When we first saw Atlas Fallen at Gamescom last year, the promise of a fantastical world and extraordinary cosmic forces to subdue the powerful creatures that plagued it immediately caught my attention, but what we saw then The trailer only promises a release in 2023 and promises a story to be experienced alone or in collaboration with cutscenes from the film, without any sign of actual gameplay.
Since then (and it’s been a few months now), the release date has gotten closer and closer, until this week we got a brief trailer with a brief (very brief) glimpse of three fight scenes and three movement scenes , in addition to exploring the environment. For a game that’s due out in a few months, the lack of marketing doesn’t inspire much confidence. Still, I needed to try Atlas Fallen to see what it had to offer, and I saw some good stuff and some not-so-good stuff, but nothing particularly original.
Atlas Fallen is set in the land of Atlas, where an evil force with power over the beasts has completely subdued the population. In the final battle, the last defenders harness the power of the Gauntlet, a mysterious weapon that can turn the tide of battle. Unfortunately, the force is too powerful to control, and the Gauntlet explodes into pieces, leaving the survivors at the mercy of evil. As fate would have it, this fragmented and unstable weapon has now fallen into your hands. The goal is to restore parts (shards) of the Gauntlet to increase its power and defeat the bad guys. So we’re going to have to travel across the vast world to find the fragments, and in the process help people complete quests and clear areas of monsters.
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Wow, a huge open world full of strange creatures and with newly acquired powers that allow us to perform magic through accessories… I’ve seen this before. not long ago. Deck 13 hasn’t dared to make an open-world game like Atlas Fallen until now, but you can see right away that it’s a bet that the studio — along with creators of Lords of the Fallen and souls-like The Surge — wants to explore this genre without becoming too complex, and capitalize on the appeal of already implemented exploration and combat systems, as was the case with God of War (2018).
The problem comes when you feel more connected to one title than the other two and have low community acceptance: Forspoken. The similarities between the titles of the now-defunct Luminous and Atlas Fallen go beyond the medieval aesthetic or the world’s color palette. In fact,Even the included accessories speak for themselves. This is equally irritating. Here at least, it appears from time to time in the form of an entity called Nyaal who advises us and guides us on our journey.
I mentioned earlier that the combat system borrows heavily from Santa Monica’s title, but from what I’ve seen, it abuses those systems and brings them to Atlas relentlessly and shamelessly. There are unlockable skills and charge bars for performing ultimate combos, as well as crafting items (Idols) for extending defense, attack, or health regeneration. I don’t mind them taking notes from GoW, in fact, I’d love more games to take notes from Kratos’ new approach, but when you plant in the first fight of the tutorial and see the fight here completely At the same time, the mirage disappears. Enemy attacks and movement are clumsy, almost static, and there’s a parry system that doesn’t visually make it clear in the opening moments, and introduces an air combat mechanic where you use huge magic weapons than hit monsters Easier to miss.
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The technical aspects of the game didn’t grab my attention at all. The graphics are from last generation though here I’ll nod in favor of Atlas Fallen and say it still performs really well on a PC with some outdated or low-to-mid components and despite being a more modest title it’s lighting and world The loading system is fluid. Even the character movement is better here than in Forspoken, which gives me a glimmer of hope that some of the issues I’ve had on PC won’t carry over to the console version, which I hope to review in a few weeks.
Atlas Fallen doesn’t quite reassure me at the moment. It might not be a groundbreaking title, but if its combat system has won you over and you’re immersed in the rich story between combat encounters (which I’ve barely heard), I’d probably come back for more adventure.
