Atomic Heart DLC : Enchantment Under The Sea [DLC3] PC Review "A wife in the hand is worth 3 in the bush?!" 🌊 @mundfish #IndieGame #GameDev

I've admired Atomic Heart from afar over the last couple of years with it featuring on my "Must Play" list for that time. With all the great games that have come out in that time Atomic Heart has been pushed to the back of my queue.

Now that I finally get a chance to cover the game through Games Freezer I am glad to say that I finally got to play it! Although, as I have been asked to cover the Enchantment Under The Sea DLC this means that I have committed a gamer crime by playing the 3rd DLC before I've even played the base game!

Someone may already be knocking on my door to take me away for such heinous crimes to gaming but for now I'm on the run and able to give you a review of my time with Atomic Heart: Enchantment Under The Sea.Immediate impressions before even playing the game were of a game heavily influenced by Machine Games' Wolfenstein and the seminal BioShock franchise. Although I suppose you could argue that almost every FPS video game since Bioshock has been influenced by Ken Levine & Co's amazing masterpiece.

First things first then, "Is Atomic Heart FUN?!" The answer is a resounding Yes and Double Yes! I think it also looks great too. I was playing it on an PC using an RTX2080 graphics card and was able to play on High settings with a few little tweaks in the options settings. 

Now with me coming into Atomic Heart without playing the previous base game and two DLCs I was a bit behind the curve but the game does a great job of doing a "Previously on Atomic Heart!" recap for players who are new to the game or people that just plain forgot what madness ensued previously.

Within the first few moments of the game your robotic wife ends up inside your hand which is both disturbing and amazing to watch. At this point I knew I was going to have some fun with this one.

This DLC continues the story from the second DLC, "Trapped in Limbo," and follows P-3 and his wife, Agent Blesna, as they navigate through new and old locations. The game picks up right after the events of "Trapped in Limbo," with P-3 and Blesna finding themselves within the destroyed city of Chelomey and their main objective is to recover the Beta Connectors, which P-3 discarded in the main campaign.

One of the standout gameplay mechanics is the grappling hook (everyone loves a grappling hook right?), which is used extensively in both combat and exploration. Early on I was asked to use the grappling hook mechanic to latch onto a flying drone to elevate me to safety over some burning wreckage.

Walking around the environment there are some awe inspiring scenery and set pieces that keep you engaged throughout the story and helps to build on the base game's narrative. Weighing in at around 5 hours of gameplay this is a nice way to spend those hours and comes in slightly longer than the previous Atomic Heart DLCs. It's also only ten of your English pounds so feels like a good deal to me!

One gripe I do have is the early learning curve went from ambling along to facing a giant bad ass robo-boss with just a whip and a pistol in my hand and basically just getting battered over and over again. I did have to walk to YouTube with my tail between my legs to work out what the strategy was in order to understand what terms the game wanted to engage me on but beyond that I was down with what it was asking and was probably suffering from not being familiar with the base game and previous DLCs.

SUMMARY
Overall, "Atomic Heart: Enchantment Under the Sea" is a riotous sci fi FPS that had me hooked from minute one and has made me promise myself that I will play the original base game before the end of 2025. Of course it's a must-play for fans of the series so far and a solid recommendation to those who enjoy the likes of Bioshock and Wolfenstein.

Right, I'm off to work out how to get my wife out of my hand!

8/10

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