Many people are expecting it to be like BioShock, Wolfenstein, or even Half-Life - an FPS game with solid mechanics and great alt-history world building that fe

Many people are expecting it to be like BioShock, Wolfenstein, or even Half-Life - an FPS game with solid mechanics and great alt-history world building that features a strong social/political ideology. This combo has been very successful in games. So I think expectations for Atomic Heart are high. As with games like Wolfenstein, I think the mainstream media has confused glorifying a regime with exploring it. And Mundfish (the developer) hasn't handled it well. I think there may inherintly be some ambiguity between glorifying and richly exploring certain themes in a game, but games like Wolfenstein have made it abundantly clear that they do not glorify their political themes (Nazism). On the other hand, Mundfish have strongly leaned into glorifying the USSR and Russia in their marketing, particularly distastefully choosing the anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine for their release date. I still think that mainstream media has jumped to the conclusion that Atomic Heart glorifies USSR and communism far too quickly. We should not make that judgement before we play the game and see its actual story. So overall, there's a lot of hype for the game, it might be pretty good. But also MSM is generating negative buzz, and Mundfish don't seem to have the expertise to handle the exploration-glorification confusion that so many games handled better in the past. Also, it's "leaked" and not "pirated" because it hasn't been released yet. And the process for leaking a game vs cracking it to make a pirated release is very different.