I was never a big fan of Atomic Heart, and while others were able to overlook the gameplay limitations and enjoy the ambitiously designed utopia, I was too shocked at how rigid, monotonous and downright boring it was. The Russian plagiarism of Bioshock from the Mundfish studio is a game that has nothing special and I think that for this new review it is important to know my opinion compared to the grade given in Gamereactor (read the general analysis of Atomic Heart). – 7/10). I would never have given the base game more than a 5/10, so keep that in mind as you read this review. Atomic Heart was and remains a game with a beautiful design but gameplay that was never more than mediocre, and these are the expectations I had when I recently started playing the Trapped in Limbo expansion.
The mechanics are simple but twisted. This DLC begins after the end of the final scene of the base game and according to the developers, the idea is to learn more about the origin of the P-3. After finishing Trapped in Limbo, I honestly can’t say I know much more now, but I’m even more upset than before. It has often annoyed me, it seems that the basic idea is more to test the patience of the players. In this game you have to overcome a variety of different challenges from platform to platform, which are unoriginal and similar to each other. It seems very absurd to me. In addition, in order to overcome even the first obstacles, you will have to ignore any shortcomings in the jumping mechanics.
The design is more or less based on the Wreck-It Ralph! themed world of Sugar Rush, where the obstacle courses consist of bubblegum tracks, candy cane paths and floating cakes. It looks like it was taken from a mobile game. You have to jump on gingerbread cookies before they send you flying into the abyss (to certain death), avoid the hard candies and hit the soft ones, land on cream, and use a bright pink shotgun to shoot sugar figures that try to attack you. I understand that the developers must have had a lot of fun with all the ideas they came up with, but if this game were in the hands of a team with more experience and better knowledge of platform games, a lot of what they offer here could Being like that also worked.
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But nothing works at all.
The jumps are horribly imprecise and the fact that Mundfish included long Subway Surfers-style sections that require me to slide through as a duck and avoid obstacles should be seen as downright disrespectful considering Trapped in Limbo $ costs 9.99. After they did this to me, they had to pay me compensation per minute played. “Trapped in Limbo” literally feels like bright pink torture. The atmosphere is supposed to be like Alice in Wonderland, with characteristics obviously borrowed from Bioshock, but nothing works. It’s difficult to find a worse gaming experience unless we look at the pile of the most disappointing or worst-rated games of 2023, where we see masterpieces like Skull Island: Rise of Kong and Walking Dead: Destinies. It should be clear to Mundfish by now that design isn’t everything, that pretty polygonal cakes or beautiful archives from a Russian research center (the base game) won’t save an FPS from terrible mechanics and encounters with enemies that fail to defeat you in Tension.
