Atlas Fallen is Deck 13's latest action title, featuring an expansive world filled with sand and monsters. Read on to learn if this game, where a gauntlet challenges the gods, is worth your money in our First Impressions review.
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Atlas Fallen Review and Score Explanation
Atlas Fallen Review Video
Atlas Fallen Score Explanation
| Overall | Atlas Fallen is an "okay" action RPG, getting several things right in all the wrong places. However, it does accomplish its job as an action game rather well thanks to its unique Momentum core mechanic and decent co-op mode.. |
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| Story | Atlas Fallen's story isn't anything new. The entire plot can be summarized into a few statements due to how basic it is. In fact, the whole setting of the protagonist coming into possession of a talking piece of accessory seems oddly familiar (Forspoken, in case it wasn't obvious). None of their characters are particularly endearing or memorable, either. |
| Gameplay | Deck 13 has once again cooked up a feast for their players, as Atlas Fallen's combat system is robust, enjoyable, and wholly immersive, thanks to the Momentum mechanic. The co-op experience is also incredibly wild and engaging. However, it also suffers from a notable lack of difficulty, even at the game's highest difficulty settings. |
| Visuals | While Atlas Fallen's graphics can be considered very pretty, it pales compared to current-era games that it would undoubtedly be compared to, such as Final Fantasy 16. Fortunately, that means it's very friendly to the most common gaming hardware worldwide. |
| Audio | Despite the strong audio accompaniment to the game's decent combat experience, Atlas Fallen, unfortunately, suffers from painfully average voice acting. On top of that, the music transition between screens is quite jarring, often switching between one and another abruptly. |
| Value for Money | The game sits at a precarious position between "buy it ONLY on a discount," and "worth your money at its full price." The game is good, but it doesn't stand out from the competition. Only consider purchasing it at full price if you're a fan of the developers' works or the genre itself, but otherwise, get it on sale. |
Atlas Fallen Review: Atlas Almost Fell
Ah, yes. God Eater 4 by the developers who did not make the three other games.
Atlas Fallen initially caught my eye with their impressive-looking monster designs for the Wraiths. These are the game's antagonistic creatures that serve as the main enemies. As someone who has played every single God Eater and sunk countless hours into most Monster Hunter games, the prospect of fighting giant monsters once again excited me. It didn't help that the trailers made the game look so enjoyable.
That is until I actually got my hands on the game.
Don't get me wrong, though. Atlas Fallen has, by almost every metric, a sound combat system. Its unique Momentum core mechanic also delivers a fresh layer of paint to the otherwise battered and beaten ideas inspired by other games. The co-op experience is also enjoyable enough that it can make up for many of its shortcomings. It allows two people, regardless of progress, to go through the campaign together in an enjoyable manner, providing a challenge without having it feel unbalanced.
However, it sorely lacks the appropriate level of punishment to balance the kind of considerations that Momentum encourages. Make no mistake; I'm definitely not a hardcore soulslike player or anything like that. But even I felt like it didn't go far enough to deter players from just being reckless.
And that kind of oversight is quite painful for a game whose entire existence revolves around its incredible combat system.
Atlas Fallen Full Game Review
Pros of Atlas Fallen
| Things Atlas Fallen Got Right |
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 Momentum Is An Incredibly Fun Mechanic We're In A Desert, But It's Not An Empty One A Great Game to Play with Friends |
Momentum Is An Incredibly Fun Mechanic
Of course, any action RPG must have a serviceable combat system. Fortunately for Atlas Fallen, they deliver on this aspect rather well. It's fast-paced, technical, full of flair, and, most of all, complemented by a very immersive audio experience.
The game's unique core mechanic, Momentum, can be quickly credited for its solid combat system. It is a gauge that slowly builds up as the player maintains an offensive and drops after a certain time outside combat or when the player is hit. As the player's Momentum builds, their offensive power goes up, which is made plainly apparent by the ever-increasing size and lethality of the weapons they wield. Yes, the weapons physically grow larger in size.
On top of that, certain essence stones that the player has equipped will also activate, allowing their character to enjoy its benefits. Players can also expend all of their Momentum to perform special moves called "Shatter," which can instantly kill enemies if they're vulnerable.
As the gauge fills, however, the player will also start to take more damage from enemies.
This wonderful system forces players to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of maintaining their Momentum. While some may think that keeping a high Momentum all the time is better, the possible price to pay for such a mindset is having to do everything all over again.
We're In A Desert, But It's Not An Empty One
The deserts in Atlas Fallen are far from deserted. Despite the game repeatedly insisting that the world was much more lush and populated before everything went down, there's no real shortage of (hostile) life to encounter and (ruined) cities to explore.
Exploration rewards players with an abundance of resources to consume, equipment to use, essence stones to equip, worldbuilding to enjoy, and, most importantly, enemies to fight. This, of course, extends to even the commonly tedious chores side quests.
Undertaking a grand journey to explore every nook and cranny of the world is further encouraged by the game's incredibly fun sand surfing feature. This replaces the protagonist's ability to sprint as long as he has sand beneath his feet, and it is so fun that minigames should be developed centered entirely around the feature.
A Great Game to Play with Friends
What's better than experiencing the game's unique Momentum core mechanic? Experiencing it with a mate. Not only that, but Atlas Fallen's co-op also allows both players to race through the desert via sand surfing. That alone is easily the best fun two players can have in the game.
To be clear, that's not a jab at the game's quality or anything. Sand surfing really is just that fun. The co-op experience honestly elevated the entire game for us.
The game has properly considered instances when two players who have progressed to different points would play together, something quite a few games surprisingly ignore. Depending on which player is hosting the game, Atlas Fallen will adjust the joining player's stats to a suitable level.
So, if a player who has completed the game joins the world of a player who is just starting out, then the game will reduce their stats to roughly that of the host's. The opposite is also true, with a low-level player enjoying a massive boost to their stats when they join a world close to or at the end of the game. There are some discrepancies in the equipment available to each player, but probably about 30% of a player’s effectiveness is reliant on equipment. At the very least, a friend playing on normal difficulty would have no issues coming to another friend’s game at the highest difficulty.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like Atlas Fallen's co-op has a form of rollback netcode built into it. For those who are unfamiliar with rollback netcode, put in simple terms, it allows the connected players to run the game independently on their respective machines. It's more focused on showing smooth gameplay to the player, and less focused on keeping everything in sync at all times. That means that a wonderful co-op experience might be diluted by instances of the game slowing down to a crawl, especially if one or both players have bad internet connections.
While we don’t know for sure that they aren’t implementing rollback netcode, the slowdowns we experienced seemed to suggest otherwise.
Cons of Atlas Fallen
| Things That Atlas Fallen Can Improve |
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It Has A Story As Dry As The Desert It's On Character Creation Is Very Limited The Game Isn’t Punishing Enough Bogus Bugs Bug Us, But Barely They’re All Characters Behind A Screen |
It Has A Story As Dry As The Desert It's On
Atlas Fallen is set in a fictional world where Essence, a rich mineral filled with power, can be mined from the ground. In a bid to obtain as much of it as possible, the Sun God enslaved humanity to toil for these rocks as an offering to him. In the Sun God's quest to gather Essence, he razes the once lush planet into vast swathes of desert filled with hulking monsters known as Wraiths.
While the setting seems pretty novel, the entire plot is as standard as they come. The game revolves around the premise that the player, as the protagonist, must use an ancient power to rescue their people from the clutches of an evil entity. That's basically it. While following a trope is not inherently a crime in itself, the content involves a lot of padding through side content that are basically just chores.
Sure, accomplishing those chores is rewarding in terms of getting more items. But completing these quests doesn't actually help give readers a better, more immersive experience to what is already a predictable story.
Character Creation Is Very Limited
Imagine my utter disappointment when you couldn't make Handsome Squidward using Atlas Fallen's character customization options.
Unlike Elden Ring's extremely powerful character creator (which has brought us some horrifying but equally beautiful characters), Atlas Fallen's character customization offers us a little in the way of creating our own personifications. It was the developer's aim to create a realistic setting for players to immerse in. As a result, though we get all the standard options, like hair style and color, facial features and outfit color, there isn't a great degree of control that is given. Everything has to be within the parameters of what they want their character to look like. This means, unfortunately, there's no way to make Gigachad in the game (because such perfection isn't realistic).
On top of that, the armors that players could equip, which usually dictates the fashion trend in RPGs, all come as a set. In other words, there is no way for players to mix and match different armor pieces together, like in Elden Ring or in Diablo 4. Though players can equip cosmetics and dye their armor later on, it will still fail to match up to the sheer customizability that piecing them together can offer.
The Game Isn't Punishing Enough
Atlas Fallen's Momentum core mechanic is fantastic. But while on paper, it should force players to always consider the circumstances and weigh their options carefully in battle, the actual result is different. In the end, players are still free to be completely reckless (unga bunga, as the kids might say nowadays) in their gameplay.
The reason is that the game doesn't punish its players for doing so, other than the minor slap of the wrist called a game over screen.
Two apt comparisons would be deaths in Elden Ring and wipeouts in Monster Hunter. In the former, death punishes you with having to redo possibly dozens of minutes of crawling through challenging dungeons and takes your runes (the currency) away until you return to your previous spot. And god forbid you die before reaching that place because the game will just throw all your unclaimed runes into the garbage.
Monster Hunter punishes its players differently. Because each run is a fresh lobby, a wipeout means that players would have wasted all their time getting to wherever they all died. And depending on the kind of hunt they are on, they may have to restart anywhere from a dozen minutes to an hour of their time.
Compared to the two games mentioned above, Atlas Fallen not only allows you to keep everything after every death, but the game's autosave function also always returns you to a point where getting back to where you died is an easy feat.
Bogus Bugs Bug Us, But Barely
During our playthrough of the game, we experienced several bugs (it's a feature, guys). Fortunately, almost none of them were game-breaking, and in fact, were quite entertaining to see. These include graphical issues, design oversight, and even strange quest progression.
For example, during a particular cutscene with Arif, a scholarly knight you’ll meet along your journey, the scrolls on his back suddenly started to spin wildly, as if his pack had a built-in washing machine. There were also instances where I saw characters getting cloned in place, obstacles lacking collision boxes, and elite enemies simply getting pushed out of a solid border.
Again, almost none of these were gamebreaking. I particularly enjoyed watching Arif carry a whirlwind on his back, and a cloned character looking like it had an afterimage as it moved. However, as entertaining as they are, experiencing them on a fully-released game is still somewhat concerning.
They're All Characters Behind A Screen
What personally disappointed me the most after finishing the game is the fact that even after around 20 hours of playing it, I still can't remember a single one of the characters. In fact, I had to look Arif up just to give a name in the section above. Of course, exceptions exist, such as the main protagonist and Nyaal, the spirit inhabiting the protagonist’s gauntlet, as well as the major antagonist Thelos. But everybody else is as forgettable as they come.
You will genuinely feel that they are simply characters behind a screen.
All of them feel like they were written directly off of pre-made templates of what a character with that specific personality would be like. For example, Khendra is your stereotypical knight with an authority complex. Everything she does is in an attempt to wrestle respect from the other knights. This is contrasted with Arif, who is well-liked by the knight order due to his natural aloofness. While it sounds like a character with a semi-decent motivation and a clear goal that could be explored, she enjoys no character development at all, even when confronted with a tragic revelation later on.
None of them made an impression that was particularly impressive or notable. In fact, most of them simply appear in and out of the game's relatively short main campaign, which further hinders any attachment that can be formed between them and the player.
The awkward voice acting doesn’t help, either.
Even the main protagonist and Nyaal are no exception to this lack of depth. Though they are easier to remember since everybody mentions their names often, both are dull beyond belief. It wouldn't even be an exaggeration to say that they're the same character but with a different background.
That's an incredible shame, especially when there are great examples of how to make an entertaining pair where one lives within the other. One such example is NIS' Revya and Gig from their classic title "Soul Nomad & The World Eaters."
Still MUCH better than Forspoken though.
Atlas Fallen Overview & Premise
Take up the gauntlet. Liberate mankind. Destroy the Sun God.
Atlas Fallen is set in a world ruined by the Sun God. Here, giant deadly monsters roam the lands while humans are forced to dig the earth. With their names taken from them, humans have lost their identities. After centuries of slavery, the protagonist, one of the nameless, chances upon a power that could rival their captor. Thus, their journey to free mankind from servitude begins.
Who Should Play Atlas Fallen?
Atlas Fallen is Recommended if You Enjoy:
• NieR:Automata
• God of War
• Devil May Cry
Anybody who appreciates a good action game will find Atlas Fallen a good deal. However, the relative lack of customization options will likely throw RPG fans off.
Is Atlas Fallen Worth It?
It's a Great Game, Just Slightly Over A Reasonable Price
Despite all the game's faults, Atlas Fallen is still, at the end of the day, a very enjoyable experience. Its combat system is robust, and its co-op features can turn most frowns upside down. However, the subpar story, forgettable characters, and lack of character customization options will definitely turn some people off.
For those looking to just turn off your brain and enjoy some fun action, you definitely can’t go wrong picking up this game.
For everyone else, though, wait for it to go on sale. Even a small discount would justify a purchase of the game.
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How Atlas Fallen Matches Up to Recently-Released Games
| Games That Came Out Recently | Why Get Atlas Fallen? | Why Get the Other Game? |
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 Baldur’s Gate 3 |
Atlas Fallen is an Action RPG with fast-paced gameplay at an accessible difficulty. It excels in letting its players experience wicked audiovisuals to tie in their robust real-time combat. | On the other hand, Baldur's Gate 3 is a faithful and passionate Dungeons & Dragons adaptation into a video game. Tabletop players will surely love the work that went into Baldur's Gate 3, as well as the freedom it provides to its players. It’s also wildly popular right now. |
 Jagged Alliance 3 |
Combat in Atlas Fallen is a chaotic mix of planning and on-the-spot decision-making. It creates a hectic gameplay loop that always keeps players on their toes. This is a staple action RPG experience that Atlas Fallen also excels in. | But those who prefer more strategic gameplay and resource management would definitely prefer Jagged Alliance 3 instead. Not only that, the game runs on the premise of getting a bunch of misfits together to fight for a cause, which is vastly more entertaining compared to Atlas Fallen's two protagonists, who share too many traits. |
 Remnant 2 |
Fans of action games with three-dimensional maneuverability would enjoy the freedom Atlas Fallen provides. The verticality of many fights makes for wild desert rodeos, wrangling wraiths like raging bulls. | Remnant 2 is an excellent pick for fans of soulslike games who have asked themselves the question, "What if Dark Souls, but with guns?" With a wide variety of character customization options, builds, procedurally-generated areas, etc., each round in Remnant 2 is guaranteed to be a satisfying experience for dozens of hours. |
How Atlas Fallen Matches Up to Similar Games
| Games Similar to Atlas Fallen | Why Get Atlas Fallen? | Why Get the Other Game? |
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 Monster Hunter Rise |
Atlas Fallen’s gameplay loop is essentially quite simple; players simply have to dodge and parry attacks, all the while taking every opportunity to output damage as best they can. It’s a very accessible gameplay that anybody can enjoy. | Players seeking to plan, strategize and learn their enemies will enjoy Monster Hunter: Rise better. It’s also much more grounded in reality (aside from its oversized weapons and monsters), Players must use a variety of tools, from traps to exploding barrels, to bridge the physical gap between their human characters and the giant beasts they hunt, rather than the smash hard, kill harder approach of Atlas Fallen. |
 God Eater 3 |
With three vast maps to explore and the tools to do so in style, the Atlas Fallen experience features much better out-of-combat gameplay that God Eater 3 simply cannot match. | On the other hand, God Eater 3 has stellar gameplay that can stand toe-to-toe with Atlas Fallen, perhaps even beat it. On top of that, the co-op experience is much wilder, being able to support up to four players simultaneously compared to Atlas Fallen’s two player co-op. |
 NieR:Automata |
Atlas Fallen offers wide build varieties for its players to experiment with. Thanks to over 100 usable essence stones, a variety of perk options, and armor with innate abilities, particularly creative players can spend dozens of hours testing different combinations and still have more to try. | Accompanying NieR: Automata's incredible gameplay is a story and character writing so good that it deserves separate review articles on those aspects alone. The game also features instances of it changing genres, such as from an action game to an isometric shooter, which serves to keep its players’ attention stimulated throughout its many, many hours of gameplay. |
Atlas Fallen Trailer
Game8 Reviews
Atlas Fallen Product Information
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| Title | ATLAS FALLEN |
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| Release Date | August 10, 2023 |
| Developer | Deck13 Interactive |
| Publisher | Focus Entertainment |
| Supported Platforms | PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S |
| Genre | Adventure, RPG |
| Number of Players | 1-2 |
| ESRB Rating | Teen |
| Official Website | Atlas Fallen Website |
