I’m a fan of the Playstation hardware and lately it has been my preferred platform for gaming. I love a lot of Sony’s first party IPs and I’ve liked a number of their execs over the years.
But damn do their store policies suck.
The biggest issue is their refund policy, or lack thereof. If you buy a game on Steam or Xbox and it just sucks, you can ask for a refund (assuming your playtime is under a few hours… I don’t have the exact numbers at hand.) On Playstation, not so much. Even if a game outright fails to run, the only way to be considered for a refund is talking to customer support and hoping you get a reasonable representative on the line. The official policy is that if you’ve downloaded the game, you are no longer eligible for a refund. Which is completely ridiculous.
But that’s old news. What prompted today’s outrage is learning that Bethesda is running a sale on ESO Plus. You can get the 1st month of a recurring subscription for 50% off. Of course there are some conditions, depending on platform:
Steam: Sale is open to anyone, even if you currently have a sub. Steam wins! (again) ESO Store: Anyone without a currently active sub can get the sale price Xbox: Anyone without a currently active sub can get the sale price Playstation: Only people who have NEVER had a sub can take advantage of the sale. Game has been out on the platform for 10 years, so if you signed up for a month at launch, no sale for you!
Why are Sony’s terms so much more strict? Who knows? Because whomever makes these store policies hates their customers, I guess.
Anyway, that’s my rant for today. I wish I could feel as good about the Playstation Store as I do about the Playstation hardware.
Having some issue with comments here at Dragonchasers HQ. Specifically in Chrome, at least for me (the comment box isn’t displaying). But I need to get to the day job so will have to circle back to this tonight.
Update: It actually might be more than just comments… I think my new hosting plan has some ‘features’ I’m not aware of and I’m having strange caching issues…
OK I think we’re back. When I switched hosting plans the ISP turned on a really aggressive caching system. Since I already was caching via Cloudflare I think things were getting gummed up. Sorry to throw around these highly technical terms. LOL
But if anyone sees anything wonky PLEASE let me know. I appreciate you!!
And now that I have time we tentatively re-enable some caching options to keep things snappy…
Last night we finished up Season 1 of Daredevil: Born Again (Disney+) and I wanted to share some thoughts on it. Not a review but more like “this is the vibe I got”.
So first some background on my preferences. When Netflix was doing a slate of Marvel ‘street level hero’ shows, I really enjoyed most of them. Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and The Punisher were all really good, but Daredevil was my favorite. (Sorry Iron Fist, you don’t make my list…you staring at your hand all the time wasn’t that entertaining). Also I’m not a comic book reader so I don’t have any issues along the lines of “This is not who he is!” that I’m sure true fans of the original material might have had. This was all before Disney bought Marvel, which put an end to the Netflix shows.
It’s been a few years, but Disney decided to revive Daredevil. I don’t know if Daredevil: Born Again is the start of a new slate of shows or a one-off, but I was happy to see Charlie Cox return as Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and Vincent D’Nofrio as Wilson Fisk/Kingpin, because in my mind these two actors ARE these characters. Not to root for the bad guys but D’Nofrio just slays every scene he is in; he’s the best Marvel villain on video, in my opinion.
Anyway the season (9 episodes) was a little uneven for me. The premise at the start is that Matt Murdock has put aside the Daredevil gig in favor of helping people in his day job (he’s a lawyer). And while he was doing that bit, the show hit a bit of a lull for me, but towards the end it ramped up — as the title gives away, Daredevil is back, baby! — and the final episode left us on the edge of our seats and wanting more (a second season is coming).
Actually that’s not exactly true. It wasn’t so much that mid-season was a lull as more a change of focus on Fisk’s Machiavellian criminal dealings. I promised no spoilers and I’ll stick to that, except to say that the show kind of reflected real life is some pretty disturbing and obvious ways. The whole season felt like a long set-up to a new world for these heroes and villain to cavort in.
In addition to Daredevil and Kingpin, a few more characters from that universe pop up and I hope to see more of them next season. I mean what I REALLY want to see is a whole new set of shows focused on these characters, most of whom I find a lot more interesting and entertaining that Iron Man, Capt America and Thor.
Anyway, maybe I’ll circle back to this once the show has been out for a while and I feel more comfortable spoiling things, but for now I just want to say Daredevil: Born Again is in my opinion well worth watching. (The critics don’t seem to agree with me but what do they know, right!? Actually I dunno where I got that idea but after I posted I went off to read some reviews and they’re actually pretty good.) If you started but stopped partway through the season I’d urge you to go back and finish because it gets really good towards the end!
I learned this weekend that an old friend of mine had died and it keeps creeping up and saddening me. It’s strange because this is a high school friend and I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in probably 40 years or so. And it would be highly unlikely that I’d every speak to him again even if we both lived to 100.
But still, knowing he is gone is a bummer.
I guess the worst part is how he died. If he’d had cancer or a heart attack or something it would be tragic but, y’know, just one of those bad things that happen. But the facts are much sadder. Basically he drank himself to death.
He’d been dating the woman he married last time I saw him; heck they may have been married. After that he got a good job, got a nice house, had a couple of daughters who grew up and gave him grandkids… and then he started drinking heavily. After he was arrested a few times for DUI, he lost his good job because he couldn’t get to it. Then he got a local job but lost that one, too. He lost the house, the wife and kids split, and he wound up back in his boyhood home. His parents had died a year apart from each other so he was living alone in the country with no driver’s license.
He’d been in rehab for a month, but when he came out he was right back to drinking. Three days later he got drunk, fell and hit his head and laid there, alone in his childhood house, for a few days before someone found him. He was still alive but his brain was swollen and he later died in the hospital. I got all this background from the friend who took the time to seek me out and tell me S was gone.
I still remember him as this good looking, easy-going young dude. We were really tight through high school. There were 4 of us and we had ‘our’ table in the cafeteria and later on when we could all drive, we’d cruise around at night, drink beer, smoke, chase girls, go beach riding, skateboarding and throw the Frisbee around. Just normal stuff. We weren’t angels but we weren’t bad kids either. Just regular guys. He got me out of a few bad binds over the years, and vice versa. The four of us were always watching out for each other.
We were all into model rockets in a big way too; he had an incredible attention to detail and his rockets were always gorgeous while the rest of us were just slapping ’em together to shoot them off as soon as possible. That has always stuck with me…how much time he’d spend on something that generally had a limited life span, model rocketry being what it is.
Since those days, I’ve done nothing significant in my life and I often feel remorse about that. I’m not the hero of anyone’s story, just a generic background character. And I felt kind of bad about that. But now I see how much worse things can get. I don’t know what happened to S between then and now; I don’t know what kind of demon he had eating away at him. And I wonder if we’d still been in contact if I could have helped.
All too late now. I read his obituary and the picture they had was of an old man (he was 63 or 64 when he passed). I guess that means I’m an old man, too. I just kind of find it hard to believe.
Notes on the AI used in this post. Image created at DeepImg with the prompt “A well maintained and realistic graveyard. Close up to show just a few graves. Daytime, clouds in the sky. A few trees. No people or wildlife. It should look like a real place. No buildings, just a few graves.”
Based on the joke a friend made, I apparently go through this every time my blog comes up for renewal. I’m talking about trying to decide if I want to keep the lights on here. I don’t blog very often these days, but when I do get a fire in my belly to say something I’m happy to have a place to say it. Plus, y’know, it’s been running for something like 23 years and that’s tough to walk away from.
Money is tight these days and bound to get even tighter what with the state of the world, so I was even more tempted to let it all go. Or I think I was… honestly I don’t recall how much soul-searching I did last time. But in the end, assuming everything works out, I think I found a significantly cheaper plan that should be sufficient given how little traffic I get.
And traffic is another thing; I’m not sure I care about growing an audience (and if it hasn’t happened after 23 years it’s not very likely it will). In fact I might not WANT to grow it all that much. I mean it’s cool to know lots of people are reading what you write, for sure. On the other hand, it’s cozy and comfortable thinking it’s only people who you know and generally get along with who are your audience, y’know? I’m not here to court controversy or get into a big debate about topics, even though I’m sure both of those activities are great traffic drivers.
Every time I make the decision to renew I also make a declaration about how if I’m going to keep paying I’d better blog more. So I’ll say that again. I need to blog more. I actually enjoy writing blog posts, but I don’t enjoy the meta stuff around it; taking, re-sizing and alt-tagging screenshots (or coming up with images for posts like this one), checking the SEO variables, sharing to services and so forth.
But if I accept that I don’t care about traffic then I don’t really HAVE to do any of that, either. I can just spew out whatever is on my mind on a given day and hit publish. Which is what I’m going to do right now. So we’ll see, eh?
It’s the end of March and I still haven’t done my taxes. Adulting sucks! But here’s the recap. Short and sweet this month!
Playing
Death Stranding has been my ‘main game’ this month and I’m having a good old time just puttering about. I spend more time building up and maintaining the world’s infrastructure than I do actually moving the story forward. Eventually I will move forward though as I find it really compelling (and really weird). Death Stranding 2 will probably be a Day 1 purchase for me in June! I have a deadline to meet!
“Death Stranding is NOT a walking simulator, Sam.”
Dragon Age Veilguard hit Playstation Plus and I started playing. I like it well enough but not enough to pull me away from Death Stranding when I’m playing on the PS5. I don’t honestly know if my issue is with Veilguard itself or just that I’m so hooked on DS. I’ll probably circle back to this and start over at some point, but it certainly didn’t hook me like Dragon Age Origins or Inquisition did.
Borderlands 2 is the one game I finished this month and I had a good time, but everyone has already played it and I already posted about it, so I’ll just leave it at that. If I had infinite time I’d replay it with a different class but there are SO many games to play!
Atomfall turned out to be a bit of a disappointment for me personally, but I already wrote about it. It is short enough that I figured “OK I can just plow through this.” but after a couple sessions of playing I thought to myself, “Why?” and uninstalled. I spent $25 or so to upgrade to the Deluxe Edition so I could play early and boy did I learn my lesson doing that. Honestly it’s a lesson I have learned before but every few years I seem to need to burn myself to remember why pre-orders and deluxe-versions are rarely a good idea.
Watching
Arcane (Netflix) was amazing. This animated series is based on League of Legends but you don’t have to know anything about the game to enjoy the show. It’s 2 seasons long. Season 1 is a relatively straightforward origin story for the characters. Season 2 gets pretty weird and is dense. I think I could watch Season 2 several times and get something new out of it each time. Which season is ‘better’ really depends on your personal preferences but both are really good. Heck it’s worth watching just for the gorgeous animation style (and the soundtrack is really good, too).
The Wheel Of Time season three has been really good so far, for me at least. I honestly am not a fan of the books since they just feel way too drawn out and Jordan re-used certain phrases so often I find it distracting. Or at least that’s how I remember them; it’s been a while. So this is a rare case where I enjoy the show more than the books, though PartPurple, who is in the midst of a re-read of the books, grumbles about how much is different. We went back and re-watched S2 before diving into S3, but now we’re caught up and waiting for more episodes to drop.
Reading
Armageddon’s Children — Book 4 of the extended Shannara series. It’s I think 60 years after the end of Angel Fire East and the apocalypse has arrived. The demons and once-men are working to exterminate the remaining people. We meet some new Knights of the Word and a group of street kids living in the ruins of Seattle. I liked this one quite a bit but I do love a good apocalypse!
Elves of Cintra — Book 5, and oh guess what? Elves have been here all along, remaining hidden from humans. With most of humanity now gone, some of the characters from Children team up with the elves to try to save the elven race from the demons. But I’m not finished yet so not sure what is going to happen. Enjoying this one so far, too!
So yeah, that’s the March highlights. I’m taking a 4 day weekend in April and hope to spend those extra 2 days in a gaming stupor, yay! And I guess do my taxes. Oh and sign up for Medicaire which, omg I have been sent about 50 different junk mails with different companies wanting to be my Medicaire provider and I’m just so confused. Like I said, adulting sucks!
This is what a Lyft ride looks like in the world of Death Stranding. Yes, that is a living person in a body bag that Sam is carrying; the bag is to protect them from TimeFall
I don’t usually do posts about games I don’t like, but I figured I’d make an exception in this case since I happened to buy the Digital Upgrade for Atomfall and got early access, so have been playing the past few nights. If the things that bug me about the game save someone from spending their money on normal release day tomorrow, I’ll feel like I helped.
I should also hasten to add that I don’t think Atomfall is a bad game; it’s just a bad game for me and my personal preferences. In fact I think it’s a pretty good game for the right gamer, and even then there’s a lot I do like about it: the setting and the exploration are both top notch, and the voice acting is very good, though the cast is small enough that a lot of characters have the same voice. Also worth noting that it is launching at $50 and is on Game Pass at launch.
Finally, I’ve only played 4-5 hours so far so things could change. On the other hand I’m told it’s about a 20 hour game so in theory I’m a quarter of the way through.
OK enough with the pre-ambling. Here’re some of the things I don’t like about Atomfall.
Character Progression
I have to admit I’m a shallow person who likes seeing numbers go up. The industry’s RPG-ification of virtually every genre is something I embrace. Atomfall doesn’t have a lot of character progression. There’re no levels, there’s no experience points. The only character progression is via a skill tree. To get a skill you have to do two things. First you have to find/buy a Skill Manual. Reading one of these essentially puts the set of skills in that manual into your skill tree, but it doesn’t actually give you the skill. In order to unlock the skill you have to use some serum things that, again, you find or buy. It’s an interesting system but I do miss “leveling up” and getting skill points. Essentially the serums are your skill points, and how many there are in the world is anyone’s guess.
Gearing
The only gear in Atomfall are weapons. Weapon stats are not numerical but like “High damage, slow reload times.” Weapons come in 3 tiers: rusty, normal and pristine. You can combine 4 rusty weapons of the same type (along with some gun oil) to create a normal weapon, and I believe 2 normal weapons to create a pristine. Guns are fairly rare and so is ammo, so you’ll probably use melee weapons a lot of the time. Weapons don’t seem to degrade but of course ammo runs out which again nudges you towards melee. I kind of miss having more stuff to search for like armor or trinkets or something, but this just isn’t a looter-shooter (nor does it claim to be).
Combat and Expendables
There’s no real point to combat in Atomfall unless removing the person(s) you’re fighting is required to complete a task. The only upside to killing someone is searching their body and they don’t often carry all that much. Your health is replenished by bandages that you craft or find, and there are various potions (again, craftable once you find the recipe) that’ll buff you. But the game seems to really be pushing you towards avoiding combat as much as possible. The resources you need to craft things like bandages or Molotov cocktails don’t respawn, but the enemies do. This means you have to really weigh the pros and cons of each fight. Are you going to use more resources in winning the fight than you get back from looting the body? If so, probably best to sneak on by if possible. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this system but I’m more a guns blazing kind of player and I get bored with sneaking around pretty quickly. I also get a weird low-level anxiety about running out of materials in the world.
So those are my biggest issues, and none of them are flaws with the game; not in the least. They’re just systems that don’t really fit my particular playstyle, and if you think these things might bother you too, might be worth waiting for a sale or something (and of course if you have Game Pass you might as well try it). It is, in my opinion, an amazing setting and an amazing set-up and I really, REALLY want to love this game, but I’m just too impatient and too shallow for it to really hook me. I’ll still finish it and all, but buying the upgrade to get early access was a dumb move for me. Maybe this post will help someone else.
This weekend I completed the main campaign of Borderlands 2. There’s not a lot I can say about a game that is this old and that was this popular; everyone who is interested in looter-shooters is probably familiar with the Borderlands series already.
But I still wanted to share what was the good, the bad and the ugly in it for me.
The Good
Well generally it was pretty good. I like playing shooters but not ones that are too realistic. Borderlands fits perfectly in my groove as far as that goes. It’s sharp looking but I never feel like I’m shooting real people. I spent about 35 hours on the character I finished with, and probably a dozen or so more on trying other classes, and I didn’t feel ‘relieved’ to be done with it, like I am with many games. In other words it didn’t feel drawn out to me, and even deep into the game I found little things that surprised and delighted me. I was level 31 when I went into the final boss level and at level 29 or so I got a gun that talked. At first I had no idea where the voice was coming from! I mean, not a big deal but there were lots of similar things that cropped up.
I also LOVED the “Badass” system. This is a series of many, many tasks that you’ll complete just by playing. Each one levels up your ‘badass rating’ and every so often you get a point to spend that will give you some small increase to stat: things like gun damage, or more health, or shield recharge rates. The clever thing here is that these perks apply to ALL your characters meaning if you play through again with a 2nd character it’ll already have a lot of perks waiting. I thought this was a nice feature for someone who wants to get deeply into the game.
Did you know Moxxie is the mother of Scooter and Ellie? Or that she was once married to Handsome Jack?!
And I have really come to like these characters. Briefly, in Borderlands 1 you could play as 1 of 4 characters, and they show up in Borderlands 2 as NPCs (three of them are in the image at the top of this post: Mordecai, Lillith and Brick). They are all bigger than life in various ways. When I did a quest for Moxxi and she pulled a long gun out of her cleavage, my inner 14 year old couldn’t help but giggle, though once upon a time I was kind of offended by a lot of these characters; once I got to ‘know’ them that dissipated.
The Bad
This is going to sound strange to a lot of people, but I was playing for the story and the design of the game is pretty bad for that. You frequently have voice-overs from one of the characters and that’s a lot of how the story is told, but you can rarely actually hear them since enemies constantly scream, your own character is “barking” frequently, and of course guns and explosions. If you miss what is said, you’re out of luck. There’s no log or anything, at least that I found. That was one of my biggest issues. I WANTED to hear what the characters had to say!!
The Ugly
One of my issues with Borderlands has always been the tone. Just the crass humor. I mitigated this somewhat by playing Gaige the Mechromancer. She is a young girl so her voice isn’t grating and her barks are generally not too bad, though for a while she did yell “God! It smells like piss and tacos!” way too often. But mostly she talks about what a good robot pal she has. The only time I got REALLY annoyed was when I was fighting a faction called Tunnel Rats or something like that, and they just SCREAM constantly. They scream when they attack, they scream when they die, they scream all the time in between. The game ALMOST lost me in that section.
The other part that was ‘ugly’ to me were all the containers. I get that this is a looter shooter but why do they feel the need to put 4 crates next to each other instead of one crate with a lot of stuff in it. And why do I have to hold down a button to collect the ammo in these crates if I’m playing solo. I am never not going to take ammo if I have room for it. Guns and gear I can see, but ammo should just jump into my inventory.
And really, that’s about all I have to say. I can’t believe it has taken me this long to get into Borderlands. Atomfall is up next but I do plan to come back to the Borderlands series. I’m debating on if I should play the Pre-Sequel or just move on to Borderlands 3. The vague goal is to be finished with 3 by the time Borderlands 4 comes out in the fall.
In last month’s recap I was bummed because I hadn’t finished any games in spite of my best efforts. Better news this month as I finished a few! Huzzah! With the deck cleared I was ready to decide what came next, and decided to try to do better about making use of Playstation Plus Extra, and to a lesser extent, Game Pass (I already play a fair number of Game Pass titles, actually). Also, I need to get more selective about what I get hooked on. There are SO many really really good games out there; arguably more than I have time to play. Mixing in “OK” games that I stick with out of stubbornness is starting to seem silly. It wasn’t too many years ago that I never finished ANY games and I made a concentrated effort to get better about that, and I think maybe I’ve swung too far the other way. Time to work on a happy medium and if I get to 15 or 20 hours in a game and I know I have a LONG way to go and the game is just “OK” it’s time to cut my losses and move on to something I enjoy more.
Final note: I was extra special bad about remembering to take screenshots this month. Sorry for the wall of text!
Playing
Finished Horizon Forbidden West, including the DLC, but didn’t go for the Platinum trophy or anything like that. There were even still areas of the map that I’d never visited, but by the time the DLC was over, I had had more than my fill of the world. Mind you I’ll definitely play Horizon #3, whenever it comes, but I do think Forbidden West was a bit too much of a good thing.
Finished Atlas Fallen and even wrote about it. This is a great example of what I was talking about in the intro. It was an OK game but I was pretty sick of it by the end and it’s not like I walked away bursting with fond memories of playing it or anything like that. I should have walked away earlier. The feather in my cap of saying “I finished” isn’t so fancy as to be worth the time I spent playing.
Finished The Gunk. I remember when The Gunk came out it was kind of a poster child for Xbox Game Pass, because it was a smaller game that, MS argued, might not do so well selling as a stand alone title but people would play it on Game Pass. Or something? Does anyone else remember that or am I inventing it? Anyway The Gunk has you exploring an alien world, using your vacuum cleaner arm to hoover up this gloppy substance called The Gunk. Early on it has the same satisfying feeling as playing Power Wash Simulator, only as you explore there are environmental puzzles to solve, most of them based on sucking things up and then throwing them. I didn’t track my time but How Long to Beat says 4-6 hours, and yet I still felt like it overstayed its welcome. The game got buggier the farther in I got, and they introduce some combat which always felt awkward as heck. The puzzles themselves were near perfect for me though. I never had to look anything up, but I was stumped for a bit a few times. So for me, perfect level of difficulty. But it just started feeling repetitive towards the end. Maybe if I’d spent a long Saturday session playing through I’d feel differently. I started this one in 2022 or something and finished earlier this week. 🙂
Just doing a bit of cleaning in The Gunk
Finished Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition and that was a surprise. It’s the first time I’ve ever finished a Borderlands game. It was only 1 class and once the story was done, so was I, but still…this was the month I finally ‘got’ Borderlands. So much so that…
Started playing Borderlands 2 and I’m so far enjoying it quite a bit. I played almost all the classes until level 10 or so and then decided on the Technomancer (??). The little girl with the robot buddy. She does feel like Easy Mode but she makes me chuckle and isn’t as annoying as some of the player characters are. It’s been fun meeting characters I know of from a general awareness of Borderlands and overall, it’s just a fun game to churn through.
Warhammer Chaosbane was the first game I applied my new philosophy too. I have it via PS Plus and have had it installed forever. Figured I’d better play it in case it leaves (I can never remember which games are in the rotating collection and which are “permanent as long as you have PS+” collection). I did so, and spent about 14-15 hours and got to level 35 and the 3rd major area and it was… fine. But it really felt like going through the motions. It’s an ARPG so it’s probably more fun with friends, but in some ways it felt half finished, too. For instance you pick up gold from enemies and are awarded gold for quest completions but I never found a single thing to SPEND gold on. When you enter a new area you’ll be told “We have merchants and shrines if you need them” but neither is anywhere to be found. Anyway, point is I thought “This just feels like killing time.” so I stopped playing and deleted it to free up some space.
Death Stranding is another game I really want to finish, and I want to do so before Death Stranding 2 comes out later this year. This is my 3rd attempt to finish this game. What’s strange is that I REALLY like it but it takes a certain amount of inertia to get me to boot it up. It always feels like a game that is going to be kind of exhausting to play, though it really isn’t so I’m not sure why I feel that way towards it. Anyway if you aren’t familiar, Death Stranding has a strong asymmetrical multiplayer aspect where you can build things in the game world that other players can take advantage of, and vice versa. This far after launch the world isn’t quite as busy as it was when I first played when the game initially released, so when DS2 comes out I want to be ready to jump right in and run with the invisible-but-definitely-there crowd.
(The header image of this post is from Death Stranding, with Sam checking out a giant hologram/chirogram of a Tallneck from Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West.)
Watching
Arcane (Netflix) I’d watched the first season of this when it came out, but now I’ve got PartPurple hooked too. We’re watching the whole series and damn is it ever well done!!
Mythic Quest (Apple TV+) I’ve loved this show since episode 1 and so far my opinion hasn’t changed. I’d love to know what non-gamers think about it.
Reading
Finished Angel Fire East, book 3 in Terry Brook’s “Word & Void” series. I liked it better than book #2. Each of the 3 books in this series takes part over a holiday weekend and about ten years apart. Book 1 was 4th of July and the events took place in a large park in a small town, where the townsfolk played softball, picnicked and watched fireworks, all of which was quite relatable to me. Book 2 took place around Halloween in Seattle and the holiday didn’t really factor into it much, nor did Seattle feel as fully formed as the park in book #1. In book 3 we’re back to the park and small town only now it is Christmas and a snow storm and while there was a bit too many words spent on how many clothes our characters needed to put on before they went outside, it once again felt like a place I could see in my mind’s eye. As far as these being “Pre-Shannara” there was really nothing here to link the two worlds as far as I’m aware. Still, overall as a series I’d give these a thumbs up, but just a basic thumbs up, not a super enthusiastic thumbs up. They were enjoyable but ultimately kind of forgettable.
Armageddon’s Children is the next book in the Shannara series. We’re still in our world, though it is on its last legs. The year is around 2100 and the Earth has been ravaged by war, polution and disease. I was about a third of the way through it when I read a scene that I’m almost CERTAIN I have read before, so I’m thinking maybe I read this series back in the day. On the other hand it isn’t THAT old (published in 2006) and I’d like to think I can remember back that far. So we’ll see. Maybe I read an excerpt or something.
One of the only good things about getting old is that you can re-read or re-watch things from like 40 years ago and it’s like you’re experiencing them for the first time all over again!! LOL
So yup, that’s February. The world is a dumpster fire, but at least I had a pretty good month of gaming. Hey I take the wins where I can get them!!
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.
In this shot I’ve circled a distant large enemy flying around in circles
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.
Combat can be pretty hard to read at timesA still shot taken with photo mode. We are in the bottom left and the vaguely crab-like sand-wraith takes up the rest of the screen
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.
