Atlas Fallen Review

ign.com:

I keep wanting to love Atlas Fallen. I mean, it’s a delightful Prince of Persia-inspired open-world action RPG with big ideas, big monsters, and even bigger weapons to fight them with, so it’s got that going for it. And I did enjoy myself as I explored each of its four unique zones, which stretch as far as the eye can see and deliver some mouthwatering, if kinda washed out, vistas. After spending about 18 hours with its mix of respectable monster slaying and brisk platforming, I can comfortably say it’s a good time – especially if you bring a friend into its seamless drop-in co-op. At the same time, its C-tier story is so campy and bone-dry – in both writing and character performance – that it’s clear Atlas has fallen a notch or two.

The middling story, which centers around a generic clash between a human rebellion and a tyrannical regime, starts out rough. No, there are relatively few bugs and the opening is pretty short – I mean, like, physically rough for my custom avatar, a rugged yet scholarly desert dweller. After a few introductory conversations with other desert dwellers in the first area, it was promptly implied that he’d been blasted in the face with a whole bunch of sand and left for dead before the opening cutscene, which kinda sucks considering his indentured servitude as one of the Unnamed. That’s the bottom caste of Atlas Fallen’s sand-strewn medieval world – which, as we learn through some apocalyptic mumbo jumbo narration – is ruled by an evil sun god named Thelos and ravaged by giant sand monsters called wraiths.

This is a pretty cool setup, but the execution of the plot that follows is thinner than the middle of an hourglass. For example, poorly synced lip movements and unenthusiastic voice acting sap