Sand. Its coarse and irritating and gets everywhere

Atlas Fallen is an open-world game set in a land that has been ravaged by the Sun God, who players will see their enormous visage high in the sky as they adventure thru the lands. Developed by Deck 13 Interactive from The Surge and Lords of the Fallen fame, the developers have said that Atlas Fallen is an action game and while there certainly are smattering of action elements from games like God of War, I don’t feel like they were able to shed their ‘soulslike’ skin totally for this game.

In Atlas Fallen players will create their own characters with a limited amount of customization options. One thing I as a man of color am tired of seeing is the ‘Killmonger” (from the MCU) hair style, why developers have grabbed on to this style as the quintessential black hair is beyond me…poor Miles Morales but I digress. Once created players take control of a blue man with a long braid who looks a lot like the Na’vi from Jim’s Avatar series. This blue gentleman is the players tutorial in the basic usage of the gauntlet, which is the weapon that will players will use for their adventures. After this introduction the real game begins, players find out that in this world humans have lost their names, and very identities and have been in slaved for centuries; until the players character finds the gauntlet and with it a way to free their people.

MSRP: $59.99
Platforms: Xbox (reviewed), PlayStation, PC
Price I’d Pay: $49.99

Atlas Fallen is a pretty game for one that is mostly a sand covered wilderness, even with all the yellow and brown sand around there is still some wonderful architecture found in the scattered settlements around the world. There are even areas of plush, greenery in various oasis that can be explored. Enemies are all for the most part larger than the hero and come in a variety of land and air targets. No matter the enemy the graphical sands which make up their body swirls around hypnotically even as hey throw attacks at the players. This level of detail even during fights really caught my eye and made the whole idea of “sand come to life” really shine through. Some of the bigger monsters have various hit points that are covered by an armor and if players can break these spots before finishing their foe, they will be rewarded with extra resources. Each of these looks like intricately carved masks, both ominous and at the same time beautiful.

Being an open-world game or a semi-open world game there is a lot of emphasis put on exploration in Atlas Fallen. To aid with this the developers have given the hero some cool navigational tools, the first of which is sand surfing. With the click of a button when on sand instead of running players will put their hands behind them and begin to glide effortlessly move along the grains of sands as if it was solid ice. The animation is fluid and fast and comes with a satisfying sound effect moving across the sand. In addition, Atlas Fallen makes use of verticality in its environments, offering the player a double jump, as well as the ability to perform an air dash. In addition to its more use for outmaneuvering enemies in the game’s action-heavy combat, the fluidity of these jumps and dashes makes movement a delight.

Combat is where Atlas Fallen begins to lose me, if you are fan of the podcast then you know that I love, LOVE fast, fluid action games. Well, the developers have said that Atlas Fallen is mainly an action game but the combat feels so clunky that it just reminds me of the soulsbourne games. Players have a choice between multiple weapons but only two can be equipped at a time. Instead of the usual light and heavy attacks that these games normally have, in Atlas Fallen each weapon is mapped to a button as a primary and secondary weapon. For most of my adventure I used the fist weapon as my primary with the sand whip as the secondary, this allowed me to pull myself toward targets with the whip and then unload on them with my fists as well as mixing in whip attacks. My issue comes in when I am trying to create combos and link various attacks, for some reason the attacks feel like all of them have a wind up so there is a brief moment before the weapon actually moves when the player presses the button. I have tried various combos of weapons and they all garner the same result, and because of this it just makes the combat feel cumbersome, especially when there are more than one enemy; which will happen the majority of the time.

What really makes this a problem is that the combat system uses a momentum-based system, which means that as the players do damage to enemies, they will gain momentum which increases damage and allows them to use their equipped essence stones. These stones are locked into each stage of the momentum bar, with three levels available. These abilities can increase defense or damage passively or have activatable actions like summoning massive sand tornados to rip through enemies or attacks that will stun them in place momentarily. Once filled players can execute a flashy finisher attack that destroys enemies and makes the hero look badass at the same time. The catch to the momentum system is that the higher the bar the greater the damage the player will receive from enemies as well. So, combat walks this tightrope of needing to be strategic when attacking and defending, and if it actually controlled better, it would be a super cool system. But as it stands due to the delay in combat, it made it difficult for me to take full advantage of this system and instead of excelling in fights I usually just barely eked out a victory, far from feeling like the savior of this land to be sure.

Atlas Fallen does some things right as a new franchise, the world that the team has made is interesting and begs to be explored, the story is for the most part extremely well told and as I said graphically the game looks great. But the unevenness of the combat just makes avoiding fights more common than facing enemies head on. Which is truly a shame because as I said above, I love action games and had high hopes that Atlas Fallen would stick the landing. I am hoping this is something that can be fixed with a patch, because I did enjoy skating around the sands and exploring the massive levels.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.