Recent reviews by OverwatchJunky

I have played just under 20 hours in the last few days and I am already in LOVE with this game!

The world design is ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL!
The animations are so smooth!!
The sounds and voice acting are brilliant.
There is so much for you to do! This is more than just a game! It is like actually living a life in the Wild West! Chores and side jobs keep you busy after a long day of debt collecting, hunting and escaping ambushes on the road!

This game really keeps you on your toes!!

10/10!! Will play again..and again...AND AGAIN TIL I CAN'T PLAY NO MORE!!!

ATLAS has been amazing so far!! Thoroughly enjoy it just like I enjoyed ARK!! Love all the new mechanics and I love how it feels so familiar!!

"OMG Its an ARK reskin! Don't buy it! Its a scam" Please show me a game franchise that HASN'T used and reused assets from previous versions of their games to lighten their futute work load???? Battlefield 1-4. Literally a constant game of reskinning. Tomb Raider! All the new games have the same kind of building design or art design!!

If you look closely enough, a LOT of the skins and item models in ATLAS look and are DIFFERENT from ARK and they even added a ton more items!! We used to just have "stone" But now we have slate, chalcedony, granite etc. How is that simply a "reskin"??? They took the best things from ARK and simply expanded on those ideas!! The skill trees are a lot more complex and it encourages people to join a company (a clan) so you all have access to the entirety of the skill tree. ARK was one tree and you could eventually unlock almost everything. ARK you could play solo because there was nowhere to travel to aside from traveling across the only landmass in the entire server. Servers used to only hold 100-200 people. Now we have servers operating alongside eachother and a massive map to explore! OMG yes the islands are copied, but do you REALIZE how long it would TAKE to design fully unique islands??? Even Stranded Deep abandoned the "proceedurally generated island" idea because it caused way too much lag.

And YES the game has its fair share of common issues like lag, FPS drops and item/creature spawns being crazy, but we ALL accepted that risk when we chose to hit the purchase button.

I have also had my fair share of misery. I spent 10 hours building a Scooner by MYSELF...only to have it destroyed while I slept IRL. Logged in and it was gone. Well, thats how the game is on PvP servers.

"OMG They said it was gonna have 40,000 players all playing at the same time! They lied! Don't buy it!" Well, maybe things stand as they are because again, Early Access game. They learned from their mistakes with ARK, so having 150 people per map grid makes sense in terms of balancing the overall performance and decreasing the liklihood of server disconnects and reducing lag. There are only 4 servers, each with dozens of micro servers for each map grid. There may very well be more servers in the future. For now, less is more.

This game is a GRIND. Anyone who sits there for 2 hours and complains about the trailer being "false advertising" probably hasn't sat there and done what I did. They have not spent a good amount of time farming materials and making a ship on their own! Most of them have less than 1 hour played, aren't in a company (clan) and have no idea what the rst of the game holds for them. This is NOT the type of game where you get from point A to point Z and finish a game in a few hours during one session. So if that tedium is not appealing to you, then by all means, leave. But do NOT trash the game simply because you do not like it.

I give this a 9/10! But that may change when we see more content and see where the player feedback takes us!!

In recent months I have discovered quite a lot of troubling details about the game, its community as well as the devs and the admins they have chosen to look after the community.

1.) Corrupt and abusive moderators. Fluxtorrent, the forum moderator who banned me had a grudge from almost 9 months ago. I reported him for his rude and innapropriate comments he had made towards another community member on a thread and he temp banned me back then for "abusing the report system" all because I had reported him for his questionable behavior as a moderator. He also recently used that as a precedent to have me banned permenantly about a month ago saying that I "ignored multiple warnings" about abusing the report function. His supposed reasoning behind a warning is "clearing the thread of any and all innappropriate comments" etc, yet how can someone be aware of this when they are not online??? He doesn't verbally warn anyone inside the thread, hee just goes through a thread and deletes what eever comments he thinks is inappropriate and doesn't issue any ACTUAL warning. Just says "Thread cleaned" and never says a word. What doees hee expect??? That we are going to go through and try to figure out whos comments were deleted so we;'d know we were warned?? Come on. That is stupid.

And along side that, he said that "my ban record was extensive" when the only bans I have on my record were from almost 2 years ago that were also a result of moderator abuse as weell as flamers and trolls on other gamee forums who had also been reported for their conduct.

2.) Game changes. Recently, the Beam Team added the flu disease when you were too cold at night. It was a pain in the butt to be sure, but nothing that any seasoned player couldn't handle. But because a handful, a FEW people couldn't handle it, it was removed. Not changed...removed. Never in my life have I seen such a ridiculous case of catering to the noobs. It takees the absolute MINIMUM amount of atteention to detail to prevent or ride out the flu and some players are just lazy and cant be bothered doing what it takes to survive in a SURVIVAL game!!! Why should a disease be taken away when most people can handle it just finee?? How stupid is that??? I could see if THOUSANDS of people were complaining, then yeeah change it a little, but not outright remove the mechanic. That is just absurd. The game should not be so drastically changed simply because some people cant tolerate a change.


Between the devs and their noob catering and the moderator corruption, I shall not be playing this game any longer. I shall be uninstalling it and never playing it again. I have a second Steam account, and I would have gladly kept giving my prescious feedback on the game, but since the moderator is corrupt and thee risk of geetting banned again and possible getting my Steam accounts closed is far too high. Not going to take a needless risk.

As good as this game is, I will not support a set of devs who have failed to provide a safe forum for the exchange of ideas about the game. A set of devs who do not care about keeping a forum environment clean is just bad for business. The fact that they would give such an unprofessional and rude person a role as a moderator is a failure to the community on their part, especially when hee has been reported and they are basically turning a blind eye to his behavior.

Do NOT support devs who do not care about their games community.

I cannot stress enough when I say that this game is "Early Access". That means that bugs, crashes and other errors, breakage and various problems are to be viewed as "business as usual". This review is based on my personal experiences of the content that the devs have provided thus far. It shall touch upon my personal prefferences, my likes/dislikes of certain mechanics, items, creatures etc, and is NOT a full review. I will update this review after the games release or any major content patch (which incidentally is tomorrow lol).



I absolutely LOVE what the devs have done so far and are still doing. They have provided, in my opinion, some of the BEST survival gameplay I have seen here on Steam or anywhere in the gaming industry. This is a truly unique twist of a tried and true gaming concept.

The devs are very active on the forums. When players report new gameplay issues the devs respond when discussions get a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. They are also very adamant about keeping the community peaceful and stress free. It remains one of the top 5 mostr most peaceful communities I have ever experienced on Steam or any other gaming forum I have subscribed to.

But above all else, the devs do their very best to keep the community informed about their progress on the development of the game. Their Trello bulliten board is always up to date, keeping their community in the know on their projects, both past and present, and even more importantly the things they have yet to start working on. There are few if any developers who keep their community up to speed as well as these people do, and while STILL providing top quality content on a consistant basis.





Likes

• I love the complete attention to detail From the seascapes, to the ambiance, the sea creatures (even the ones that totally scare the absolute crap out of me).
  
• I love the simplistic yet arduous nature of the crafting system. It combines high tech ingenuity with a simple UI that is completely user friendly.
  
• The steady updates to the precursor storyline is really taking shape! It involves so much mystery and scifi fantasy. The precursor base updates have been completely amazing so far. The simple yet elegant design of the structures is truly unique.
  
  IMPORTANT NOTE
  This Dislike list will be very short. There is not much to dislike about this game!! Some of the bugs/glitches can be very annoying. Bugs and glitches do happen. It cant be avoided. But I do hope that this gets improved upon as soon as humanly possible.
  
  
  
  Dislikes
  
  
  • The duplicate sealed door glitches are a major issue. It puts players in a position to drown very easily. I hope this gets fixed with the update tomorrow!!
    
    
  • Various clipping issues or creature and tech bugs. 1.) The Magical Reaper that dives into the ground like a sand shark and completely surprises you as he springs from the terrain underneath you!! Or...the Reaper Leviathan who holds a grudge cause he didn't get to kill your beloved Seamoth and so he follows you into the Safe Shallows or other adjacent biome your base/lifepod happens to be in. 2.) I get particularly annoyed when the Prawn suit decides it wants to be just as magical and glitches through the sea floor and into the void. It scares the ever loving CRAP out of me for fear of not having enough thrust left to escape the cold embrace of the void below.
    
    
    
    Conclusion
    
    Early Access isn't for everyone. Many people get angry or sad because of the lag, framerate issues, a few broken mechanics that need fixing or even the smallest of things they would prefer to be different. But in this case, the good outways the bad by a landslide.
    
    The devs have done an absolutely fabulous job despite so many hurdles they had to jump. If I had to give it a grade, it would be an A minus!!! But that is only because of a very balanced mixture of frustration, terror/fear, heartache, and a blind hatred for the monsters who destroy my beloved Seamoth!! But along with all that comes a sense of accomplishment that makes those bad times seem like nothing!! But hey, an A is still an A after all!!!

This game is truly amazing!!! 10+ rating for me!!! The graphics are amazing, the environment is massive and well designed, grinding for resources is tedious but fun (also can be scary when raptors are chasing you down >.<), the simple yet painstaking crafting, building and item progression is steady. All of it is great!!

It has the same gameplay simplicity of Minecraft paired with the amazing graphics quality of Skyrim!!!

This game is very well rounded. Even though it is still early access...if the release date was TOMORROW....it would already be on pre-order!!! No question,

There is no shortage of quality servers. There are hundreds of official servers to accomedate thousands of players across the world and hundreds of unofficial servers with many mods to fit many player prefferences.



Yeah, like any game, it still has its querks and its bugs, even some hackers, but that is always something to be expected for any early access or beta content.

Anyone who regularly plays early access games and/or beta tests will always understand that bugs and glitches are part of the process and we provide the feedback for devs to make appropriate changes.

Hackers are sadly a part of this process. The Devs probably get hundreds of emails. Just because they do not answer every one or ban that guy you want to see banned doesn't mean the devs dont take it all into consideration. They truly have a lot to work on.

The devs are great at constantly providing quality content. Many of the reviews on this game might disagree with that, even go as far to say that the devs are ignoring their emails and deleting their complaint threads. But they all ted to focus on the few mechanics they liked or disliked that got changed, or they are complaining about the lack of "dev communication" and eve the hackers.

Nobody should EVER care about hackers. They will get their punishment eventually.

Would you rather have devs who sat there and provided minimal content and dealt with hackers, or a set of devs who are attentive to the rest of the community in regards to content quality? I assume many people want the attetive devs who provide a wealth of amazing content.

There are 20k+ players online each day. There are definitely hackers and exploiters, but they will probably be monitered, possibly even get banned once the devs figure out how they are hacking and stop them cold. Outright banning people will just encourage them to try harder to hack as long as they can. The devs have made a choice to focus on the content, and thats good.

My advice. Do NOT listen to the raging complainers with 1000-3000 hours of butthurt and hacker complaints under their belt over early access content....BUY THIS GAME....JUDGE FOR YOURSELF!!! Support the devs!!! Have fun playing with Dinosaurs!!!!

Due to recent events, I have decided to edit this possitive review.


The forum runs rampant with trollish veteran players, and despite how many reports get filed by me, my friends, none of them get banned for their patterns of behavior regarding comments made on my threads and threads of others.


These veterans that I speak of gang up on people threads in an endeavor to derail a thread and get it locked, or even get other people banned. They have a group page where they OPENLY mock those they eventually get banned. I am one of those people, because in ONE reply to MY OWN THREAD, I said "if I ever met a certain player in real life I would put my fist through their face".

This however, was several pages into the thread after I had reported them MULTIPLE times for their unrelated videos, trollish memes and other unrelated comments.

Had the moderators done their job sooner, I may not have been subsequently banned becaue I was insighted by these people who admit to doing it intentionally.

I submit to you, that this game has a certain level of corruption, a severe lack of moderator activity that also favors the veterans who make up a large portion of the current community.

This game is infested with shameless, cold hearted, relentless trolls, and I am severely questioning ever playing this game again if these people are not dealt with in an appropriate manner by the moderators.

The fact that this games community has been so drastically effected by its veteran players is astounding and I truly hope it changes for the better before the game is completely dead.

This is without a doubt a good game. But be forewarned, these trolls are present. SeanXD, Sinopia, KckKryptonite and a bunch of others that will reign hell down upon you for disagreeing with their egotistical point of view.