Atlas Fallen is a classic jack-of-all-trades, master of none. It’s an open-world action RPG Metroidvania platformer with co-op that tries to do so many things it rarely does any of them well. That doesn’t make it a bad game, just, more often than not, a forgettable one. I had some fun surfing its sandy dunes and pummeling giant monsters with equally giant magic knives and hammers, but the novelty wore off long before the game had ended, leaving me ultimately disappointed as I wandered the apocalyptic ruins of its world in search of a reason to keep going.
Deck13’s previous two games, The Surge 1 and 2, were grim Souls-likes that revolved around sawing off enemy limbs in a brutal near-future dystopia. They were suffused with a distinctive mood of anti-corporate technophobia and buoyed by a clear focus on challenging combat and environmental mazes that strung you along from one encounter to the next. Atlas Fallen is very different in almost every way, trading the punishing fights and bonfire structure of Dark Souls for open-world checklists and arcadey arena brawls. Unfortunately, none of it quite comes together, resulting in an uneven mess of ideas that get boring pretty…