Thanks to NIS AMERICA for the review code

Title: Neo Atlas 1469
System: Nintendo Switch
Price: $49.99
Release Date: 04/19/2018

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Story

In this mapping/cartography game, you take control of a mapper back in the 1400s, as you set off to discover the vast, wide secrets of the global earth! Getting supplies, mapping new territory, discovering the world and meeting admirals to recruit are the goals here, and while there is a story and you have an aide to help you through it, the story is honestly really dull, did not engage me whatsoever and arguably even gets in the way of the gameplay, for reasons i’ll note a bit later. Pretty much every character you meet is paper-thin and has nothing memorable to them.

Presentation

Being that the main goal of the game is to focus on a map, obviously Neo Atlas is presented almost entirely via a view of a developing world map. You scroll around and zoom on the map to find hidden objects or landmarks, and some of them are pretty cleverly hidden and can be easily missed if you don’t zoom in. The visuals here are fine enough, and dialogue kicks in frequently with traditional-style character portraits, save for your assistant Miguel, who happens to be chibi and looks a bit silly when he’s interacting with admirals and world leaders.

Visual scenes during certain events on an exploration/investigation are portrayed via illustrations, and these look OK enough as well. Nothing eye-catching, yet nothing badly made. The music selection here is rather OK too, and as you continue to map out more regions and continents, you’ll discover their respective theme music as well, which helps to change up the monotony a little since whichever map track you go with is what you’ll be listening to for almost the entirety of your play sessions; the BGM that goes with events and cutscenes is almost entirely forgettable to the point I assumed the main map music just played during them, until I went back and double checked before drafting this review up.

Gameplay

In Neo Atlas, you’re given a task from the prime minister to map out as much of the world as you possibly can, and thus, that’s the goal of this game! You start off with some gold, and basically have to use that gold to hire admirals, establish trading routes, all while searching the globe for new landmarks and locales to discover, in order to use those for furthering your trading/exploration needs.

You can buy a fleet and send out admirals into unknown territory, which is how you fill in the missing parts of the map, though unlike what you may expect, Neo Atlas doesn’t rely on the realistic globe for the unknown, and thus, your admirals can report wildly different experiences on what they encounter, so if they claim they hit land and discover an island to the southwest of Africa, then accepting their report will put that island on the map for you to research further. This seemed like a pretty simple way to keep the game from not having a very predictable way of finishing the map, but unfortunately I found this concept to just lead to a lot of aggravating situations, since the core gameplay loop, once you get down to the basics and establish some needed routes, is ridiculously simple and boring.

See, while you may be able to fund yourself pretty well with trade routes, the map is the main focus of the game, and I was wanting and eager to keep mapping out and see what I could find. After all, that was what Uncharted Waters did a pretty good job with back in the day, and the mapping focus here gave me similar vibes to those games at first. Unfortunately, sending your ships into uncharted territory will almost always lead to them not going out as far as you sent them, since if they hit land, they’ll just turn around and go home. Sounds handy, except if you manage to send them 1000L away and they hit a tiny island only 200L of the way through, then you basically just waste time and have to repeat the process over and over again.

When you run out of stuff to discover on the parts you already mapped, then needing to send your admirals into fog and hope they don’t immediately run into pirates/islands/etc just becomes a very tedious waiting game, and eventually the brief bit of excitement I got from the initial gameplay loop quickly evaporated once I kept hitting this wall. To make things even more annoying, this game is absolutely not ashamed to just dump a lot of exposition or throw new quests your way, with none of the dialogue being outright skippable. The same goes for when you have to watch your admiral recount his journey again and again. (though thankfully you can fast forward through the travel recap, but the dialogue still has to be mashed through) Two hours in after an initial high of discovering a bunch of cool European landmarks, and the idea of trying to map even the west part of Africa became a painful exercise in boredom due to the constant travel interruptions; Neo Atlas really does not want to respect your time at all.

To make things a bit sillier, I should point out that the game does have a handy list of all the discoveries you’ve made on the world map, collected in a nice catalog, except when analyzing an item in the catalog the command prompt to zoom directly to that discovery remains in untranslated Kanji, which is a very small, but completely silly omission I was astounded to stumble upon considering how old this game is.

Conclusion

Neo Atlas is just a weird game, even after all the years it took for me to sink good time into it. It originally came out with JP support, then got english patched in later due to the NISA release I’m reviewing now… Only for it to still have a very very small pocket of untranslated text that baffles me as to why it wasn’t caught and corrected. At first when I played this right before the derail, it had a cool concept that originally gave me vibes to my beloved Uncharted Waters series, and I always enjoy revealing maps in all kinds of games, so I hoped for a fun, relaxing time with an easy gameplay loop.

But after spending actual time with it and learning the ropes of trading, hiring admirals and trying to explore the new world, I quickly realized a painful truth; Neo Atlas does not respect your time at all. From ridiculous, almost constant interruptions of unskippable text, slow menus that take a few seconds to fully load even basic stuff such as your fleet status, and a gameplay loop that slowly feels more and more like a bunch of repetitive fetch quests or boring battles where the engaging bits are blockaded by dumb interruptions or periods of just waiting for your ships to do stuff, this game just does not succeed at what it was trying to accomplish, and it made me lose interest rather quickly. For every successful attempt at shaping the world and discovering something new, comes a bunch of dialogue, constant ramming into Islands or stupid pirate encounters that’ll make you wish everybody would shut up.

I give Neo Atlas 1469 a 5 out of 10.