Atomic Heart's latest trailer shows off its ray-tracing chops
My PC's heart can't take it
Robots! Flesh! Fleshy robots! Robo-worms! Swirly Big Hero 6 lookalikes! Upcoming sci-fi Soviet FPS Atomic Heart seems chock-full of weird, mostly robotic things that want to kill you, and its latest trailer shows off all the ray-traced reflections and particle effects you can admire as they do so. We've seen a lot of this before, but it doesn't half look pretty - and now at 4K, if you can handle that. I worry for my poor 1080p-tier GPU, though at least there's also freshly-announced DLSS 3 support.
There you are, then. Sparkly.
Developers Mundfish dropped the trailer during Nvidia's CES 2023 showcase, where they also announced DLSS 3 support for 33 upcoming games, including Atomic Heart. That should mean a nice framerate boost for anyone with an RTX graphics card.
It's always hard to tell how a game will play until its beneath your fingers, but Atomic Heart looks like a hell of a romp. It's set in a world where the Soviet Union thrived thanks to newfangled "polymer injections", which is as good an excuse as any to let you blast lightning out of your hands and chuck enemies about with telekinesis. It all adds up to an intriguing combination of unprecedentedly-Russian aesthetics with BioShock-like plasmid powers. I want to spray weird white goop at robots and I'm not ashamed to say so.
Hardswaremen James interviewed Mundfish last year, when they said they're aspiring to "reinvent as many aspects of game design as possible" in the hopes of not creating a BioShock clone. I get the impression they don't like people saying BioShock as much as they do when they look at Atomic Heart, but come on, it's got weird arm powers and an outlandish, ostensibly-utopian floating city.
We'll get to admire more ray-traced robots for ourselves real soon, when Atomic Heart comes out on February 21st.