Deck 13’s latest action RPG Atlas Fallen throws you into a world of a ruined empire amidst sun soaked sand, of blindly devout people worshipping a corrupt god, classicism, slavery and plenty of monsters roaming the wild.
Years after a long war and a short-lived rebellion decimated the once beautiful world of Atlas, you take on the role of an Unnamed, one stripped of everything including a name and whose job it is to do whatever you’re told. You are nothing more than a slave with no rights, working to serve the Queen and the corrupt Sun god Thelos. Thelos has enslaved and blinded humanity, demanding a tribute of a substance called Essence – the lifeblood of the planet – as a show of devotion. The mining of Essence is slowly stripping the world of life, leaving behind vast oceans of sand and lifeless deserts.
In a bid to get your people more rights, you are thrust into a battle between Thelos and another god, Nyaal, who has been stripped from history. As the only one capable of wielding Nyaal’s power through an ancient gauntlet, you have no choice but to bring down the Queen and Thelos before it’s too late.
Set across four large locations, Atlas Fallen embraces the open world genre and all of its trappings. There are side quests to engage in, collectibles to find, locations to discover and hidden lore shedding light on the world and its inhabitants. The game doesn’t do anything different with the usual open world checklist of activities. Instead it chooses to invest in a fun and fairly inventive combat and movement system that makes navigating the large world and exploring oodles of fun.
Courtesy of Nyaal’s gauntlet, which gives you control over sand powers, you gain the ability to double jump, air dash and, most importantly, surf the sandy dunes. Sand surfing is as cool as it looks, letting you zip across the landscape quickly, leaving trails of sand in your wake. Combining your move set with sand surfing lets you explore the surprisingly vertical environment with ease and style.
And that environment is absolutely stunning. Deck 13 have managed to make the sandy wastes look absolutely stunning with environments that tower in scale, flipping between sun-blasted ruins, wild outposts of life, ancient citadels and chasms galore. Coupled with the photo mode, Atlas Fallen has plenty of screenshot worthy moments as most of the environments look as though the concept art was translated 100% faithfully into 3D.
Less successful are the character models and animation which look at least a generation behind the stunning environment design, replete with animations that don’t always sync fully with the voice lines. It’s a small blemish on what is, otherwise, a visually stunning game.
Combat is the other part of Atlas Fallen’s magic trick. It’s fun, fluid and challenging all at the same time, featuring stunning animations and a system that requires you to play around with its many options to find your best play style. While you only have three weapons, your ability list of passive and active skills, along with the Momentum meter, determine how effective you will be in combat. You can swop abilities in and out as you please, once you’ve crafted them and unlocked further sections of the Momentum metre.
As you attack without taking damage, the Momentum meter grows, enhancing your attack power, and the size of your weapons, while dropping defense. The meter is broken up into three gauges, with each gauge activating the abilities you’ve placed in that section of the meter. Once the meter is full enough, you’ll have access to an AOE super that freezes the enemies in its radius while dishing out massive damage. If you use it though, it uses up all of your momentum.
There’s a risk/reward status then. Do you use your shatter attack or hold onto the momentum to keep you smaller abilities in play?
Pulling from their previous game, The Surge, enemies have multiple body parts that you can target and break off. While it doesn’t reward you with specific items, it adds to the complexity of combat as this too brings a heavy element of danger to the fights. Once you break an enemy’s body part, they become enraged and their damage output increases. But it’s a necessity to do if you want to defeat the larger enemies and bosses.
There’s a huge element of air combat in Atlas Fallen as well because of the airborne enemies and how large some bosses are. If you play your cards right, along with enhancing your dash, you can practically fly throughout entire encounters as you dash between enemies.
Combat has one caveat in that the camera sometimes struggles to keep up with what’s going on onscreen as the game tends to throw multiple enemy types at you at once. And enemies are very aggressive and challenging even on medium difficulty. And sometimes the lock-on doesn’t always target the creature you want, especially when the larger, screen-filling enemies are blocking your view.
Your abilities can also be upgraded, courtesy of the items you’ll scavenge in the wilds, whether it’s ore or plants, they have their use. Thankfully, I never needed to grind to gain the items I needed. Normal play threw enough of them at me to make sure I never felt in want when a new ability I wanted to jack up came my way.
Character levelling isn’t handled in the traditional manner either, which I enjoyed. Completing quests and defeating enemies gives you Essence to use. And you use that to upgrade the various armours you will pick up. Each set of armour can be upgraded three times, which accounts for all you stats and your character level. I found it to be a more interesting and simple system than the usual RPG levelling method.
Atlas Fallen takes its story very seriously as well. While I didn’t find the writing or vocal performances to be as strong as I’d hoped, I still found the story engaging and entertaining even if it was less of a hook than the combat. While I wish there were more than passive screens of you watching a conversation or occasionally making a choice, I still enjoyed the tale that Atlas Fallen was telling.
Atlas Fallen may not feature the strongest or most original story, but it does make up for that with beautiful, impressive visuals, a wonderful sense of exploration that holds a little bit of a Darksiders feel to it, and some stunning and tough combat that will keep you on your toes. These sands are definitely worth surfing.
Atlas Fallen Trailer
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