The pirate game Atlas has been released after several delays. However, for many players, Atlas is a huge flop and a scam. We look at the Steam reviews.
The story of Atlas is turbulent, and with other developer studios, one might have thrown their hands up in the air in disbelief beforehand. After all, Atlas was postponed several times at the last minute, after high-mindedly declaring that the game would be released just days after its announcement.
Now the game is out, and the community punishes it with negative reviews. It is one of the most unpopular games on Steam of all time. 80% of the reviews are negative, only every 5th review is positive (as of: 24.12.2018, 03:00).
Atlas is just an outsourced ARK DLC: The criticism is particularly frequent that Atlas was originally planned as a DLC for the dinosaur game ARK. This theory is also supported, as numerous assets from ARK can be found in the game files of Atlas.
Players even found a menu that was copied directly from ARK and discovered that an “Ocean” DLC was found in the game files of ARK. The assumption is therefore obvious that this DLC is simply Atlas.
Even the positive reviews are negative: Those who think that the 20% positive reviews are truly positive are mistaken. Many of the supposedly positive reviews are also merely sarcastic or cynical.
A particularly well-received positive review came from the Steam user Pinkie, who gave the game a whopping 10/10 points with the reasoning:
“This is the most accurate pirate game I have ever seen. It stole money from all of us. 10/10”
Here are a few more of the “positive” reviews:
- “After you start the game, it keeps you trapped in the menu for two hours so you can’t return it. Genius marketing strategy!”
- “Potential is present, but sadly not in the game.”
- “I don’t even know why the game has so many reviews. You can’t even play it to judge it.”
- “I love it! Finally something in the world that my father can be more disappointed in than me.”
In contrast, there are few genuine positive reviews, but those praise the game and hope that it will undergo a transformation in the coming months, just as ARK has done over the years.
What are the player numbers for Atlas? Whether Atlas will recover from this debacle is questionable. However, a look at the player numbers on Steam shows that Atlas is still being bought and played. It is currently in the top 15 on Steam, with almost 40,000 players concurrently (24.12., 16:00). Its popularity seems to be unaffected:
