Atomic Heart is well-know for its brutal combat and punishing difficulty. Many systems in the game are stacked against the player: enemies hit hard, they gang up, and they repair quickly. As a result, players often spend their time in the open world dashing through enemies or driving past them to get where they’re going.
On Armageddon difficulty, also known as Hardcore mode, everything is tuned to the maximum. Enemies have higher health, they hit harder, and there’s more of them. The change in difficulty becomes especially apparent during boss fights. Dewdrop for example can be dropped on Normal difficulty in two or three combos from the Zvezdochka, but that same strategy takes many more tries on Armageddon.
Tips for Completing Atomic Heart on Armageddon
Completing the whole of Atomic Heart on Armageddon difficulty gets easier later in the game. Once Agent P-3 has found all the weapon blueprints and completed at least a few Training Grounds, he’s pretty much unstoppable. However, up to that point, P-3 doesn’t have many tools at his disposal. Until he does, the game is significantly more difficult.
There are ways to mitigate this challenge though. Players can follow these tips to give themselves the best chance to complete Armageddon difficulty:
Loot Every Chest
Players discover weapon blueprints according to a set order. For example, they can’t find the blueprints for Zvezdochka until after they’ve found the ones for the MP. Upgrades, consumables, and ammo all work the same way. Only the upgrades that are earned through the Testing Grounds have predetermined locations.
Each time the player opens any chest, they have a chance to discover a blueprint, especially red and gold chests. This means that players who loot more chest have more chances to discover blueprints and thus move through the list of possible blueprints faster.
The trick is to use the scanner everywhere. Chests are hidden all over: in the backs of trucks, at the tops of towers, tucked in a back corner of a house, stashed behind a building, everywhere players go in Facility 3826. The more chests the player finds, the faster they’ll get to whatever their favorite weapon is and the upgrades for it.
Gather Resources Quickly
To gather tons of the resources needed for crafting, players can bring down a HAWK to disable the security network in an area. This turns any robot that can be stealth killed into an easy target. Players simply need to walk up behind them, smack them once with a melee weapon and then perform a stealth kill. Then, they can loot the parts and move on to the next robot. Clearing a whole area of robots in this way repeatedly will net players plenty of resources.
Focus on Character Upgrades First
Players should absolutely pick up two glove powers to use, but once they’re selected it’s best to turn their attention to Character upgrades. Many upgrades in the Character tree are absolutely essential to surviving Armageddon difficulty. For example:
- Morning Exercise: Increases running speed to make dodging enemies easier.
- Sleazeball: Makes P-3 invulnerable while dodging which is essential to dodging some boss attacks.
- Second Wind: Provides P-3 with a second dodge charge he can use to avoid attacks.
- Wild Boar, Musclehead, Athlete: All three skills increase P-3’s maximum health to give him significantly more survivability.
Atomic Heart players are free to use their favorite weapons throughout the game without feeling too underpowered. There are also many useful upgrades to choose from, and every weapon and skill combination is viable–even on Armageddon difficulty. Following these tips will get players to the point where they can enjoy that freedom sooner and survive while doing it.
Atomic Heart is out now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.