72 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2019REVIEWS ATL A S
So tell us, O muse,
how I and my friends
Joseph Bradford and
Joseph M. spent our
holiday vacation
subjecting ourselves to
more mental duress
than we normally face in
our jobs.
From the start our
time in Atlas played out
like something from a
Greek tragedy, The best
islands were packed
and closed to new players mere minutes
after launch, leaving us no choice but to
spawn in a desert region far from the
resource-rich tropics. After leveling past the
starter cap of level 8, we built a raft and
sailed to another desert island that looked
lovely from a distance, with windswept
sandstone cliffs evocative of the Vasquez
Rocks (go.pcworld.com/vasq). We staked a
claim and called it home.
In truth, it was a hellhole. Pools of
freshwater didn’t exist (which isn’t all that
common in Atlas outside starter freeport
islands), but that might as well have been as
true for the groundwater you could find on
other islands by hitting X to plop on the
ground and digging. When we did find such
water, it took forever to respawn and we were
in competition with the island’s other unlucky
souls. Metal, so important to many projects,might as well have been a myth. Powerful
“alpha” lions and snakes terrorized us—killing
us with a single chomp—and then they
stalked around our bodies, preventing us
from rescuing the meager resources we’d
managed to find. (For now, at least, the alphas
have been removed.)
It gets worse. Dehydration forced us into a
suicide cult, or at least until we managed to
cobble together a shovel for digging up a
spout of water that lasted more than two
gulps. We’d see our water meters fall, then
hear our characters wheeze and hack, which
was our cue to stagger off to the respawn bed
on our raft and wait for death. When the
sweet release came at last, we’d be born
again close enough to grab the remaining
supplies off our former lifeless husks.
Somehow, shockingly, after hours of toil
and harvest, the two Joes managed to build aAlthough, seeing a shark strolling along the shore shortly before a server
crash is definitely worth experiencing.