Austin does not recommend: Atlas Fallen (Review)

this video is sponsored by Ridge and their wallet and keycase the next update for your wallet and keys is here and you can get 10 off your order by using offer code skill up click the link below to get to it or stick around to the end of the video to learn more thank you foreign Fallen oh dear uh this is from deck 13 the developers behind Lords of the fallen and The Surge games these were some of the first titles trying to take a stab at from software's souls-like formula and while they garnered a mixed reception they did find an audience who appreciated deck 13's take on the genre and felt that they really found their footing by the time the surge 2 launched but Atlas Fallen is not a Soul's like it's an open world action adventure with some metroidvania elements more in the vein of something like Darksiders I only played a couple hours of The Surge and while I do enjoy my soul's likes I was excited by the prospect of this studio developing a more dare I say simple game one doing away with that punishing difficulty instead focused on delivering a narrative driven story with some fun spectacle combat so the initial reveal trailer for Atlas Fallen really piqued my interest with its nice visuals it's sand gliding the flashy move sets and some rather unique combat mechanics I was looking forward to picking this up going in with an open mind and tempered expectations given that they're a smaller studio and this is quite a departure from their previous games so I've finished the campaign now I've done a handful of side quests a fair amount of exploration and what do I think well first you may be surprised to learn just how short this campaign is there's nothing wrong with that of course in fact I actually enjoy a shorter game these days especially when the content is high quality but that's not exactly the word I would use to describe this Atlas Fallen has a very shallow overplayed and underdeveloped story accompanied by less than Stellar voice acting and monotonous main objectives lacking any unique bosses or set piece moments the metroidvania and open world elements are similarly Half Baked while this land is quite visually impressive it's full of backtracking and busy work that often feels like needless padding what should have saved this for me was the combat and while it delivers on that spectacle alongside a large ability roster and novel mechanics the camera telegraphing difficulty tuning bugs and overall wonkiness of its implementation caused the whole framework to feel cumbersome and completely broke down in most of my encounters I want to clarify as well that I played this game entirely solo would this game have been more fun Co-op maybe but you could probably have a good time binging the entire Real Housewives of Beverly Hills box set if you did that with friends so that isn't saying much overall I can't say that having another player with me would have really enhanced my experience needless to say as you can tell by my tone of voice I did not have a great time with this Atlas Fallen is a serviceable game at the best of times but is ultimately an unremarkable and unwieldy experience at its worst while I admire the attempt here at something new time will not be kind to this game and I suspect it may be back to the drawing board for deck 13. I Believe In You Gauntlet Bearer give me The Relic watch out welcome to Atlas a desolate land broken by War most Mortals hear those known as the unnamed are condemned to a life of servitude mining for a precious resource known as Essence all to feed the almighty God thelos that that fellows Thanos I think it's thelos uh this God is hungry and the feeding of essence has starved this land of its beauty now a husk of its former self nothing but Rock and Sand as far as the eye can see it's coarse it's rough it gets everywhere and to make matters worse thelos has caused the sand to birth these sand creatures known as wraiths to keep mankind on the back foot ensuring nobody undermines his rule you are one of these unnamed but under fortunate circumstances come across a strange Gauntlet it brings you the power to bend the Sands to your will to ride it to wield it and you must use this Gauntlet against Thanos to rid Humanity of its shackles this responsibility is bestowed upon you by The Gauntlet it speaks to you turns out the gauntlet houses the soul of another God known as Niall who created The Gauntlet eons ago for this very reason but oh no it's broken because it wasn't ready or something and now you need to restore its power by searching for the fragments scattered across Atlas Niall the god you're stuck with throughout the entire campaign has the personality of a doorknob all his lines are delivered in the same dry dull tone uh he is purely there to spout Exposition any chance he gets as if our character was born last week and has absolutely zero knowledge regarding the history of Atlas it was beautiful indeed a sea of emerald as far as the eye could see until Silas decided the harvesting of essence was a greater priority than their guardianship of the world he is laser focused on his rivalry between him and the other God at times it can almost seem Sinister I overheard one NPC concerned that we're just replacing one God with another and what would actually happen when we finally overthrow thelos I heard some Knights talking about how they're not ready yet that there's doubt among the ranks the priests speak of thelos bringing order while Niall invokes chaos maybe there's a balance there that needs to be upheld these are all interesting ideas to pose but literally none of them are ever explored throughout the entire campaign your character as well known only as The Gauntlet Bearer he's just as one note in his writing and delivery with zero bravado do you not want to deal with him I think we have better things to do we shouldn't forget that we are in thelos's territory indeed they could attack at any moment now a reef we need to find a reef never once does he grapple with his responsibility doubt his leadership question Niall's motives in fact almost every character here just feels like the same stoic hero type and never develops into anything more sometimes I actually got confused as to who was speaking because of how similar they all sounded both in tone and personality combined with how bad the lip sync animations are take this Essence Stone whatever is waiting for you up there it should help you when you are surrounded thank you he lost his wraiths will not stop me now that the goal is within my grasp there are no proper cutscenes to indicate the passing of time you go from being a slave to obtaining this Gauntlet to Leading an entire nation against their God within what feels like a couple days there are essentially no developments between your character the ones you meet or the gods there are like one or two twists in there but they make no perceivable impact on the plot I mean there's just not much to say here this is a very Bland Story character dialogue isn't well written and the voice acting especially was very flat across the board so that's what I think about the quality of this story but what about the length well I don't think deck 13 have done a great job managing expectations here as I said at the top I don't particularly care about a game's length but given this is a 50 game given Atlas fallen's creative director himself claims you can expect 25 to 30 hours for a 100 completion given titles in the same genre like dark side Fighters offered that you might have been under the impression that it'd take about 20 hours or so for an average playthrough that's okay that's not too long not too short like I said about what I would expect I want to say I relatively beelined the campaign but I did do maybe a dozen side quests or so just to keep my level on par with the enemies or if the side quests sounded interesting enough I did dawdle a little bit a bit of exploration I didn't just do the main story so after finally defeating the final boss and rolling credits on the game I checked my in-game play time and it clocked out at a whopping 10 hours I mean that's quite short right that really did take me by surprise especially given that there isn't much to this campaign there's no set piece moments or proper cutscenes that might have Justified this deck 13 probably should have made this clear from the jump as I'm sure most will feel a little disappointed by this realization you can probably hit 20 hours May maybe if you decide to do absolutely everything this game has to offer but I can't see many players committing to that given that the exploration and side activities here aren't so great either so this game has metroidvania elements like a metroidvania your ability to explore this world is more or less gated by the tools you have available to you at that moment you might see an area up high that you can't quite get to yet so you'll need to continue playing until you've got the necessary Powers as I said in the story block the Crux of what you will spend this whole campaign doing up until the last couple hours is looking for these fragments of your Gauntlet so you can gain access to these Powers typically this process of unlocking new abilities in metroidvanias is immediately rewarding for example you discover the ability to wall run or something and then you remember all these places that you couldn't get to before that you now might have access to the game has immediately opened up in a meaningful way here this process is tedious and poorly paced not only do you need to find the piece but once you've got it you've then got to find these extra shards in order to actually fuse the piece to your Gauntlet so that you can use the power every time I finally got a piece I was so ready to start using it only for Niall to chime in and remind you that actually no first you must find the three shards and boy will he never shut up about it forget it you are not powerful enough find more shards first forget it you are not powerful enough find more shards first we need to find the shards of the crush piece to get through these there are three powers in this game Dash lift and Crush for two of those this step needs to be repeated twice in order to fully upgrade it that's like 15 shards you need to find throughout the entire 10 hour campaign just to use three abilities to their fullest potential and what is that full potential you might ask well given Atlas Fallen only has three abilities you might think the platforming puzzles here would utilize and combine them in interesting ways that is not the case at their simplest it'll just be a few gaps that you need to cross with your dash at their most challenging it might be lift a thing and now dash from that thing to cross this Gap done and side note there are places where it seems like the developers intend for you to lift a sequence of platforms to jump between but this makes no sense because you can also just stand on the platform and then lift it while you're on top of it completely ignoring the others just so weird the platforming puzzles here are rather Elementary and despite the game having this focus on momentum through both combat and gliding along the Sands the implementation of these metroidvania abilities feels antithetical to that you are rooted in place when lifting or crushing things it's slow it's cumbersome it doesn't feel like your tool set really compounds nor the challenges you need to overcome had these abilities been faster perhaps been able to use on the move there could have been an opportunity here to expand on these challenges and demand that you actually Master using these abilities in unison instead of one by one deck 13 have not labeled this game as a metroidvania just that it has metroidvania elements but I don't think this progression system has been fully realized here at all and honestly feels like it only serves to pad out the game this is blatantly clear when exploring the open world and completing side activities there are two kinds of puzzle type things that you can run into there's this one where you lift a crystal thing out of the ground it'll show you where the next Crystal thing is so you can follow the tether over there and lift the next one and then repeat until the daisy chain is complete I really despised this one often you come across a new area and lift this Crystal only for it to make you turn around and go back the way you came it especially sucks because you need to do this in a time limit and if you come upon a point where you need to lift up a big rock or something to jump on you just stand and they're wasting time lifting this thing only for the timer to run out and you start it all over again this is a good example of how clumsy these metroidvania Powers feel we have to start over look at the map in case you do not remember where the other one is where you pull out a crystal that releases a little orb thing which flies along and reveals some hidden platforms that you can jump between and then the chest spawns at the final platform like I said very basic there are these Vantage points which are well you jump up to them you interact and they reveal all the treasure chests nearby while you're up there no sound no animation or Fanfare the UI just pops in and out as you hit the button speaking of treasure some can be dug up by using your slow lift ability sometimes you will have to do this multiple times in an area until you've found the chest you can also find chests by slowly trailing these shiny Stags until they lead you to them foreign there are also these watchtowers where you will just fight a boss underneath them and beating it will clear the sandstorm in the area allowing animals and NPCs to show up I guess despite the name there is no platforming involved it's literally just a boss fight underneath the Watchtower there's your traditional side quests there was one where I exchanged letters between a soldier and his lover leading them to organizing a marriage very cute or another one where a black bailed a priest with info about his Unfaithful brother to release a prisoner they're very short and the objectives are never too involved usually just finding some item or killing a couple enemies but the stories weren't varied enough that I didn't mind doing them from time to time there are also errands yes there is a whole category of side quests called errands they're not trying to be subtle at all as you can gather they are literally just fetch quests collect a bunch of items kill some wraiths or do one of the puzzles I mentioned just your standard filler content so to their credit though the incentive to do all these things are pretty good while they can give you simple things like upgrade materials or currency they're way more often new perks or abilities which I really appreciated they can also offer armor sets and cosmetics which I am all about uh fashion is like the number one reason I do anything in any video game and I was delighted to see that there's also a die and transmog system vendors would offer all these things as well making them always worth seeking out an immense currency felt valuable throughout the entire game so despite how unengaging these activities were I would actually just bite the bullet and do them when they came up because I think deck 13 did a pretty good job with rewards here Atlas Fallen is quite a pretty game as well at least from afar unlike the story this world is anything but flat massive Cliffs and crumbling Castle remains protrude the landscape split by cascading sand dunes that you can glide along at Great speeds as you take in the scenery cities and townships are small but rich with detail and lighting is used effectively here to separate the common districts from the CD lower Burrows that said there are only three zones across the game and as you can see here they all look quite similar aside from a few underground areas it's mostly just more sand dunes with a smattering of grasslands and rock there's no night and day cycle or weather systems to break up the visual monotony either it's just Perpetual daylight not every game has to contain those things by the way but you know I think systems like that could have provided some much needed visual diversity here the game performed at a solid 60 FPS most of the time on my RTX 3080 and i7 though I would get the occasional stutter on Steam deck on lowest settings you can get this to run at you know roughly 30 to 40 FPS though sometimes it'll drop as low as 20 during heavy action which is not ideal given that combat is so reaction based you will run into a lot of Terror rain and texture pop in though particularly foliage on multiple occasions objects were just stuck at low res there was a time when the armor on characters looked like they were straight out of Minecraft I only ran into one hard crash throughout my play time but a lot of audio bugs one time there was this very loud humming noise persisting wherever I went thank you very often during encounters all music and most sound effects would just completely drop out and I was only able to hear the clanking of my weapons like those YouTube videos where they remove all the music and it's just that awkward silence with people grunting and scooting about speaking of audio the sound design is just not good like The Dashing the attacks the enemies it all sounds very tinny almost like low quality stock audio and to be honest it got quite grating by the end of the game keyboard and mouse implementation is fine for the most part until you get to the menus uh these were clearly designed with console in mind not only other UI elements massive but if you click the tabs to navigate these menus your cursor will continuously reset its position to one of the nearby elements I understand this being beneficial for controllers so you don't need to move the joystick from the tabs every time but on keyboard and mouse this gets very tiresome as you'll have to just keep resetting your position and dragging your mouse back over I learned this early on and found this so annoying in fact that I ended up switching to controller for the remainder of my play time so despite the nice visuals and rewards I remained unimpressed by the story metroidvania elements and frequency of bugs the Saving Grace of Atlas Fallen though should have been the combat especially given the years of experience deck 13 has in this department alas this aspect of the game fell short for me as well Your Arsenal starts here with an ax for General damage a whip for movement and AOE damage and you can also swap either of these out for fisticuffs for fast single Target action your primary weapon is controlled with one button and the secondary another each have basic combos you can perform through button taps or holes you do have a Dodge roll which becomes your dash when in the air but most importantly you have a Parry that resets its cooldown if you block an attack this is a very Parry heavy game you need to time your blocks to the enemy's attack chains because parrying enough attacks in quick succession will freeze them for a period allowing you to go ham initially this worked great at the beginning of the game most of your encounters are against groups of smaller enemies these guys don't pose much of a threat their attacks are easy to predict and any incoming attacks are telegraphed by these red arrows around your character and I could choose to lock on or I could also get by by just attacking with directional inputs and parrying when things came in it started to feel a little wonky though when I came across my first boss enemy I'm introduced to the mechanic of being able to Target specific parts of the boss to damage first thing I noticed is you basically must use the lock-on when fighting these boss enemies as you can only damage them by hitting their parts you cannot just run up to them and start dealing damage by hitting their body that's fine but you come to realize that these monsters are constantly moving around so your character's attacks and even your active abilities have trouble tracking these parts especially when you're attacking parts that are swinging around in the air by the way breaking body parts does not disable any part of the enemy's move set as you might imagine it would in fact they will become enraged attacking even faster and dealing more damage which is you know an odd Choice given that there seems to be no way to avoid this inversely because you can stay in the air indefinitely through double jumps multiple air dashes and your whips grapple ability enemy attacks have trouble tracking you that sounds really cool on paper but this becomes a problem because if you're in mid-air and you see an incoming attack you might go to Parry only for the enemy to completely whiff and now your Parry is on cooldown and then the boss slaps you with a follow-up swing as you can see as well the camera is also super weird in most action games when you're locked on the enemy now takes center stage and both you and the camera pivots around them here the camera simply cannot keep up with your character's movement nor the enemies in this clip you can see me locked onto this dude's claw but the claw is not in the center of the screen it's like it's moving back and forth it's moving to the edge of the screen off the screen even the problem is my character's movement is now relative to the claw so my inputs feel really imprecise and that in combination with how zoomed out the camera is makes it a little difficult to receive depth which becomes a real problem when you're trying to Parry these attacks in quick succession in this situation you'll sometimes forget you're even using the lock-on because the subject is not centered so you might feel encouraged to rotate the camera but trying to rotate the camera on a controller simply switches lock-on Targets this is a total nightmare when multiple enemies are around and your lock-on is switching between body parts flying enemies ground enemies just snapping in every direction it all devolves into this janky fiddly routine between you and the boss you're floating all over the screen as your character's attacks try to home in on the locked on body part neither of you never knowing for certain if your big hits will connect not to mention that you will regularly get kicked out of the lock-on mode because there are enemies that will either go invisible or have some invulnerability phase so you're constantly having to re-lock onto targets I also think the difficulty tuning is wildly inconsistent basic and enemies take maybe half a dozen hits to kill whereas all these boss type enemies are ridiculously spongy since you need to take down every body part to kill them by the way and each of those has more Health than a dozen basic enemies combined I played on the normal difficulty and found that trying to fight bosses under leveled by just one level cause them to be really frustrating due to their damage and health scaling combined with all the issues I've listed but once I upgraded my armor and abilities and I was at level these encounters then became a total pushover this is in part due to the momentum mechanic basically you build up this blue gauge at the bottom by Landing hits and when you reach certain thresholds your weapon will grow larger deal more damage and you'll gain access to your slotted active and passive abilities the trade-off being that you will also take more damage you can also completely spend this gauge on a shatter a sort of ultimate ability that will also delete their health bar if it's low enough indicated by this blue outline so there's a lot built into I feel like this never quite clicked with me I never felt like I needed to contend with that risk versus reward Factor any increased incoming damage was often far outweighed by the multiple active and passive abilities I now had access to for this reason I also didn't end up using the shatter a lot because I just rather go in for the kill with my Juiced up weapon and abilities than have to build up all that momentum all over again because it really does feel awful when you don't have access to those abilities speaking of which though there is quite a range of active and passive abilities that you can choose from and upgrade for bonus effects in fact I was quite impressed with the depth of the build craft here as you can see in the menu there's loads of these with even more to discover they enable a diverse range of play Styles as well you can build for damage protection healing you can focus on momentum gain or freezing enemies armor also has these little set bonuses that are activated when you've slotted in a certain number of these abilities in the same category this was undoubtedly my favorite aspect of the game I really enjoyed discovering more of these finding the necessary materials to upgrade them and I spent a lot of time in this menu experimenting with various setups I really applaud the team that designed this kit and I can only imagine that it gets more engaging if you try to synergize with a co-op buddy to combat this though enemies have momentum draining attacks indicated by this blue flash unlike the normal attacks these are not very well telegraphed at all for some reason these are all like Split Second animations you can't Parry these either you have to dodge them I I don't know why all of these are so fast and they don't just damage your momentum either they also do a lot of damage to your health I will say there is quite a variety of enemy types here with their own parryable attacks and momentum drainers that you'll need to learn some of them are just awful to fight though especially the flying ones due to all those camera and collision issues I mentioned is this one basic flying enemy that shoots projectiles and fires a tracking momentum draining laser and when you kill it it just bum rushes toward you before it instantly explodes and drains your momentum very annoying to deal with especially if it dies off screen because of your abilities and you just get bombed out of nowhere add to that the blinding VFX the size of these bosses the camera issues the number of enemies dog piling you it just becomes this insane visual noise sometimes like look at this clip can you see what the boss is doing in the wise words of Dora [ __ ] no I should note as well that I've been using the term boss lightly across this review because all the major bosses in this game are just introducing you to a new one of those big dudes that you'll see in the open world so every time I've said boss I'm just talking about one of these big guys there is only one actual bespoke unique boss in the game that being the final boss who was also a complete joke to fight foreign [Music] what I will say is that I think this game somewhat delivers on the spectacle promised in the trailers when you've got one of those big boys wailing on you and you're in the zone you're parrying blow off the blow the camera pivots to emphasize these exchanges the boss finally freezes and you unload your barrage of active abilities before executing him with a final shatter that makes you feel like a badass that's when the game lives up to what I can only assume deck 13 intended but I can count maybe two or three times these moments occurred throughout my playthrough as most of my experience with this game is defined by a vapid story in a half-baked open world with frustrating combat what a shame this is indeed I'm sure those who enjoyed the surge were cautiously optimistic about this bold New Direction for the studio and it seems that caution was warranted while there are a couple novel ideas here this was was clearly not deck 13's best work I can only suspect they'll let bygones be bygones here and return to their souls-like roots for their next project as I cannot imagine this one will fashion the kind of following or admiration their previous releases did unfortunately Atlas Fallen is an overall disappointing title and I do not recommend it [Music] I don't know about you guys but I've noticed that I'm using wallets in a very 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Channel: Skill Up

Views: 235,780

Keywords: skill up, skill, up, gameplay, games, guide, atlas fallen, atlas fallen gameplay, atlas fallen news, atlas fallen ps5 gameplay, atlas fallen demo, atlas fallen combat, atlas fallen coop, atlas fallen preview, atlas fallen deck 13, deck 13, atlas fallen classes, the surge, the surge 2, action rpg, darksiders, atlas fallen review, atlas fallen impressions, atlas fallen hands on, atlas fallen bosses, atlas fallen cutscenes, atlas fallen game, xbox, pc, 4k

Id: 3RjTAfSQxSU

Length: 32min 9sec (1929 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2023