Games worth discovering

This desert romp is stiff and janky but still worth a look - Atlas Fallen Quick Review

2K View2023-08-10

Atlas Fallen

Get

SHOULD I PLAY ATLAS FALLEN?

Play it if you can tolerate a bit of control jank and are up for an old-school open-world adventure in a genuinely stunning desert landscape. Atlas Fallen blends PlayStation 2-era God of War button-mashing combat with open-world exploration and puzzle solving in its own unique way, and while it can feel a bit stiff and wooden sometimes, there’s something special here once you get through the opening few hours.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played nine hours of Atlas Fallen. In that time, I’ve made my way through the first major area, a sprawling desert split by bottomless chasms, and opened the path to the secret underground fortress where the Knights of Bastengar reside. I completed a handful of missions and side quests in the first area, reforged my magical gauntlet, and collected a dizzying number of special abilities to mix and match to suit my play style. There are a lot of subsystems to learn in Atlas Fallen, from the way combat moves can be customized to upgrading armor and abilities, and the first area of the game serves as a tutorial and testing ground to get to grips with all of them.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT ATLAS FALLEN?

• Acrobatic, customizable combat. Atlas Fallen’s combat doesn’t have the speed of Devil May Cry nor the sheer impact of God of War, but it sure looks cool as hell. Once I had reforged key components of my supernatural gauntlet artifact, I could double jump and air-dash around during fights, zipping in and out of enemy range to avoid their strikes while delivering punishing blows of my own. As I landed hits, I filled up a momentum meter, and that momentum made my weapons grow physically larger and deliver increasing damage—but at the cost of making me increasingly vulnerable to my enemies’ attacks. With spectacular impact effects, sand tornadoes, and giant enemy crabs everywhere I looked, each fight was cinematic and exciting, even if the pacing felt a touch too slow.

• Gorgeous world. Atlas Fallen takes place in a destroyed, arid world, but this desert is anything but dull. Ruined castles pierce the sky, sand-swept caves bore into the sides of rocky buttes, and the whole initial area is crisscrossed by ravines that plunge too deep into the earth to be able to see the bottom. It was a fun place to explore, especially since I was able to skate over the sand, almost like I was on a snowboard.

• Loads of build options. Once I had completed the first few story quests in which I reassembled my legendary gauntlet, Atlas Fallen started showering me with new abilities and passives that I could slot into it at any of the ancient anvils I had uncovered. The gauntlet holds up to nine of these, three for each level of momentum I built up during fights, and each ability is designed to work with a specific play style. For example, if I found that at high momentum levels I needed more healing to counteract the increased damage I was taking, I could pop in some green abilities at tier three, while keeping my aggressive combat abilities slotted into tiers one and two. It’s a chaotic system to learn at first, but once I understood what was going on, I had lots of fun experimenting with the new abilities I found after each big wraith fight.

WHAT SUCKS IN ATLAS FALLEN?

• Combat can feel stiff and slow. As spectacular as the combat is in Atlas Fallen, I always felt as if it was lagging behind what I wanted to be doing. Animations played out just a touch too slowly, keeping me from ever feeling the thwack I wanted to when I hit a giant sand snake in the face with a hammer. Moving around felt nice and zippy the way it should, but my attacks just didn’t keep up with where I felt they ought to be.

• Wooden dialogue. Characters and conversations I found in Atlas Fallen were all pretty dull and uninteresting, and several quests were simple busywork tasks like placing flowers on a grave or rounding up three lost guards. Voice acting ranged from eyebrow-raisingly questionable to merely serviceable, with my main character picking up a theatrical fantasy accent at some point and the spirit companion who guided me along my path sounding like an AI character from a bargain-bin sci-fi adventure. Nothing sounded downright bad, but at the same time, none of the performances were helped by the script, which suffered from some awkward translation and speech pacing.

• Performance. I have a pretty beefy PC, and Atlas Fallen still chugged fairly frequently—which likely means most users are going to have to turn down a lot of graphics options for decent performance in this game. Definitely check out the system requirements before you decide to buy and make sure you’re well above the minimum required specs.

💬 Will you be venturing into the desert to fight the Sun God in Atlas Fallen, or are you planning on staying cool in the shade? Let me know in the comments below.