Conclusion

With Atlas Fallen, Deck13 is moving away from the Souls-like structure of their past titles to embrace a more traditional open-world adventure. The story in Atlas Fallen follows a character who defies oppressors after discovering a powerful gauntlet, which possesses magical abilities. While there's excellent traversal mechanics and an engaging combat system, everything does feel a little bit clunky, especially combat. Still, gameplay is a strong point, with satisfying movement and combat, and the addition of special abilities adds variety and excitement. There's a lot to discover in the vast open landscapes that do look a little bit empty quite often. Overall it's a solid game, but launched at the wrong time. A huge chunk of the game's target audience is playing Baldur's Gate 3 right now, and Starfield is coming soon, which makes it very hard for this AA title to gain significant sales.

Visually, Atlas Fallen looks very decent, especially the beautiful landscapes and well-designed levels stand out. I'd say this is more of an achievement of the map designers than the engine programmers. In terms of rendering the game does look a bit dated. While texture details are good on the highest setting, the amount of geometry on models is severely lacking. Textures do look sharp and crispy, thanks to the application of noise textures, which ensure there's always good detail, even when standing close-by. Rendering of humans is of fairly average quality, faces often look worse than in 10-year old games.

What's very distracting is the fact that there is pop-in everywhere you go. The LOD system isn't working very well, so as you traverse the map, you often see objects switching between their level-of-detail states in a non-fluid manner—other engines are solving this much more elegantly. I also noticed a substantial amount of texture pop-in. At first a low-resolution placeholder is displayed, which gets swapped out with a higher-resolution version after a second or two—very distracting and immersion-breaking.

Hardware requirements of the game are quite light, actually even a bit lighter than expected. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with highest settings you only need a Radeon RX 6600, Intel Arc A750 or RTX 3050. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you'll be fine with an Arc A770, RTX 4060 or RTX 3060. Even 4K60 is in reach for a lot of cards. For example, the Radeon RX 6800 XT gets 67 FPS, the RTX 3080 72 FPS and the RTX 4070 74 FPS. We compared both the Vulkan and the DirectX 12 renderer, the Vulkan API is always the better choice. Especially on Intel Arc, running in DX12 mode kills performance, but we've also seen performance drops on NVIDIA and AMD, too. Given the good performance I do wonder why Deck 13 didn't give us better graphics, less pop-in would be the first entry on my wish-list.

What's very important to achieve high framerates is that you need a powerful CPU—the game is fairly CPU limited. As we reported last week, there's a serious performance bug when running on processors with E-Cores (all newer Intel CPUs). For some reason the game will schedule important work on the E-Cores, which makes the other threads on the P-Cores wait for results from these slower cores—for every single frame. That's why we disabled the E-Cores in our processor, through BIOS, for all testing in this review. What doesn't help either is that the game has a hidden FPS cap of 200 FPS, which can never be exceeded, even if you set the FPS limit to 360, which is an officially supported setting. I guess nobody ever tested this, or they would have noticed.