Thanks to a 3-day weekend, I was finally able to finish Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand today. Total time was about 20 hours though I spread that out over quite a while. “How Long to Beat” says the main story should take about 11 hours which tracks for me since I always take like twice as long as HLTB says a game takes.

In Atlas Fallen you play an ‘unnamed’ — the lowest class of this society — who finds a magical gauntlet. Once you put it on you start conversing with an entity name Nyaal who acts as your ‘guy in the chair’ and guides you around the world. The gauntlet gives you various skills and as the game progresses you’ll uncover items that expand its range of powers considerably. Your primary opponent are “wraiths” which seem like monsters made of sand. Due to the nature of the enemies there’s no blood or gore which was kind of a welcome change. When you defeat an enemy it just dissolves into sand.

Combat is action based with a lot of air-dashing, parrying and dodging. This is not a milieu I’m very comfortable with so I eventually turned the difficulty down to easy and that was plenty difficult for me (at almost 65 my reflexes are not what they one were).

Overall Atlas Fallen was, for me, the quintessential “AA” game. Some of it I really liked, other parts left me pretty cold. Here’s a quick run down of both.

The Good Stuff

The Setting

I loved the world itself. This is a world in ruin, mostly desert though there are still small bits of green here and there. The world is littered with truly huge ruins to explore that make you feel tiny at times. You spend a lot of time unearthing things from beneath the sand using a magical power. The wraiths that you fight can get pretty weird and fairly big; you can often make your way to the top of a ruin and see the larger beasties prowling the world and know you can go and fight them if you want to.

Traversal

I just had a lot of fun moving around the world. By the time you finish playing you’ll have a double jump and a triple air dash and between those you can (and will have to) cross over pretty wide gaps and chasms and doing so feels really good. You can control your fall nicely so landing on a tiny pillar or something is pretty easy. When on the ground there is this ‘sand surfing’ mechanic that feels like a really decent snowboarding game, though you can surf uphill as well as down. I spent probably too much time just manually traversing the game rather than using Fast Travel. Honestly it was the traversal that kept me playing the game; it was SUPER fun.

Graphics and Sound

The game looks pretty good. Character models are decent for a game with this kind of budget (I mean, I don’t know exactly what the budget was but I think it is safe to say it didn’t have the budget of a blockbuster from one of the really big studios.) Voice acting was solid too, though Nyaal was the exception as something about his tone always kind of bugged me. Personal preference there, though.

The OK Stuff

Combat

This is really subjective, but for me the combat was just OK. Your gauntlet has 3 tiers of power, each with an active and a few passive skills. As you fight you built up “momentum” which powers up the gauntlet giving you access to these skills. When I fight ends your gauntlet quickly powers down so this is a process that happens in every fight. A lot of enemies are bigger than you, or are flying, which means either relying on ranged skills, or jumping and air dashing to get you high enough to hit them. I did the latter and in so doing I may have been my own worst enemy. But it is the kind of game where you can stay in the air seemingly indefinitely by air dashing and hitting enemies, as each hit seems to reset that ‘3 air dash’ limit. But there were times where I’d just lose track of what was going on in all the chaos, and later in the game you’ll encounter enemies that drain “momentum” and I found those fights much less enjoyable.

Character Building

While you do have levels (and I was only level 10 when I finished) what really matters is the skills in your gauntlet. You add skills via Essence Stones which you find, craft or buy, and these can then be upgraded a few times each. Armor can also be upgraded, though armor comes as a complete set so you upgrade “armor” and not, y’know, your chest, your helmet, your gloves and so on. While this system was OK I had leveled up the skills I wanted to use pretty early. I think the game wants you to constantly be switching your skills around (you can set up 3 sets of gauntlet skills and switch between them via hotkey) but I couldn’t be bothered, which is maybe why combat was so hard for me. I think that if you were really into the game and playing on a harder difficulty and needing specific loadouts for specific enemies, the character building would be more interesting.

The Bad Stuff

Story

The story wasn’t bad per se, it just felt a bit mundane given how cool the world was. Basically there’s a god you have to take down but first you have to level up the gauntlet and that’s really it. There’s a bunch of side characters that seem like they could have neat stories but they’re not really explored that much. But my biggest issue with the story was how often Nyaal would “sense” that we had to do something rather than there being some bit of narrative leading to doing that thing. It felt like the writers ran out of time or ideas or something. He would always be “I sense we need to head to the top of that mountain” when the next quest objective was up there. It just felt a little lazy.

So for me, Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand was an OK game. If I was letter grading I’d give it a B. On a 1-5 number scale more like a 3.5. Put it this way: I finished it but left side quests and a lot of activities unfinished and had no desire to go back and do more. Happy to have played, happy to have finished but 20 hours was plenty. On the other hand if you’re into this kind of combat (and since it isn’t my thing I can’t think of other examples though I know they are out there: Devil May Cry maybe?) you might like it a lot more than I did.

As of this writing it is available on both Game Pass and one of the Playstation Plus tiers. I played it on PC Game Pass using an Xbox Controller and using Xbox Game Bar’s “Auto HDR” feature.