Atmosfar Early Access Review – Sky High Potential

Atmosfar is a survival game developed by Apog Labs that thrusts you into a world of floating islands spread out among the clouds. As a vagabond, you’re forced to scavenge to survive, battling against aggressive creatures, deadly storms, and dwindling resources on your island-hopping journey. You slowly acquire an arsenal of tools to tackle the various problems thrown your way, along with a fleet of multipurpose airships, called wasps, and even a cloud cruiser that serves as a mobile base. You can play solo or co-op with up to four players, and with different tools for different jobs, it certainly helps to have friends along.

Admittedly, Atmosfar’s traditional survival elements are rather light, focusing more on fuel and resource management rather than basic needs. In fact, you don’t have to eat or drink at all, although you can craft food for a variety of benefits, like increased movement speed or jump height. Regardless, your foremost concern is making sure you have enough fuel to get from island to island. This is done easily enough, since you can just place down a mobile base to farm hydrogen crystals, which can be found on most inhabited islands. Still, it helps to be conscious of your fuel levels when exploring, since it can mean a long trek back if you run out of fuel far away from a reliable source (and plummeting into the void when flying between islands is hardly ideal, either). That said, dying isn’t exactly punishing in Atmosfar. You lose 20% of your resources, but then you just respawn at your cloud cruiser or the nearest checkpoint. Even if your wasp gets totaled or falls into the bottomless abyss, you can just recall it at the nearest landing pad.

That’s not to say there’s no difficulty at all, just that it’s pretty easy to recover from even the worst setbacks. Besides that, Atmosfar doesn’t really hold your hand. You’ll be given a waypoint for certain objectives, but sometimes you’ll only be given an area, and other times just a direction to go on. This can actually be quite troublesome at times, since there’s no built-in map, and it’s easy to get lost if you forget where you were when you first got the objective to head a certain direction. That said, it’s also refreshing to have to figure out where to go by piecing things together yourself, rather than being given a waypoint for every little thing. It also encourages freeform exploration, and there are plenty of rewards to be found off the beaten path, like wasp and character cosmetics. Plus, there are scenic views to be found almost everywhere.

While Atmosfar has a story you can follow, you’re also free to explore any island you want, so long as you can reach them. The distance between islands is quite vast, both on a horizontal and vertical plane, and eventually your smaller airships can’t even manage the turbulence. That’s where the cloud cruiser comes in, which you can unlock by following the story (or accidentally stumbling upon it like I did). Your cloud cruiser is a fully customizable mobile airship that you can upgrade to improve its speed, mobility, utility, and offensive capabilities. More importantly, it can cut through the turbulence of open sky, and the fuel economy is entirely self-sufficient, letting you cross vast distances to points of interest that you can explore with your smaller airships or on foot. The cloud cruiser only has one landing pad at first, but eventually you can have an entire fleet of wasps at your command. From the utility wasp with its portable generator, to the hauler wasp with its magnetic hoist, each one suits a different purpose.

The freedom granted by the cloud cruiser is nice, but I highly recommend making sure you’ve acquired the jetpack before moving past it. I managed to miss the jetpack on my first playthrough, since I had accidentally skipped the story-crucial island where you’re meant to unlock it. This was one of the cases where the quest objectives were perhaps a bit too ambiguous, because all I knew was that I had to head west, but not where from. Not only is the jetpack crucial for vertical exploration, of course, it’s also the easiest way to customize your cloud cruiser since you can hover around indefinitely when building within the cruiser’s airspace. Without the jetpack, funnily enough, I actually wound up getting soft-locked on my first character. I had died a suitable enough distance away from my cloud cruiser that I respawned outside a nearby enemy fort instead, with my airship atop an unreachable cliff off in the distance, and no landing pad reachable on foot. If I had the jetpack as was likely intended, I could have simply boosted over the fortress walls and recalled my airship at its conveniently placed landing pad, but alas, I was born with free will.

It was certainly tempting to give up after getting soft-locked, but I found Atmosfar well worth the investment of a second character. I was a bit chagrined at having lost a fair few hours of playtime, sure, but I couldn’t stop thinking about playing. There’s something satisfying about the gameplay loop, and the level of thought you have to put in to actually progress. Atmosfar rewards clever-thinking and preparedness, and while you won’t lose much just by being a little careless, there’s a good chance you’ll miss quite a lot along the way if you just blunder through each island. With the fuel investment of actually exploring islands, to the time investment of cruising between them, every journey requires intent. And with no built-in map, it definitely helps to fully explore each area before moving on.

While I found Atmosfar to be an enthralling experience, it’s worth noting that the ground combat is quite simplistic. The only combatants you’ll face are drones and wild animals, which have pretty predictable attack patterns. Drones can be stunned and dismantled to get them out of the way, whereas animals can only be stunned for a few seconds before they pick a fight with you again. This was admittedly quite annoying when trying to harvest resources, and some means of dispatching animals permanently would have been greatly appreciated. Of course, it’s entirely possible this is just another jetpack situation and I missed some incredibly obvious net or something, but again, it’s quite easy to skip past things unintentionally (especially if you’re as directionally challenged as me). Still, even with somewhat middling combat, Atmosfar soars high rather than remaining grounded by its flaws.

From the atmosphere, to the sweeping vistas, and the sheer joy of flight, Atmosfar is an adventure that captures a genuine sense of wonder. There were so many moments that took my breath away, whether the sight of an unexplored island slowly materializing as you rise through dense cloud cover, or the vast sea of clouds itself stretching to the horizon. There are moments of exhilaration, too, like making it to the next island with scarcely a drop of fuel left in the tank, or ducking into a chasm to escape an incoming missile. And between it all, just the steady loop of gathering supplies to chart routes to new, increasingly deadly islands. Even in early access, Atmosfar is a world worth well exploring, and one that respects your time so long as you respect it in turn.

Austin reviewed Atmosfar in Early Access on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and will not be changed.