Atlas is a disheartening MMO shipwreck that plunders your time
Grapeshot Games, a sister studio of the makers of Ark: Survival Evolved, calls its new pirate-themed survival MMO Atlas, a word that sizzles with the promise of high adventure and discovery. And it’s true, there is a bit of that. But the more I played the newly launched Early Access release over the holiday break, the more I felt it’d be better called Odyssey.
That word also evokes escapades and exploration, but more to the point, it suggests an aimless voyage where greater powers pelt you with hours of misery and misfortune. Much like Homer’s Odyssey, Atlas ($30 on Steam) is an ordeal that breeds good stories, but they’re stories that are better told than experienced.
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 . We
