For Atomic Heart, the five-year journey from announcement to launch was a rollercoaster.
In its earliest days, prospective fans were enamored with its Soviet BioShock-esque premise, with one combat trailer alone racking up nearly eight million views. Anticipation was sky-high by launch, yet its reception in 2023 was ultimately more polarizing – we scored it 2.5 in our Atomic Heart review. That didn't stop the game from becoming a commercial success for first-time developer Mundfish, though, and just last week Atomic Heart passed the 10 million player mark.
Just over two years after launching its debut game, Mundfish has returned to announce Atomic Heart 2 at Summer Game Fest 2025. The developer also has a multiplayer spin-off in the works, so to catch up on everything the studio has been working toward, we caught up with Mundfish founder and CEO Robert Bagratuni to chat via translator.
Back in the USSR
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With the first Atomic Heart sitting at a Metacritic score of 70, Bagratuni says Atomic Heart 2 will carry lessons forward from the development of its predecessor. Rather than pointing to any one issue, though, Bagratuni says the heft of these improvements
"We started playtesting about one year before the launch, but we froze about six months before the launch," says Bagratuni. "Six months before launch, we couldn't really change the game. I saw certain challenges and things we could have done differently – for example the first dungeon [we could] make it more simple for the player to pass and get into the open world a bit faster. [But] it was impossible to change."
Bagratuni suggests that "global circumstances also affected scores" at launch (the company faced backlash for its alleged ties to Russia), but when asked if that will affect the studio's run-up to Atomic Heart 2, insists Mundfish's focus will be on telling the story it started in the first game. "We were always building a story about technology, and how it affects and changes the modern world" he explains. "This has always been the vision [...] The story itself resonates very well with the audience, no matter what is happening around it, so I think right now we're just concentrating on the story."
Atomic Heart 2's story will be a continuation of the game and its post-launch DLC, and build upon the same dystopian technological themes.. "It's not just like a 40 minute Black Mirror segment," says Bagratuni. "It's going to be a huge world with lots of digitalization, and even though it's sci-fi, it's an imaginary world but it's very believable."
BioShocked
Besides the story, protagonist P-3's Polymer Glove – which grants powers ranging from telekinesis to electricity attacks – will also return, with players now able to use both hands at the same time. The change brings Atomic Heart 2 closer in line to the Plasmid abilities of BioShock, which the first game was compared to heavily before its launch. Yet despite similarities between the Polymer Glove and Plasmids, and even the retrofuturistic societal collapses portrayed in both games, it was a "big surprise" when players compared Atomic Heart to Irrational's seminal shooter.
"When we were creating Atomic Heart, we were not thinking of BioShock, believe it or not," explains Bagratuni, who says the team only learned about the similarities through comments on the game's first trailer. The CEO adds that the Polymer Glove was created in response to expectations from starved BioShock players. "We actually added that when we realized that if we weren't going to be added, people would be really disappointed. This was something they were now expecting from us."
With those expectations proving difficult for Mundfish to match in 2023, Atomic Heart 2 presumably benefits from being more of a known quantity. Though we'll have to wait a little longer to see how it shapes up, there's one last bit of good news for fans – Atomic Heart 2 isn't the only game in development at Mundfish.
The Cube
You know what they said about buses: wait for one long enough, and two will come at once. The same principle applies to Atomic Heart fans, who are not only getting a sequel, but a multiplayer spin-off called The Cube. An MMO RPG shooter set after the events of Atomic Heart's fourth DLC, The Cube will stick players down on – you guessed it – a giant floating cube made up of rotating rows. The setting is so big it has its own biomes, while deep inside is an "equation" that humanity's survival hinges upon.
It is, admittedly, a deeply weird premise. The idea came to Bagratuni while he was sketching during a "very boring, very long call" between Mundfish's co-founders, and within two hours of hanging up, the team had brainstormed the game's core concept.
Yet multiplayer shooters are a difficult nut to crack right now. Sony's attempt to wade into the genre, 2024's Concord, resulted in the game being shuttered within two weeks of launch. Earlier this year, EA cancelled yet another shooter in the works at Respawn. It's not a recent problem, either, with Sega pulling the plug on extraction shooter Hyenas in 2023. When asked how The Cube will fare differently, Bagratuni emphasizes the game's "exploration, character development, and storytelling" – factors that are usually prioritized more in single-player games.
"The Cube is spinning, and while it's spinning, the biomes are changing," says Bagratuni, pointing to the game's unique setting. "They start to connect, and you start getting into very different situations. You meet different creatures – some of them you can communicate with, some of them you can't. You start exploring where they live, how they live, their habitat, and so on."
"It's an incredibly complex, complicated challenge"
Creative director Robert Bagratuni
The ever-changing setting sounds as complicated as it seems, and as we get more into the tech side of things, Bagratuni becomes increasingly animated. "It's an incredibly complex, complicated challenge. We had to write our own physics [with] the ballistics system. We had to rewrite the gravitation system and engine."
"We had to optimize the renders in order for it to actually work," he laughs. "This is art!"
Bagratuni describes the behind-the-scenes workings as a "technological breakthrough," and claims that "for the first time in the history of computer games, so many objects can rotate in real-time, online [and] simultaneously". He points to the launch of Crysis in 2007, which he describes as an "epitome of technological revolution" in gaming: "I definitely draw inspiration from what it meant back then."
That, Bagratuni stresses, is why he thinks The Cube will succeed. While I can't speak to the game in action, having only seen some (admittedly very pretty) screenshots, the confidence is certainly there. The premise, as strange as it sounds, is incredibly intriguing. With both The Cube and Atomic Heart 2 on the horizon, the future is looking busy for Mundfish – and although only time will tell how either game shapes up, it already feels like Mundfish is trusting more in its own vision than anyone else's.
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