When the first trailer for Atlas Fallen was released, it caught my eye with the concept of a world that is beholden to the sands and as more of the game was revealed, my interest got even more piqued. Now that the game is here, I can say that my expectations were set way to high.

In Atlas Fallen, you play an Unnamed character, that is not because you get to choose, but rather that your character is considered the lowest of the low in terms of societal rankings. You are someone that is given the worst menial tasks and when the caravan you have been assigned to is directed off the safe route and through the wilds, where the dangerous Wraiths are known to be, chaos does ensure. Not content to be a pawn for the captain of the guard any longer, your character is told that if they want to be treated nicer, they need to find the thief who fled the camp with something of the captains. A simple task normally, except in the wilds, Wraiths will appear at random and when one does, it usually means death for those nearby. In your quest however, you come across a gauntlet that is calling to you, a voice asking for help and in picking it up, your adventure really begins.

The voice is that of Nyall, a being of chaos who once ruled the world and the pair decide that teaming up will be the best thing to remove the Forever Queen from the throne and take down Thelos, the god ruling over everything. The problem is that the gauntlet was once used and its wearer was unable to control the power it contained, which caused the rebels who were relying on it to be destroyed. However, fate gets in the way and a former member of that group finds you, after you fail to control the power early on and advises that it can be controlled, if the gauntlet is restored to its former glory. Once restored, the quest to take down the queen begins and that is all I will say on the story front, mostly because by the time you have restored the gauntlet, you have only a little time left.

While the overall story has some interesting beats, the characters that you meet throughout it are boring beyond measure. There are times when they might say something interesting, but those are rare and more over they fit into moulds of completely stereotypical, that its hard to care. When you meet the Knights of Bastengar, their leader mistrusts you, as her sister was the previous wielder of the gauntlet and nothing you say will convince her that this time its different. Except when you tell her that her sister, whom she believed to be dead is actually alive (or was at some point), she does a 180 and becomes your most ardent supporter. Now characters growing and evolving are very much welcome, but here they don’t evolve as much as have a switch flipped. Even the most dangerous threat goes from mildly annoying to pure evil and then back again, with very little provocation.

Thankfully, the gameplay more than makes up for the weak characters, mostly. The bulk of the game will see you exploring the world, helping folks out and upgrading your skills. As you upgrade/repair the gauntlet, you do get more abilities like double jump and air dash, but until then movement feels a bit slow. Except when you are on the sand, from the outset, you can surf around on it and it feels amazing. The only downside to sand surfing is that you are often attacked by Wraiths while you do it, which in turn leads you to entering into combat to give them a good thrashing. The time out of combat does have a lot to do, but its very much a lot of a little number of things, so the variety quick does run out, which is why its great that the combat is a heck of a lot of fun.

The game gives you two attacks, a quick and heavy one, and you can unleash them at any time, pressing and holding them, cycling through them or just mashing a button, it all causes some damage. Where the combat shines is with the essence system, where you can equip a series of buffs to give you a leg up. There are two types, the always on type and the trigger type and learning to equip the ones that suit your playstyle is going to take some getting experimenting. There are some always on options that increase your damage dealt, once you get to a certain number in the combo and then there are some that increase your momentum. As you explore the world, you can find more of them, along with materials to upgrade them, giving you even more damage potential.

The trigger effects are tied to your momentum bar, an energy that builds up as you attack, the higher it goes, the more impressive attacks you can trigger. But that momentum bar is a double edge sword, as the higher it goes not only gives you the power to hurt your enemies more, but also lets them damage you more as well. Upgrades can also be applied to your armour, which let you have more health, deal more damage and so on. Essence shards can be used to upgrade them and with each level you obtain with your armour, you get points, which modify the game even more. There is really a lot of customisation to be had here, to suit your playstyle and a nice bonus, the armour sets can be coloured to your style and the game offers up transmog.

This sadly leads into the bad part of the game, the presentation, it is so all over the place and unstable that its hard to spot the good. There are some great moments, the world design is incredible, the locations are vast enough that crossing them via sandsurfing can take a good amount of time. The enemy designs are fun and challenging to combat, but there are only so many of them, meaning you will have to deal with them over and over again. Where things fall apart is the characters, there is something off about all of them, the designs have some interesting aspects, but the execution never quite matches up to the potential. If that was not enough the game struggles across the board to maintain a consistent performance, with objects popping in all over the place. I was heading from the upper district in the capital to the main square and while taking with someone about a quest, all the objects, the carts, stalls, boxes and such, appeared during the conversation. Even some enemies and folks would appear at random in the world, as if the game couldn’t keep up with my sandsurfing and air-dashing.

On the audio front the games score is delightful, it is cinematic when it needs to be and then more tranquil for the rest. Even when I would pause the game, the music that played just sounded so nice, that unpausing the game was a hard decision. As I mentioned earlier the characters are not great and that extends to the voice work for most of them, they all sound bored. The main character voice comes in two flavours, male or female and as the games main art uses the female as its model, that is what I went with. The problem is that when they are trying to rouse people for a rebellion or just asking directions, the tone of the voice is the same, like they don’t care about the answer or even the question. It makes connecting to them quite a hard thing to do and I wonder who thought it was a good idea to use those recordings.

Atlas Fallen is a game, it has a world that is interesting, with some combat mechanics and systems that let you find options that suit you. The problem is that the game offers up a story that once you feel like you are making progress, rapidly comes to an end, has characters that are so bland watching paint dry would be more interesting. All of that pails to the technical issues, from items not loading in, characters behaving weirdly and even hard crashes out, it’s a mess. Behind all the problems is a game that offers up some fun, but the effort to find the fun is just too much for the end result.