Atlas Fallen Review – A Controversial Sand Adventure

Open world games tend to be full of life – at least that’s what they aim for. Here a stream flows through the forest, where the jungle hides innumerable predators. Don’t forget the snowy landscape that small rabbits and foxes traverse. Atlas Fallen does it differently. The world is just a dry and barren wasteland in which few things survive. Ruined castles alternate with the ruins of broken bridges. Only the golden altar, built in gratitude to the cruel god, remained untouched. At the center of it all is you, gliding across the endless sand in a pulsing magical gauntlet.

• Platform: PC, PlayStation 5 (Remastered), Xbox Series X/S.
• Release date: 08.10.2023
• Developer: Deck13 Interactive
• Publisher: Focus Entertainment
• Genre: action role-playing
• Czech localization: yes
• Multiplayer: the ability to play together
• Download data: 21.41 GB (PlayStation version)
• Game time: 20 to 30 hours
• Price: 1449 CZK

It is at this point that the Fallen of the Atlas are at their strongest. As you roam the desert and encounter a monster that looks like a sand snake, you will have to fight. As you climb a high cliff and take in the scenery. Unfortunately, several things slow down the game.

The main character (or heroine) you create doesn’t have a name, literally. He lives in a world destroyed by the extraction of the essence, which the inhabitants there give to the omnipotent and omnipresent god Telos. People here are divided into certain castes, where the richer live in the city or serve the god as priests, while the poorer roam the desert in caravans and extract precious raw materials. They are called nameless because they only have titles like hitchhiker or cook. In fact, they are slaves with very limited rights.

But one of the caravans is approaching the place where the massive glove lies forgotten in the sand. Not an ordinary piece of metal, the gauntlet harbors a bound spirit that grants the wearer the ability to shape the sand around them and use it to fight bloodthirsty monsters. Congratulations, of course you found this glove.

Maybe it reminds you of something. Fast gliding through the world, talking assistant hidden in the metal on the arm, medieval stylization. One such action-RPG has already been released this year, but compared to Forspoken Atlas Fallen, it is a smaller creation of a European studio that did not arouse such high expectations. It was developed by the folks at Deck13 who you might know mostly from another medieval game, Lords of the Fallen, or both The Surge. The games are characterized by soulslike mechanics, which this time the studio decided to abandon and plunged into a different genre. But certain similarities can still be found here, and oddly enough, in fights.

Find a weakness

Your hero is left on his own in the desert, but when he finds a magical glove, he decides to use it to track down his nameless friends who have been taken to Teloswickam. Along the way, he improves the glove with the help of special fragments and the so-called idols.

You have three different weapons that are formed from the glove. So you can choose whether you like a heavier hammer or maybe a whip that doesn’t deal as much damage but allows you to stand a little further away from enemies. This is often useful as you never fight humans or animals, only ghosts created from the sand around you. Sometimes it’s a small flounder, sometimes a giant crab that has a few weaknesses. And here we come to similarities with The Surge: in order to defeat a colossus that is several times larger than you, you need to focus on marked weak spots and swing around the enemy. Accidentally swinging the whip in front of you is not entirely inefficient, but it is tiring.

The fights are somewhat reminiscent of Monster Hunter, and the design of the stronger monsters is great. But at the same time, you also remember Devil May Cry, because the ghosts have a number of weaknesses on their heads. Your hero always jumps up to them and crashes into them in an unrealistic but very effective way.

During the fight, his momentum rises, something like adrenaline. Each hit and timely strike gradually builds it up, and vice versa – each wound takes away a little. The higher the impulse, the stronger the hero, but also the more damage he receives in case of inattention. When your blue bar fills up, you unlock the ability to perform one of three special attacks. Or you can wave your hand over him and “spend” all the momentum on a massive attack, which will freeze the enemy for a while.

Along with moving around the world, the combat system is what you’ll probably enjoy the most. It’s also pretty volatile. A bit in the style of the new releases of God of War, you upgrade your armor and create Essence Stones using the raw materials you find. Then you insert them into the glove, in which you gradually free up individual slots. Some bring passive abilities, other stones are active and perform the aforementioned stronger attacks. They are divided into different categories, so you can put together a defense-oriented build, where, for example, one of the stones creates a sandy wall in front of you, slowing down enemies. But you can easily switch to another build, where the stone will quickly replenish your hero’s momentum after activation. There are about 150 Essence Stones, and even if they’re a little tricky to rummage through at times, they allow for constant customization of fights.

Search, talk, kill

You get these useful helpers for killing larger enemies, or classically from chests or by completing various tasks. As in other similar games, you will meet people who do not quite understand that you are trying to change the world, so they give you sometimes even stupid tasks, such as “find my lost apples” or “pick flowers and bring them.” them to that knight” (well, the second one was apparently a joke of the developers). Side quests are a lot of quests in Atlas Fallen. But it also looks like a number of main ones.

An important part of the game consists of collecting fragments of gloves or very ascetic tasks “go somewhere and fetch something.” The story itself is not bad, there are interesting twists and turns. Your search for lost friends quickly turns into an attempt to overthrow the god Telos, who has long and unjustly ruled over people. Unfortunately, this path often has a harsh content, consisting only of searching, talking and killing. For example, you will be given the task of recruiting three people into an emerging squad, which you will do by approaching them, talking to them and returning. You don’t even have to choose the correct dialogue options or talk about them. Just click and you’re done. It is all the more pleasant when the game sometimes offers something more and you are forced to race through the ruins of an ancient castle, for example.

You dug up a million essential stones, what the hell do you want to do with them?

But there are many more such opposites in Atlas Fallen. For example, graphics. The scenery is beautiful, especially considering that most of the few maps you will visit are mountains of sand. On the other hand, outdated character animations will remind you that this is not a “AAA game” from a huge studio. Especially during dialogues. Facial expressions are almost absent, and the bodies and hands of the debaters usually repeat strange movements over and over again. Add to that graphical glitches and bugs like slow texture loading, reduced FPS in more detailed areas (even in performance mode), or the scattered order of Czech subtitles, most of which, according to the developers, should be solved by a patch on the day of the game.

Dubbing and acting are also incompatible. Your glove assistant named Nyaal is surprisingly non-irritating and you will enjoy listening to his remarks. In the settings, you can even significantly limit its tips and advice in the style of “you dug up a million essence stones, do you want to do something with it?”. Unlike the bracelet in Forspoken, it does not have an English gentleman’s accent, and in various places it materializes into a glowing blue creature that is much easier for the player to bond with. However, my heroine had weaker moments, especially in the second half of the game. From time to time, the actress spoke in a low, almost masculine voice for an unknown reason. Another time, she regretted the death of a complete stranger in such an exaggerated tone, as if she had been tortured.

And working with an open world … We have already talked about side quests. On the other hand, their customers constantly recognize you. When you meet them ten hours later in a completely different place, they’ll say hello and perhaps tell a story or a gift, which creates a nice sense of connectedness.

Small activities scattered around the world are a very pleasant pastime in moments when you don’t really want to rebel against an angry god. One consists of rapidly tracking glowing stones and deliberately throwing them through the air from one to another. Another will make you slow down while you relentlessly follow a group of deer, one of which will break off, turn to gold, and dig up a treasure map for you. In addition, places gradually appear on the map hiding various mini-quests, and you must clearly find them, so forget about the accumulation of question marks.

You can also explore the world and complete tasks in collaboration with another player, but I didn’t end up trying this mode. However, characters of different levels can also play together, and dialogue, for example, seems to be handled relatively clearly. But the title does not support crossplay.

In the end, Atlas Fallen is easy to “find your own” – whether it’s elegant movement through the desert or fun fights. However, in the process, you’ll come across some outdated elements that, in my opinion, make other “non-AAA games” of this genre more modern and better. But it’s still a good title to kick back, especially for those who are hungry for new worlds and knowledge and don’t care much about graphics or dialogue.