This blend of Devil May Cry and gigantic monsters hits the heights.
The hotly anticipated Atlas Fallen has revealed details of its aerial combat system alongside two new gameplay trailers showing the awesome hijinks players can get up to in the air. The game is a new epic action-RPG set in the semi-open world of Atlas, where you play as a hero traversing these vast sand-covered landscapes and aiming to take down Thelos, the god who rules this place with an iron fist.
Luckily, there’s something up your sleeve: a gauntlet that is a Swiss army knife of magical tricks, prime among which is the ability to manipulate the sands that lie everywhere around. The gauntlet can create shape-shifting weapons and use the sands to move the hero around, yeeting them into the skies and granting incredible aerial mobility up there, letting you explore the world in a new way but also creating a combat system that’s equal parts Devil May Cry and the Incredible Hulk.
Atlas Fallen’s combat is about movement and momentum, with regular switches between ground and air underpinning a flowing but heavy-hitting rhythm. The hero’s moveset remains a graceful constant, with individual moves that seamlessly transition into one another, allowing the attacks to remain ongoing as you manipulate the sands to keep yourself airborne and dodging enemy offence. Soon enough, air and ground combat won’t feel like different things.
The joy is in experimentation, with the hero capable of quick vertical switches and changing the plane of battle to suit the situation. Basic combos are easy to perform but more complex combinations of the moveset let you exploit enemy positions and the environments to devastating effect, crashing into them unseen from above, or whooshing individuals up with you for an isolated beating. Certain of your weapons, like the sandwhip, can also be inserted mid-combo to instantly transition between air and ground.
While your airborne abilities are incredible, you’re not Superman: it’s the sands that keep everything afloat, as well as your air dashes and combat moves. Part of the fun is in eking out the time in the air, seeing how long you can stay up there zipping around before having to quickly touch ground and launch again. Atlas Fallen even includes mechanics that reward aggression with increased airtime, such as successfully hitting wraiths to replenish air dashes.
Mastering airborne combat is the only way you’ll ever stand a chance of reaching Thelos, with it being essential to take on flying enemies and wraiths so gigantic that their weak points can’t even be targeted from the ground. These larger wraiths will also suffer, being debuffed and losing abilities, as you injure them, so prioritising targets becomes more important as the encounters get gnarlier.
Outside of combat, the world of Atlas is vast and crammed with secrets, treasures, pieces of lore and side activities everywhere. Getting airborne is often the only way to find what’s all around, and the vertical scale of this place and its extreme topography will soon have you awed. Atlas Fallen releases August 10 on PC and consoles, and pre-orders will receive the bonus DLC Ruin Rising Pack. You can keep up with the game on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
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