Review: Crystal of Atlan - one of the best MMOs of the Year!

Considering the idea of ​​being a multiplatform game, including being compatible with mobile devices, and the fact that it’s not a game focused on immersion and a deep story, Crystal of Atlan offers great graphics! Throughout my experience, I set the visual quality to maximum, and it delivered what was expected.

Many skills fly around during combat, and they’re all very polished and attractive. Speaking of combat, it also offers good sound effects, consistent with the movements of dodging, casting magic and attacking.

Still regarding visual experience, but not graphic quality, the game's interface is good. Of course, the store or the events tab are full of information, but Nuverse managed to distribute everything masterfully. You won’t face any hardships when navigating the game or changing your character's skills or equipment.

“Try” to create your character

The playable character itself is my biggest point of attention in the game's visuals. On the class selection stage, you’ll already be able to notice that each of them will be linked to a specific gender. For example, all Magisters will be men and all fighters will be women - it won’t be possible to change this, which can be honestly frustrating.

After completing the first story quests, you’ll be able to change some of your avatar’s characteristics, but these are only a few options for faces, hair, eyes and skin color. It’s impossible to innovate and make a character with different height, weight, etc.

If you don't buy skins, you'll have a limited wardrobe that barely changes your look. This makes the world of Crystal of Atlan full of characters who look very alike to each other.

Predetermined portraits

The biggest issue is that your character portrait, be it in your profile or while a ranked game is loading, will always be a predetermined model of the subclass you chose, I'll show you an example:

Notice that my Magician doesn't have a top hat and has short, completely black hair and blue eyes. But none of this is considered for my avatar, you can see in the upper-left corner my profile picture represented by a magician with longer hair (black and white), orange-ish eyes and wearing a top hat.

This predefined representation will be the same for all characters of this subclass, and will also appear when starting a PvP game, which takes away some of your immersion and the feeling of your character’s exclusivity.

In the game, you can play as: Swordsman, Musketeer, Magister, Puppeteer or Fighter. Each of these types provides two subclasses, except for the Magister, who has three different playstyles, check them out:

These subclasses become available by completing a quest unlocked at level 15.

The fact that a single class can offer distinct gameplays, catering to a wide range of players, is excellent. For example, an Elementalist Magister deals a lot of area damage with their fire and lightning abilities, while the Magician Magister specializes in performing silly tricks that stun or even confuse the enemy, since he creates a clone of himself and turns invisible.

All of them were also very well-thought-out, the Magician is completely comical, his skills revolve around interacting with playing cards, or blowing bubbles and throwing giant toys at the opponent. In fact, some of this class’ sound effects really give a more humorous touch to his gameplay.

A Berserker Swordsman, on the other hand, obviously focuses more on brute melee attacks with their sword, appealing to other player personalities. Overall, you’ll probably find a class that suits your own style!

Everything’s very flexible

You can test out each of your character’s subclasses as many times as you want before choosing it for real, but you’ll still be able to change your playstyle whenever you want. The only downside is that you won’t convert your current weapon (which is different for each subclass) to the chosen subclass’ one, but you’ll have all your skill points back to shape your new build.

It’s possible to start as an Elementalist Magister and, even after playing PvP and other modes, change to a Warlock or Magician.

Still in this topic, I mentioned getting your skill points back when changing your subclass. These points are needed to unlock and/or upgrade new skills so you can add them to your kit, and they’re extremely flexible.

Many games charge some kind of resource for you to get the skill points back, or simply don't even allow it, but in Crystal of Atlan you can always remove the upgrades from some magic to reallocate the points as you see fit.

This allows you to spend this resource without fear to strengthen yourself, and when you reach a higher level and unlock more skills, you’ll be able to get back the points from the beginner skills and focus on more powerful ones.

The game actually encourages doing so, it's possible to create skill tree presets so that you, with a single click, change your entire allocation of skill points and available spells.

In the image below, for example, you can see that this Magician has two different skill trees, one for PvP and one for PvE. You can create these or other presets to improve your experience.

In Crystal of Atlan, as soon as you join the server, you’re introduced to some battles with different characters. It’s just a tutorial to help you with the commands and understand more about the classes, but it’s enough to get you excited and raise your expectations with the great battles that the game offers.

Many titles have long, drawn-out tutorials, with lots of talking and too little action, but Nuverse got it right! The image below represents your first screen after the short initial cutscene, you’ll literally start in the middle of combat.

This fast pace persists in the first hours of the game, you’re encouraged to complete the tasks of the main quest, which are mostly dungeons with bosses to be defeated. The battles are amazing, we have several skills available to us, in addition to a good attack and movement system.

You’ll gain XP quickly, unlocking several challenges, events and the main thing: a subclass. So, you’ll always have new content to play, until you come across the next topic.

Dungeons and main story quests often require you to spend a few batteries. We have 120 of them at our disposal, which are recharged to the maximum each morning, but it’s a real pain when they run out.

On my first day of playing, I had very few options to continue in Crystal of Atlan after running out of stamina. Some events and challenges require you to reach a certain level or complete a specific chapter of the story, which made it difficult to continue my progress and I could only keep going the next day.

However, once you complete Chapter 2 of the campaign, which you can do on your second day of gameplay, running out of batteries is no longer as frustrating, since you'll have other types of content to pass the time, such as PvP duels (including ranked ones) and the Arena.

Your battery charge lasts relatively well, and you also get recharges by completing specific quests, but it’d be unfair not to mention that there are limitations.

Another aspect that needs improvement are the side quests. There are even some subplots that encourage you to complete Elite level dungeons, a type of campaign mode with greater difficulty and rewards, but that still requires batteries. Other than that, I was only introduced to a few tasks that introduced me to one mechanic or another, such as gathering and cooking.

There’s not a lot of content outside the big cities and challenges/events, adding side quests that encourage players to explore more environments would be perfect. And that’s because, despite being an open world game, and we can see this in the cities, I still don't see myself exploring and killing monsters randomly like in Diablo IV, Path of Exile or even Genshin.

One of the best topics of Crystal of Atlan! Even though I’ve said that there isn’t a large volume of content within the open world, it’s impossible to dismiss the variety that we have at our disposal.

For those with battery power to spare, it’s possible to complete the story on normal or elite difficulty, as well as dungeons with great rewards in items and XP.

Other options that don't require batteries are:

Finally, the Wonder Challenge is another type of content to enjoy at will, without investing resources! I'm mentioning this one separately because it’s available for a limited time, only during the first two weeks after launch, and we don't know if it’ll return soon.

It’s based on minigames that open at specific times, playing them will give you tickets to spend in the event store. These games are very casual and very reminiscent of Fall Guys, check out the images below:

Despite not offering a vast open world, I'm sure you'll be satisfied with the content in the game.

The progression system brings alongside it some controversies. Even with the vast amount of challenges and events available, you'll basically only level up by completing dungeons or the story (normal or elite).

It can be frustrating for a player to spend hours in the arena, the Tempered Trials or ranked and not get any XP to show for it. The lack of side quests also leads to this consequence.

On the other hand, whenever we use our batteries for dungeons and manage to level up, we really feel the progression. Several of these modes are released over time, some at level 30, others at 40 or 50 and so on. You'll always have new features to discover within the game.

Crystal of Atlan has a gacha system, but it’s more friendly to those who don't like this type of behavior in games. There are no new characters unlockable only in the gacha banners, you can play with any class and subclass for free, having access to all skills in the game.

However, there are exclusive skins in this system, and these looks have above-average buffs. See, in the example below, that a piece of SS rank clothing available in the banner offers stats greater than double those of my equipped looks. This pattern shows itself in all skin components.

And, like most gacha games, you're guaranteed to get the top prize after many rolls. Since Crystal of Atlan is still in its early days, we don't know if free-to-play players will have to give up plenty of banners to get a single prize later on.

We also have a battle pass with free and premium tracks, where players who purchase the enhanced version will get more gold and resources. But outside those points, I don't see many resources being abundantly available in the store to make it fully pay-to-win.

Our verdict is that yes, Crystal of Atlan does offer advantages for those who pay up, but it’s nothing abusive or frustrating for free players. It’s still possible to have a lot of fun without using monetization.

On the computer, with the specs provided at the beginning of the article, it was excellent! Team fights with dozens of skills being used each second didn’t even affect the FPS. I played for around 20 hours on the computer and didn’t experience any, literally zero, performance issues - even at maximum graphics quality.

When playing on my cell phone, I noticed that the battles are not as fluid, nor is walking around the city itself. But even with a more limited device, I didn’t experience major frame drops or crashes in my gameplay.

The mobile device configurations used are:

It’s far from being a device suitable for gamers, and it still performed well for this heavy game. The gameplay was not completely fluid and perfect, but given the context, Nuverse delivered great results.

Pros

Cons

SCORE: 8.8

Crystal of Atlan is a great game, and it certainly deserves your attention - especially if you're a fan of MMOs or games such as Genshin. The combat’s extremely fun, and the variety of gameplay styles and content will satisfy most of the audience. I recommend it, especially if you're playing with friends!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this review, I'm available in the comments if you have any questions and/or suggestions.