Machinika: Atlas

I love everything about this game, it's so cool and just difficult enough, too many good things to list. The bummer is it is super glitchy and no many how many times I restart it (~6 times so far), something goes wrong...multiple times. For example the magnetic srewdriver in ch. 2 - the images were so wonky they wouldnt match up. I rebooted 2x and the it finally worked but on the second stage, the round part, had the same issue. Tried several things, turned my iPad off, robooted the game, no improvement. Normally I wouldnt bother to leave a review but I really love this game! Fingers crossed the developers fix the bugs.

I was so excited for this game, following it on multiple platforms, because Machinika Museum is one of the best iOS games I’ve played. It was so unique, like a sci-fi The Room, with great puzzles and just an interesting spin on the genre. Atlas is a complete miss of the mark for what made the first game so special. It seems the devs put all their focus on scope, trying to create a massive spaceship, but ignored fundamental puzzle design. Almost every single puzzle was either confusing, illogical, annoying, or just made me go - why? I don’t know how they regressed this badly on puzzle design, but it’s BAD here. I really hope it’s such a fluke, maybe they ran out of time, or just completely ignored the skeleton of the gameplay to try to make the visuals more “epic”. But it doesn’t hold a candle to the strange gizmos I played with in the dusty room on earth.

There’s some minor graphical glitches with the doors, during the loading sequence the ceiling sometimes freaks out and so does the lighting and textures. I like the game but please make better hints as they don’t help at all besides guiding you to the object. The only other problem I have with this game is the load time, if you can find a way to make it more reasonable that would be great (im sitting in front of doors for a while and there’s nothing to do while that’s happening, if you can’t shorten the load time maybe have something to do while it happens) anyways Good game and it’ll earn a five star once the graphical glitches are fixed and maybe the hint system. Edit! The bugs are getting better but the doors are still a problem, I found an annoying solution. If you turn your graphics down the doors work better. As well as this in the security room the hologram has a weird visual glitch that has a giant bright light randomly appear. Please fix that as I can’t deal with it. If you could fix the loading times as well that would be great but not necessary.