The best guns and weapons in Atomic Heart

Atomic Heart has quite a few guns and other firearms that you’ll want to explore while you play. However, they each cost a significant amount of resources to craft, and you may not be able to get them all if you’re trying to rush through the story. This guide outlines the best guns and weapons in the game so you know which ones are worth your time.

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What are the best guns and weapons in Atomic Heart?

In this section, we’ve outlined what the best guns and weapons in Atomic Heart are for the early, mid, and late game. There are others we haven’t mentioned, but these are the weapons that saw us through to the end of our playthrough.

Best early game weapons: MP and Shotgun (KS-23)

There are two weapons we’d recommend you use in the early game of Atomic Heart. First is the Shotgun (KS-23). You acquire this early on as part of the story, and it’s a weapon that can be used all the way into the end game if you upgrade it along the way. Ammo will be scarce at first, so use it sparingly and lean more on your melee weapons to start with. Once you’re above ground, things are a bit freer, and you can collect enough resources to always have enough shells for every combat encounter.

The MP is a small pistol that’s only useful in the early game. As soon as you can craft something better, such as the Railgun or Electro, then do so. This weapon is great for taking out flying robots without using up your precious Shotgun ammo. It won’t help you much further than the first open area above ground though, so disassemble it as soon as you can craft anything else.

Best mid game weapons: Shotgun (KS-23), Dominator, Electro

The Shotgun (KS-23) is fine for the mid game, don’t get rid of it. But you need something else to spice up your arsenal and protect your reserves. For this, we found that Electro was a great start. It’s an energy weapon, so it uses a battery for ammo instead of bullets. This means you only have a limited number of shots to fire before you need to switch to something else and let your power recharge. However, it’s a great alternative to MP because you don’t need to use up inventory space for ammo, and the shots are about as powerful. When upgraded, this weapon can do some serious damage to end game enemies. Craft it and keep using it on enemies and bosses between bouts of melee and gunfire attacks, and you’ll see the benefit of the damage it provides.

The only other weapon we’d recommend for the mid game of Atomic Heart is the Dominator. It’s another energy weapon, so it doesn’t take up inventory space with ammo, and its rate of fire is far greater than Electro’s we switched over to Dominator pretty quickly when we found the Blueprint just because it’s the superior choice. You can pull this out and deal a good chunk of damage to enemies, taking many of them down entirely, or keep up the hits on a boss if you’re caught in a sticky situation and just need something with firepower. As you enter the end game, Dominator becomes much less useful, but it’s worth having for as long as possible just for the free hits it can provide from a distance.

Best end game weapons: Shotgun (KS-23), Fat Boy, and Railgun

The Shotgun (KS-23) should still be in your arsenal in the late stages of Atomic Heart. However, to supplement it, we recommend getting the Fat Boy. This is a missile launcher that deals huge amounts of damage and is particularly useful in the final couple of boss fights. The only downside is that its accuracy is pretty poor, but you can upgrade it to be slightly better. We ended up firing missiles at the feet of anything we wanted to kill, and that seemed to do the trick. Ammo for this monster also takes up quite a lot of space, so you’ll need to decide if you want the benefit it brings with firepower over an energy weapon like the Railgun.

The Railgun is the best energy weapon you can get in the game. While it doesn’t have a high damage rating, its beam deals continuous damage and will decimate whatever you’re aiming at. Once again, it’s the advantage of freeing up inventory space combined with damage output that makes this worthwhile. You can pack in more ammo for the Shotgun (KS-23) and Fat Boy and still have an alternative to pop enemies with between weapons if you need to.