game's sense of place.

The graphics are good, with detailed, stylized character models. The environments are high-quality, bringing the desert to life through visible heat effects and footprints left in the sand where Nadira and Jiji have been.

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Difficulties

The game offers standard difficulty options, with no unique variations. I played the game in Normal Mode, and the enemies were engaging enough that I needed to heal myself multiple times. However, if you are just looking for a fun puzzle adventure, I suggest Story Mode, while you might prefer Challenge Mode to push yourself. The main thing that changes with difficulty is HP. I did a comparison, and Story Mode has enemies dying very quickly, while Challenge Mode turns them into bullet sponges. Nadira, on the other hand, will die after fewer hits in Challenge, compared to Normal and Easy, where she can take a lot more damage before she dies. Puzzles stay the same regardless of difficulty.

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Conclusion

Mirage 7 is a short yet fun puzzle adventure that mixes fantasy and sci-fi elements quite nicely. The straightforward gameplay was simple and enjoyable. Combat feels somewhat clunky without a lock-on feature, but that was the only negative I felt was worth complaining about. Overall, I recommend it.