With its untold depths, couldn’t the sea keep alive such huge specimens of life from another age, this sea that never changes while the land masses undergo almost continuous alteration? Couldn’t the heart of the ocean hide the last–remaining varieties of these titanic species, for whom years are centuries and centuries millennia? -Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: A Tour of the Underwater World

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I’ve mentioned this before in my work but I’ll mention it again: the sea is at the heart of me. I dream about the ocean. I grew up around it, spent hundreds of thousands of hours within it. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a marine biologist. One of my first novels was Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The ocean fascinates, terrifies, and calls to me. It’s in my blood.

I have reiterated all this because it underscores one of the reasons why I love Earth Atlantis and its immersive properties (heh, water joke). My oceanic affections might have led me to try out this game for myself on the PS4, having missed it on the Switch, but I stayed for the shmup gameplay, the monster hunting, and the bullet hell. What I found in Earth Atlantis was a robust, occasionally tedious but fun title for blasting benthic behemoths and abyssal atrocities, the kind of game where you have to be on your toes but can also relax into the gameplay and hit that trancelike state of entertainment.

Given my endearment for the deep, you might initially think that I’d believe more ocean equals more better. Turns out I don’t believe that because that’s stupid and Earth Atlantis proves it.

Some cataclysmic climate catastrophe caused the Earth’s oceans to rise at the end of the 21st century, enveloping all but a tiny bit of land. Ninety-four percent of the Earth is now underwater and the oceans have become the perfect breeding ground for Jules Verne’s wet dreams. Mechanical marine life swarms the dangerous seas, sinking ships and shrinking the floundering remains of human civilization ever further. Sea monsters such as the naturalists of the 14th century could only dare imagine now play beneath the waves, kings and queens of their domain.

Only the hunters stand between the human race and obsolescence.

As a hunter, you’ll command the Nautilus, an armored submarine equipped with front- and rear-facing pew pew pews. While navigating the underwater world and blowing up anything artificially living thing in your path in a complete reversal of sustainable fishing, you’ll be able to find upgrades for your submersible. These appear as floating bubbles with letters in them: P stands for the basic power up to upgrade your main weapon, allowing you to crank out even more bullets than before.

There is also the Electric Beam that fries nearby enemies, the Torpedo Missile that’s fairly traditional so far as torpedoes go, the Homing Missile which is a shmup staple, and the Bouncing Bomb for ricocheting off of walls, great for those tight coral corridors. Your submarine can only carry one special weapon at a time, but snagging multiple bubbles for the same weapon with power up its offensive capabilities: launching more missiles at once, for instance.

One of the games best upgrades is a full revamp of your vessel. New submersibles can be unlocked after finding them and fighting them as rogue enemies in the sea. These are the Aquanaut, Moby Dick, and Musashi. Each have their own unique uses, ranges, arcs of fire, and offensive and defensive capabilities. Musashi has got to be my favorite with its liberal use of lasers. The back-facing and diagonal weaponry and upgrades remind me a lot of the Gradius games.

One thing I didn’t quite grasp from the trailers is the fact that Earth Atlantis doesn’t play out like a typical side-scrolling shoot ’em up. There are no levels or stages with bosses at the end, and fortunately, you can take a few more hits than in your typical shmup. Instead, there’s an emphasis on Metroidvania-esque backtracking and exploration in an open world that opens wider as you advance.

Your goal then is to hunt down a series of unique monsters (or swarms of them) like a bounty hunter. Once you exterminate your target, typically other targets will appear or a new path will open up. Once you’ve explored the entire map, it becomes a matter of clean up, taking down each target as they appear and traveling back and forth across the West Sea.

Earth Atlantis, in the end, is still a shmup and therefore a pretty short game. It took me about three hours to seek and destroy every last target in normal mode. It won’t be long before you too hang it up to dry.

Click here for the full review... https://thewellredmage.com/2018/06/02/earth-atlantis-2018-ps4/