Once they are in a fight, attacking and defeating enemies causes players to gain momentum, which fills a bar at the bottom left of the screen. In between fights, players can equip their character with Essence Stones that buff or add abilities, assigning them to one of three tiers in the process. It’s faster-paced than I expected from a developer who previously made Souslikes, but it’s the Ascension system that really caught my attention. The core combat revolves around attacking, dodging, and parrying, with weapons shapeshifting as you use them in different ways. Satisfying combatĭeck13 and Focus Entertainment had yet to go into much detail about Atlas Fallen’s combat before now, so I was shocked by how unique it was.

That’s where Atlas Fallen’s engaging combat system comes into play. Of course, that’s only one part of the game, as players will run into many enemy Wraiths and need to fight them. Open-ended games with large worlds like Atlas Fallen can live or die on how satisfying they are to explore, and making movement fun is a crucial way developers can make traversal enjoyable.įorspoken was able to capture some of that magic despite its problems, and it looks like Atlas Fallen has too. After I entered the game’s open world, I could play around with all my movement options and found them to be a treat. The few seconds of Atlas Fallen‘s sand-surfing and fighting in its Gamescom trailer caught my eye last year, and both lived up to the hype.Īs I worked my way out of a cave at the start of the demo, I learned how to raise large structures out of the ground, surf across large patches of sand, and dash through the air with the help of my gauntlet. But neither game’s story is the appeal of either to me: It’s their fun traversal and combat that interest me.

The narrative wasn’t a big focus in my preview build, though, and the script is full of jargon that probably will only make sense once I play more of the game.Ī talking companion bonded to the player’s arm and hand is already an unexpected narrative coincidence between Forspoken and Atlas Fallen. That gauntlet has an amnesic spirit named Nyaal living inside it and is now trying to save the world from gods that have left it in desert-filled ruins.

The basic premise is that player was a person from the lowest caste in this world’s society who was bonded with an ancient gauntlet. Based on my demo, I’m not fully sure what to expect from Atlas Fallen’s mysterious story yet.

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