Deck13 studio has been famous for the last ten years focusing on souls-like games from Lords of the Fallen to The Surge series, and now it brings us Atlas Fallen, which mixes fast-paced RPG gameplay with Hack and Slash and Souls-like to offer a different and distinctive experience. Although the beginnings of the game made us optimistic and enjoyed the experience to the fullest extent, the overall experience did not reach the required level for me, and Atlas Fallen became one of the most disappointing games in 2023!
The story of Atlas Fallen is almost non-existent!
Deck13 studio wanted to make lore and a story with a great history in this world, but failed to do so, as the story talks about an ancient conflict between the gods, which in turn led to the destruction of the world because of their ego. Now we, the Gauntlet Bearer, must work together to defeat the world’s ruler, Thelos, in order to put the world back on track.
The problem here is that the story is almost non-existent and not important at all, with many unimportant characters whose names you will not remember five minutes after you see them. The studio couldn’t build the world the right way, especially since putting together strong lore fundamentals needed much better writing. We won’t spoil the game for you, but its ending is one of the worst endings I’ve seen in recent times, plus all the story’s events are explained through comic book-style shows without cinematic clips!
Want to know how the Atlas Fallen story goes? Well in short, the story goes like this: go to this area, collect 3 shards to power up your gauntlet, take down a bunch of bosses and go to the next area. This is repeated about 4 times, and that’s all the events of Atlas Fallen combined with the bizarre comic book offerings.
Our biggest problem with the story revolves around the age of the game, as the studio explained that the game requires between 15 to 20 hours to complete the story missions, but we were able to finish it within about 9 hours of play, and the full game time reached about 11 hours, as we completed some side missions to see what You introduce him to the game world (which is never much).
In short, the story of Atlas Fallen exists only to mainly serve the gameplay, but this in turn created another problem with many flaws in the game system and its design itself, so let’s talk in more detail about the game world and gameplay.
Excellent gameplay hampered by boring world design
The action in Atlas Fallen is smooth and fun
Perhaps the most successful thing that Deck13 studio has achieved with Atlas Fallen is the movement itself in the game where you can literally sandboard quickly to get from point A to point B without getting bored or running out of time. Action is the key here, and the gameplay and exploration are built on it, and that’s one of the few times we found myself taking every opportunity we had to enjoy the movement system and see how we could traverse areas and monsters and jump and do cool stunts.
Kombat itself started at the beginning of the game as a Souls-like experience, but by unlocking more abilities and weapons, it turns into a Hack and Slash system, such as Devil May Cry or Final Fantasy, for example. Kombat is fast and fun, but unfortunately the design of the monsters remains consistent throughout the events of the game, with almost the same bosses introduced over and over as they perform the same movements and fighting positions, but the game makes it difficult for the player by making their life level higher and this is a lazy design!
How does the game adopt the idea of role-playing (RPG)?
At the beginning of the game, you will be able to create your character, choose its gender, its appearance, and everything you want to change like any other RPG, but after that the game turns into a relatively ordinary action experience, there are no dialogue options that affect the events, and we do not see anything that expresses a true role-playing game. All the game offers is the ability to choose between three weapons, some clothes and armor, and change the skills available to you according to your playing style.
It can be said that the role-playing system here is a simplified version of any other game, and the game did not try to create a completely new idea to serve the wonderful gameplay that it offers, but rather relied on systems that we are used to in all games, which made the experience repetitive over the ten hours that we spent in it.
Repetition haunts everything in the game
Unfortunately, the game Atlas Fallen suffers from repetition in many things, the first of which is the design of the world, which is one of the laziest world designs that we have seen in our life. Despite the different regions and our transition to more than one new Region throughout the game’s events, the general shape is almost the same and most of the time you will find yourself moving between the sands.
The same applies to the confrontation system, almost all bosses have the same combat moves and in the second half of the game you will find yourself pressing the hit button over and over again without any thought or calculation of the situation. The game gets boring over time, and the combat system loses its luster that shined so high in the early hours of play. It’s unfortunate to see the studio taking the trend of increasing enemy lives to make the experience more difficult instead of creating new encounters or different enemies!
In addition, almost all the puzzles are Kobe Beast throughout the events of the game, so all you have to do is run a specific machine, which in turn activates another distant machine that you have to run towards, and do that about five or six times until you finish solving the puzzle. Literally all the puzzles in the game are built in the same style and it’s annoying.
Oh we almost forgot about the side quests, and the reason we forgot about them is because they are so unimportant and it would have been better if they weren’t there in the first place! The game asks you to do the same thing in all the missions so much so that we were expecting what the characters would tell us before they did. Terrible laziness in designing the side content made us not think about returning to it at all after we spent about an hour and a half with it.
Cooperative play saves the day
Perhaps the thing we enjoyed the most about Atlas Fallen is its experience with one of our critic friends, as we finished the whole game together, and we were happy to learn that the progress in the game is saved on both sides and not only on one side like most of the games that have been released in recent times. The game only supports the cooperative experience for two people, so you can enjoy the experience with one of your friends, and this certainly increases the overall fun.
We also liked that the game knows that there are two people playing, and therefore you will find all the dialogues and cinematic clips in which the players are present and they do different things, and this is evidence of the interest of Deck13 studio in this aspect of the experience.
Unfortunately, the technical experience was not perfect
Perhaps the most impressive thing from a technical point of view is the game’s graphics, as it is based on the Unreal Engine 5 engine and uses the Lumen lighting system significantly, which reflects lighting very close to the ray tracing technologies that we are used to from Nvidia, for example. The game does not explicitly support ray tracing, but it takes advantage of Unreal Engine 5 in these matters.
The design of the characters, environments, and monsters was wonderful, despite the similarities between the regions, but the details in them are distinctive with attention to the smallest things, so that the image that you see in the end becomes dazzling to the eye, and it is one of the best games that exploited the capabilities of the new generation in providing a beautiful, fun and calm experience for the eye.
As for the technical performance, we tried the game on a computer with the following specifications:
- Core i5 10400F processor
- 32 GB of DDR4 RAM
- Nvidia RTX 3050 8GB card
- NVMe SSD storage
We were able to run the game at 1080p resolution with high settings, and in return we got frames ranging from 70 to 120 frames per second, depending on the region and the situation in which you are. In general, the technical performance was constant throughout and did not fall below 70 frames per second, regardless of the number of enemies or details on the screen.
Unfortunately, the game is full of technical problems, as the review version contained a huge amount of glitz and bugs, whether the sounds completely disappeared, the music disappeared, the enemies disappeared, or you died for no reason sometimes, and the annoying thing is that Crash happened to our friend with whom we played the game over and over again because he wanted to activate specific skill. All of these problems affected the experience and made it annoying most of the time.
In addition, the game suffers from a major problem when using it on DirectX 12, as you find a terrible amount of chopping and dropping frames, so we advise anyone who intends to try the game to play it on DirectX 11 until the studio solves these problems.
In the end
The idea of coming up with something new or creative is generally a good idea, but when you look at Atlas Fallen you’ll find Deck 13 studio’s notable blunders in design decisions, with the end result being one of the most disappointing experiences of 2023 alongside Redfall. Atlas Fallen doesn’t know what it wants to be, a strange mix of action-adventure, role-playing, souls-like and hack-and-slash, which we didn’t want in any way, and the studio had to stick to the strong ideas it presented with The Surge. Add to this the lack of story and repetition with a huge number of technical problems that made us want to finish the game as quickly as possible, and it is an experience that we do not recommend!
Gamer Zone Club evaluation
- Story, characters, and dialogues: 3
- Gameplay and movement in the world: 7
- Design tasks and map: 4
- Technical experience as a whole (graphics, sound, and performance) : 6
Advantages
- Stunning visual design with Unreal Engine 5
- Smooth and fun motion system
- The gameplay started strong in the first game
- Solid performance on an average PC
- Fun co-op experience
Disadvantages
- Repetition of world design and tasks
- Very weak boss encounters
- Almost non-existent story, nothing was presented
- Noticeable technical problems and their abundance made the experience very boring
- Not to exploit the RPG system
