REVIEW: ‘Atlas Fallen’ Provides An Incredibly Engaging But Imperfect Experience (PC)

Atlas Fallen is Deck13’s latest RPG with many enticing and fantastical elements. While the game offers many great elements that’s fit for any action RPG fan, it also fails to provide a wholly engaging experience.

Atlas Fallen takes place in a fantasy world where humans are ruled by all manner of corrupted gods and are at the mercy of frightful monsters and creatures. The story follows you, a random worker who is an “Unnamed,” a title given to those who have job titles instead of names and are basically treated as slave workers. One faithful day, the unnamed is forced to go out into a monster-infested field to reclaim a stolen item.

Before nearly being killed by a monster, they are saved by a mysterious-looking gauntlet inhabited by a spirit called Nyaal. The gauntlet grants them powers, and after a series of events, the unnamed becomes the gauntlet wielder and, with their newfound abilities, they decide to learn more about Nyaal, the origins, and purpose of the gauntlet, and to save their people from the whims of the corrupted God called Thelos.

It’s clear that a lot of effort was put into the game’s narrative. It takes time to set up and display its worldbuilding in a very satisfying way for the player right from the start as it details the several types of factions, gods, monsters, and locations. However, while I found the worldbuilding interesting, the story itself is more bland than entertaining, especially for the first eight to ten hours, where players are just sent from one location to another with little development. Players will be kept busy with objectives like gathering materials in order to learn a move to unlock a path to meet a specific person, but not much narrative weight to hold onto. There are not many major story developments,  with most being kept until later in the game, which can be disappointing. However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight the game’s superb voice acting with a cast that put up a great performance in portraying all the major and minor characters.

Thankfully, the gameplay and world design do a lot of the heavy lifting regarding engagement. The game provides players with all manner of enemies and bosses to fight and hurdles to traverse. The mystical gauntlet takes the center of all combat and gameplay elements. Instead of finding weapons and earning skill points for a skill tree, players will find items known as Essence Stones, which are used to unlock several moves, skills, and weapons in the game. You can find them while exploring the world and as drops from bosses or in the form of blueprints which you’ll need to craft using several materials. 

Essence Stones are also categorized into three tiers, from weakest to strongest, and include several types of skills. These range from upgrades like increased defense and attack to passive moves that activate in certain conditions, like after parrying or blocking attacks. I found these gameplay elements to be a breath of fresh air as it allows players to optimize their gameplay experience without the hassle of trying to find and level up the best weapon or grinding enemy mobs to acquire skill points. Moreover, everything can still be upgraded, from the gauntlet to armor sets, using Essence Shards, the game’s highly convenient in-game currency.

When not fighting enemies or progressing the story, players will have to do a lot of busy work, such as gathering gauntlet shards to unlock more features for the gauntlet. To do this, the game has you do some tedious platforming and sometimes even more tedious traversal challenges that you’ll have to repeat if you mess up even slightly. I found these segments to be the most frustrating parts of the game as they are time-consuming and often repetitive. The only fun part of the game’s traversal system is the sand surfing mechanic, which is as fun as it looks. Moving from place to place is smooth, fun, and controls really well.

Atlas Fallen also offers a lot in terms of visuals. Environments are highly intricate and almost life-like, character designs are detailed, and models are sharp. Performance-wise, on PC, Atlas Fallen provides players with a regular version and a Directx 12 version to choose from. The regular version ran smoothly without glitches, framerate dips, or any other performance issues. However, my Directx 12 version experience was plagued with glitches, crashed several times, and had several other performance issues, at least at the time of writing. Hopefully, this gets sorted out at launch, but it is worth mentioning. Lastly, the game also has co-op capability, but unfortunately, I could not test it before the game’s release as matchmaking was practically nonexistent.

Ultimately, while Atlas Fallen‘s narrative is a bit of a hit-and-miss, it still offers players, especially action RPG fans, a highly engaging gameplay experience in a well-crafted world. 

Atlas Fallen will launch on August 10 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.