I love janky imperfect games. Frankly, I don’t trust people who don’t. Janky imperfect games make the world go round. These games usually feature interesting ideas and concepts that eventually get refined in a future, better game or outright copied by a AAA game. These games are the heart of the industry. If you can’t name a single janky imperfect game that you love, I believe in my heart that’s irrevocable proof you have bad taste.

That’s why when I first heard about Atlas Fallen, while everybody else looked past it, I was kind of excited. An open-world AA action RPG is something that really gets my rocks off.

Now, of course, if I had played it on release, or even any time within a year of release, I would not be writing this right now. You can probably guess what happened.

Atlas Fallen was released on August 10, 2023, and I had no clue. I didn’t hear a single soul mention it and I had completely forgotten about it because let’s face it, there are too many video games. It wasn’t until almost a year later that I learned it came out. Don’t ask me why but one day I felt a strong compulsion to look up the “RPG with sand” as I knew it at the time. Something I was doing or watching triggered my memory and I wanted to know when that game that I thought looked neat came out.

Once I learned, much to my surprise, that it came out a year ago, I did what any person would do. I put it in my Amazon cart (physical media ftw) and left it there for weeks.

Now, before you judge me, just know that I was totally going to buy it as soon as I finished the games I was in the middle of playing. I swear. But then I found out that the game would receive a big free update that would do two important things;

That second thing was much more important to me than the first thing. Ben Starr is cool. He voiced Clive in Final Fantasy 16. Clive is cool. Final Fantasy is cool. If Ben Starr was being added to the game then I would wait to get it until he was in. That’s exactly what I did. The update, called ‘Reign of Sand’ was released in August 2024 and I bought the game in November for Black Friday.

As soon as I got it on Black Friday I installed that bad boy and got to playing.

Sike! I let it sit for another month while I finished other games.

However, I did eventually play it. After all, you wouldn’t be reading this if I hadn’t because I wouldn't have written it. But the real question is, once I finally played it, what was my time with it like?

Like I said up top, I love janky, imperfect video games. But like all things, they still have to be good. And Atlas Fallen is mostly not very good. There are some good things in it for sure. The things that made me want to play it in the first place are good. It has a few interesting ideas that would be good in a better game. But overall, I was disappointed, and being disappointed in a janky, imperfect AA game hurts me much more than being disappointed in a shiny, polished AAA game.

I’m used to being disappointed in those because they’re often bloated, homogenized, and full of soulless, derivative ideas. Being disappointed in AA games hurts because those are the games often full of interesting concepts, ideas, and a respect for players’ time that many AAA games don’t have. I want these janky, imperfect games to succeed.

Unfortunately Atlas Fallen starts off poorly and only gets a little better before going back to not being good. The story is dull nonsense that’s also somehow basically the same as Forspoken except worse in every way. (I like Forspoken by the way, that game is cool so don’t even start you troglodyte gamers) And if you think I’m being hyperbolic, I’m not. Atlas Fallen sees your character gain powers after a magical talking gauntlet binds itself to your wrist. Except this time the world is coarse and rough and gets everywhere.

I can forgive a game with a dull story if the gameplay is good and Atlas Fallen almost has good gameplay. Almost. Despite a world filled with sand being somewhat visually dull, Atlas Fallen gives you the ability to glide on sand which is actually quite fun. It’s a smooth and satisfying way to quickly maneuver around the world. There’s a cool idea in it called the momentum system where the better you perform in combat the more damage you do but the more damage you take as well. The higher the meter the more abilities you have available and equipable passive bonuses get activated. It’s a nice risk-and-reward system and is an interesting idea I’d love to see in a better game.

The problems of Atlas Fallen all come from the combat. Which is a pretty big deal for an action RPG that’s almost entirely focused on combat. There are two types of enemies in Atlas Fallen. Very large beasts and small to medium beasts. Fighting the very large ones is decent. Fun even. You can damage their individual body parts to weaken them, they each have different weak points to exploit and they can be decently entertaining battles.

But then comes the small to medium enemies. That’s where the trouble begins. These things bring all the cracks of this game to the surface. You see, the camera in this game is not good. Bad even. It will routinely go places you don’t want it to go and will make it hard to keep track of enemies. This isn’t a problem when you’re fighting a big enemy because you can lock-on to them and just hammer your combos. But when you have to fight the small to medium bastards you usually have to fight more than one which means you usually never know where all of them are which means you’re always going to be getting attacked from just off-screen and also flailing the camera around to see what just attacked you.

Remember that cool momentum system I told you about? Where the better you perform in combat the more damage you do but you also take more damage? Well, it’s not so cool when you get your meter up to use your cool abilities and then get attacked by an enemy you didn’t know was there which takes a quarter of your health. That’s not fun, it’s annoying. You know what’s more annoying? When you have to deal with that while also fighting one of the very large enemies who hit much harder. That’s a recipe for a very bad time.

Maybe I could have acclimated to the bad camera. Maybe I could have found something there. But I was playing Atlas Fallen at the same time I was playing Metaphor: ReFantazio which is a very good video game. I was about 40 hours in at the time which means I had about 800060 hours left before beating it. So every time Atlas Fallen annoyed me I just wanted to go back to Metaphor. Even worse, during my time with Atlas Fallen, they shadow-dropped Ninja Gaiden 2 Black which made me install the first Ninja Gaiden Black. That’s a very good video with very good combat.

When you play 3 video games at once and 2 are very good and 1 isn’t you tend to not want to continue playing the game that isn’t very good. Especially when 1 of the very good games is a similar genre to the not-good one. Ninja Gaiden Black even has its own camera issues but that game is so good that I was able to forgive those camera issues. Atlas Fallen is not good enough for me to afford it the same grace. No matter how much I like Ben Starr.