Atomic Heart
Skip · Shooter · 2023
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $59.99.
- Length
- 16.2h
- Value
- $3.70/hr
- Reviews
- 81% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, 4 GB VRAM, AMD Radeon R9 380 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960, 90 GB of storage. Windows only.
In a mad and sublime utopian world, take part in explosive encounters. Adapt your fighting style to each opponent, use your environment and upgrade your equipment to fulfill your mission. If you want to reach the truth, you'll have to pay in blood.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $11.99, set in September 2026. It has been discounted 38 times in the 4 years tracked here, typically at 67 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 48 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 61 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Scorn ($3.99, scores 49) beats it on value, while it beats INDUSTRIA ($19.99, scores 25).
Steam's global achievement data says about 4 percent of players ever finish it. On a 16.2-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 16 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written August 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 67 percent of the 2,933 reviews written there were positive, against 81 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (cosmetic); the score docks it lightly for that.
16.2 hours to finish it, 38 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.3 times the campaign.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating, which is the one that means it just works.
The drop-off
92% start to 4% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 16.2-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
466 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
The setting of the game, the atmosphere, the graphics and the world as a whole were all perfect. Also no performance issues. The game ran smooth and looked amazing. Now the rest of the game kinda lets the world down. The story was cool but I wasn't really bothered about it too much as there were other things bothering me. The soundtrack of the game is odd. At one point there will be some calm Russian music playing...
Nothing really new here, we've seen all this in 100 other games by now. Plenty of opportunities to innovate but they didn't take them.
I have mixed feelings about this game. The biggest problem with the base game is definitely the combat. It throws tons of tanky, high-health enemies at you, but barely gives you any ammo. You've got all these guns in your inventory just sitting empty, you're forced to use melee weapons most of the time. (There's obviously a way around, if you know you know) Swarming robots + endless melee swinging quickly turned...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Atomic Heart scores 40/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/668580/atomic-heartThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 14, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.