Atlas is one of those open world MMO games in which you are dropped in a sandbox environment and start from scratch to build a character. It has the same principle as games like Ark and Conan. Your goal is to become a scary and feared pirate and rule the seas with your crew of friends or random people.

Because the game is a sandbox, you can collect almost anything from anywhere. Wood, stone, fibers, food, just collect it and build stuff. You can make fancy ships and weapons and set sail to blow up other players and become the strongest. There are different skill trees that let you build more stuff, make you tougher, let you use different weapons and to grant you some special abilities.

It is hilarious when you play this game with friends and create a new character. You are free to choose any feature you like, and you can create some vile abominations as a playable character. You laugh your ass off for about twenty minutes but then the fun got sucked out of the game soon enough for me.

For me, Atlas is the fifth game that I played with exactly the same mechanics, skill trees and progression system. Normally, I would not mind too much, but the problem with Atlas is that it is just so unbelievably boring, broken and empty.

You got some islands with almost nothing interesting on it, apart from a small town and some birds, and then you got the ocean. Hundreds of thousands of square feet of oceans. It is incredible how empty and boring you can make a game, and this one takes the crown. Of course, this kind of games are more fun with friends, but even then, it felt so pointless, repetitive and I did not feel any urge to continue playing. The most fun I had was just murdering my friends’ characters.

In terms of graphics, the game offers nothing special. It got some sort of cartoon style look for the characters, which is nice to look at, but the environments and animals all look semi-realistic. This contrast makes it weird to look at. Also, the sea and land textures are really blend and lifeless. I know that you cannot make the sea anymore blend then it already is, but just add some jumping dolphins or something, while you waste away on your ship, traveling to the same-looking island as before. The sound and music offer nothing special and does not deserve any special attention.

The combat mechanics are poor, it feels inaccurate, stiff and any form of strategy is lacking in my opinion. When I want to throw a spear, it is pure luck if I will hit my target or not.

If you thought that this game was stable and glitch free, think again. Ships clip through rocks, trees float in the air, you fall through the world and in an incident in which the ship was stuck on land, between rocks while trees where floating higher than the ship, made me think that I had some LSD accidentally. It was hilarious but very sad at the same time.

Besides glitches, crashes, stuck loading screens and a ton of other issues plague the game, making it unplayable most of the time. Yes, it is early access, but if you want to charge twenty-five ducats for this mess, there is a basis of functionality that one can expect.

This is another one of those games in which the developers ship out an unfinished tech demo, cash in, and then fix the issues slowly and steady throughout the years. By the time the game is finished, nobody gives a sh!t anymore and so do the developers, because the dough is already in. It is games like this I hate the most.

In the end, there is not much more to say. Atlas is not the worst game, not by far, it is just too damn boring, and I could not force myself to play it any longer and become “a feared pirate”. I just buried myself in the endless ocean and never came out again.