encounter a map with more than five
fellow buccaneers.
The finished game promises an
ambitious crafting system where you
can team up together with fellow
pirates to build everything from rickety
dinghies to mighty galleons. Our
experience of building ships during
the 90-minute free trial? Nonexistent.
Our experience being eaten by giant
tropical tigers? Let’s just say if there
was a corporation called, ‘Tigers Ate
Our Face Off’, we’d be CEO.
The opening minutes are so
bemusing and hard to wrap your head
around, you’re lucky to walk along a
beach for 30 seconds without being
mauled by some terrible beastie. When
you’re constantly being eaten, it’s
kinda hard to go about constructing
a seafaring vessel that would make
Captain Sparrow weep into his pitcher
of rum. Weirdly, we actually don’t
mind occasionally getting munched
on by a huge croc. Animals may be
too aggressive in their current state,
but right now, Atlas’ array of slightly
off-kilter creatures are the best thing
it has going for it. And by off-kilter,
we mean bright blue crows and grey
giraffes with spines.Dull and crossbones
Atlas is obviously a long way off being
in a release-worthy state. During the
free trial, the inventory only decides
to work about half of the time, and the
skill tree refuses to unlock crafting
abilities and other perks even when
you have the XP to pay for them. These
menu problems will no doubt be ironed
out before the game’s full launch, but
this grating, buggy interface really
sums up the current state of this
broken buccaneer.
Quite how the Ark engine can
still be quite this ugly is borderline
baffling. Atlas has inherited some
seriously poor tech, and as a result,
it’s one of the blurriest, most poorly
detailed games we can remember
playing on Xbox One. We’d compare
it to playing an Xbox 360 title, but
that’s an unwarranted slap in the
face to the mega handsome Halo 4.
Can Grapeshot’s online raider iron out
these problems to attract the sort
of obsessive cult following Ark won
over? Right now, we would put more
doubloons on Long John Silver winning
gold in a 10,000-metre relay race. QShiver our collective timbers, is this
one flippin’ ugly high seas scoundrel.
While you’re at it, burn our eyes
to boot. Seeing as this massively
multiplayer pirate adventure is made
by Studio Wildcard’s sister team, it’s
no surprise the spiritual follow-up to
Ark: Survival Evolved is such an iris-
offending shipwreck.
We recently got our hands on Atlas
when the online swashbuckler popped
up on the Xbox Game Preview program,
and our inner freebooters have been
giving us hell ever since. On paper,
Grapeshot Games’ MMO promises
a sweeping experience. In reality,
however, it’s currently a broken mess...
albeit one where you can somehow
watch a parrot successfully fend off
a huge horned crocodile. Nature in
videogames be cray.
That the game isn’t ship-shape
right now shouldn’t come as too
much of a monocle-dropping shocker.
After all, Atlas launched into early
access on PC last December in a truly
sorry state. It may promise a shared
pirate experience encapsulating a
barely believable 40,000 players, but
individual maps are actually limited to- Even that figure looks absolutely
heaving when we get onto the all but
deserted maps. Whether hopping on
a server called ‘The Whale’s Solitude’
or ‘The Kraken’s Grasp’, we never
Atlas
MMO marauder’s shabby
state proves the pirate’s
life isn’t for you
Dave Meikleham
PUBLISHER GRAPESHOT GAMES DEVELOPER GRAPESHOT GAMES
ETA TBCMAP OF
HONOUR
Atlas may not be in
the best of states
right now, yet at least
its map is ambitious.
Being a pirate
adventure, you’d
perhaps think it would
just limit itself to clear
blue seas and the odd
tropical island, but
that’s not the case.
While lush,
jungle-covered
islands do feature
heavily, Atlas also
features baking
deserts and steep
mountain ranges.“One of the blurriest, most
poorly detailed games we
can remember playing”
Grapeshot struggled to initially release Atlas on PC. It was delayed four times last DecemberMore Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 033
PREVIEW