I was browsing through the Playstation Plys Game Catalogue looking for some games to play and stumbled over Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand. I remember reading about it around the time it released in August of 2023. It came off as simple an OK game so I ignored it and didn't look more into it. Needing a new game to play I decided to give it a go, even if the reviews aren't the best.
What is Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand?
Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand is an action RPG adventure game set in a fantasy world swallowed by sand. Humans mostly live in fear from the sand wraiths that constantly terrorize them. It all seems to be orchestrated by an entity known as the Watcher. I have to be honest and say that the story itself wasn't very interesting to follow so I mostly drifted away in my own thoughts during most of the story sequences.
The game plays in 3rd person and you mostly traverse an open world inconsistently littered with collectibles and enemies. There's a good few unique elements to both overworld travel and combat that I feel can be interesting to a lot of people. To me it wasn't all that impressive. Just a few to many elements to keep track of during combat for my own taste.
The goods and the bad
Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand is a very cinematic experience. That's something I can appreciate a lot. The world is very pretty to look at and it's rare to have a game where you can enter photo mode anywhere in the game and basically have a work of art in front of your screen. There's nothing to take away from the visual quality of this game. Top tier in my opinion.
Combat and general movement is where the game lacks something for me. While combat seems to be somewhat deep and innovative it also feels slightly unresponsive. Like they focused more on adding lots of depth and systems to the combat instead of polishing the basics first. Combat is very focused on dodging and parrying but it's hard to track enemy movement once there's more than one enemy in a fight. It's just frustrating.
Movement isn't anything special. I'm mostly annoyed by the sprinting feature that has you magically sliding across the sand. It's not very clear where you can or can't use it. Sometimes you can use it on rocks, sometimes on wood and sometimes you can't at all. It's quite frustrating overshooting all your movement all the time, jumping to far or falling off a cliff just because you had no idea that your character would suddenly start his sand sliding at this spot when he didn't 5 meters back.
I spent roughly two hours with Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand and it simply wasn't enough to get me hooked. I guess we move on to the next. I've been looking to try Dave the Diver. I might go there.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.
too many videogames right now are made like art and not as ...videogames. too bad. o well, next!
Yup, indeed next. Dave the Diver is both art and an incredible game so far.
At first glance, this game bring to me the vibes of another Action- RPG videogame, and that videogame is Elex. And of course, a game that have unpolished basics, fails almost always to provide an intuitive and positive experience with their mechanics for the player.
Great pics (Y)
Regards.
I've never seen or heard about Elex. It seems to be rated pretty close to Atlas Fallen.
Yeah mate, Elex is a game developed by the same team that develop the Gothic and Risen Series (Y) .
❤️❤️
wtf lol
Maybe he is in love with you
Wow! It is a gaming plus art adventure. There are many games and films built on the sand stories. I like the ones who have scientific facts not only fantasy. Thank you for sharing; I would love to explore it.
Haha, the sand sliding thing looks funny. How does he do it?
Hehe, I love that gif.
But is that all? Like... HOW?
Hmmm... maybe not in the fiction that I write with Lex but in my other stuff I like to get a bit technical about magic. Makes it more real and less hocus pocus. lol
this game looks great, that creature looks like it will be hard to defeat. the design of the environment looks nice i like the way it looks.
I think it's very good that the game is successful in terms of cinematics because nowadays they don't do it as well as they used to but on the other hand for a game to be good it also has to have good gameplay lol.