finished playing Chivalry 2 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕

finished watching Vertiginous 🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑

finished watching The End of Oak Street 🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑

wants to watch Judy

wants to watch The End of Oak Street

finished watching The Invite 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗

finished watching Terminator 2: Judgment Day 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

finished watching The Terminator 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

finished watching Tuner 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

finished playing Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand 🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑
Atlas Fallen is Deck 13's best Action RPG so far and a culmination of their year-long experience in the genre. The huge world is filled to the brim with collectibles, beautiful vistas, diverse fights, and manifold quests. It's a shame they're ditching their FLEDGE engine for Unreal in their next game because I've always appreciated having another competitive engine on the market that performed well for me under any circumstances.

The Good
- Combat is extremely versatile, the long airtimes feel great and the impact of your weapons feels powerful. I also liked the system where you need to maintain momentum to become ever more powerful during combat at the tradeoff of being more vulnerable.
- Collecting skills and perks like trading cards was a fun spin, and there are TONS of both. I'm glad you can save up to three loadouts, because every build plays uniquely and gives plenty of room for experiments.
- Movement in general, and sand sliding in particular, is crisp and fun, and every upgrade constitutes a noticeable improvement to your movement repertoire.
- The world is huge and incredibly beautiful, consisting of several maps that all have their individual charm. The included photomode helps you capture the beauty of this organic, fantastic world. I was originally sceptical whether there would be exclusively sandy wastelands, but just like Mad Max this game is able to capture all the different aspects of desert biomes in beautifully rendered sceneries. Kudos for the high draw distance that always makes you feel like you can see over the entire world and beyond.
- The playtime hits the exact sweet spot: If you stick to the campaign, you're going to be done in under 15h, and you can add another 10h for collecting stuff and fulfilling sidequests (of which there are surprisingly many for this kind of game). This makes for a focused experience where you never feel forced to go after optional content, it's usually laid out cleverly along your way to the main quest.
- All in all, the soundtrack was enjoyable and fitting. There were plenty of audio cues underlining gameplay mechanics.
- Secrets and loot are hidden everywhere and the paths to reach them are fun to traverse.
The Not-So-Good
- The writing and story won't win many awards, but are generally functional. I wouldn't call it bad, but since the voice acting is also sometimes a bit off, story and narration are not this game's strong suit. There weren't really any surprises in the story, and I disliked the many strange pauses in the middle of sentences by the narrators.
- Camera issues are probably the most annoying thing about this game. First of all, I found it weird that the vertical camera movement was capped at such a low angle so you couldn't really figure out what's above you. Second, during fights you often lose sight of your target and then it clips into the camera and you're left guessing what your enemies' next attack will be. I think this is also a problem of the lock-on targeting mechanism that doesn't feel snappy and easy to control.
- There are segments where you play as another character, but in hindsight it feels like they could have been omitted from the game entirely. You don't learn anything new for the main game except for some lore drops. If anything, this feels like its only purpose was to stretch play time.
- The shop system is a bit useless and doesn't really add anything valuable to the experience. You can buy some materials needed for skill upgrades (didn't need this a single time), dyes for your armor, treasure maps, and on some occasions armor. Most of these can also be found or earned otherwise. So the whole money economy feels a bit forced in and the game could probably do without it, considering there is also a second currency, "essence", which you need for upgrades.
- There are no puzzles like in Darksiders or Zelda, which could have provided a bit more challenge to the collectibles.
- Too often during combat, a lot of attacks will come down on you simultaneously or with the tiniest bit of delay between each other. In these cases, even a successful block will leave you vulnerable since only the first strike is blocked and the rest of them will damage you. In addition to that, I missed the enemy attack indicators way too often, for example because there were so many visual effects on the screen or other noises were louder than the attack sound. And if you miss the time window for blocks due to these reasons, you're toast.
- Some cutscenes are quite clunky and don't really get any emotion across, often because the camera is very static or the protagonists only exchange a few short sentences that don't really feel connected.
- Our hero is very one-dimensional and doesn't have any interesting personality. Instead, they keep yapping about destiny, helping the people, restoring peace bla bla bla.
Conclusion
I'm glad I played this game, as the unique movement mechanics are snappy and fun, and the combat feels weighty and powerful. With tons of build and equipment combinations, you have plenty of experimentation ahead of you, and the variety in enemies definitely requires it. Apart from camera issues, the game is technically polished and rums smoothly. Its weak spots are writing and storytelling, but the game is focused enough to be over before that becomes an issue. There is a coop mode which I haven't tried, but it sounds like a fun idea. Definitely looking forward to Deck13's next game, as they've been constantly refining their trademark mechanics and style over the last few games.