Neo ATLAS 1469 Reviews

A shockingly enjoyable little weird exploration game that is, in some ways, surprisingly self-aware about the Joke of its colonialism.

Remake of the Neo Atlas II, pretty interesting take on the world exploration genre since it is based on procedural generation for it's map creation. The game features light trading element, but is way more interested in finding plotlines and following them to their conclusion with a bunch of different admirals. I had a great time playing the game and the different potential events that can happen depending on the choices of plotlines you follow.

Neo Atlas 1469 was recently reviewed in a German magazine and its mix of exploration and visual novel reminded me of 80 Days which I enjoyed a lot. So I got it on the Steam Golden Week sale. I've read later that it's a port of a Vita remake of a Playstation game from 1999. As reviews of it are mixed, I immediately started it to possibly refund it if it was really terrible. While not everything was gold, it was fun and unique enough to play through it. There are three major elements in this game. First, fleets led by various admirals can be send out to explore unknown territory or investigate discovered places that bear mysteries. Second, trade routes can be established to guarantee the monetary means to pay your admirals and repair or extend your fleets. Third, discovered areas have to be searched in detail to find hidden items, locations or knowledge. The unique thing in exploration is that you can disapprove the findings of your admirals if you don't like the coastline they discovered. The second unique trait of Neo Atlas is that you can decide on how the world is. Round or flat, your choice. I wanted to go for the flat world but I didn't find in time the necessary prerequisites for this. Thus, the world I discovered was boringly round. Pushing on the exploration of the world is a sedate albeit repetitive experience. The basic storyline with 39 missions will be the same each game. Locations of items might change although I haven't verified this. The game ends when you have discovered 100% of the world but it is possible to continue playing to find missing items or complete more missions. I stopped with 31 of 39 completed missions and about 70% of all approx. 550 encyclopedia items found. The UI is cumbersome, the repetitiveness is a drawback and some design decisions have me wondering what I'm supposed to do. But as a whole, enjoyed the experience. It's difficult to get bearings in this game. There are no real resources for it except for very limited discussions in the Steam forum. By time, many questions answered themselves when I stumbled across the solution by coincidence. Quite appropriate for a game of exploration but also frustrating when another hour is spent without any discovery worth mentioning. A niche game only for settled gamers like me who don't mind their games being sedate and repetitious and accept this for the moments of satisfaction when discovering all musical animals or solving the quest of the mythical mermaids. For me, a 7/10 but I could understand other players disliking this.

This game is fun and intrigueing. The scripted parts are tedious, especially on a second playthrough. The best part is the adventure and exploration. Searching for treasures all over the newly revealed lands. Then, the map of the World is alway diffrent, the farther you explore. A fun game, just for that!

This is an exploration game set around 1469. Your job is to make valuable trade routes, while discovering the way to Zipangu (IIRC Japan). Since this is the Age of Discovery, you do have a couple ways to go… The game can quickly become addicting. Oh, and using our maps? Not wise. Outside of most of Europe and North Africa, the map is generated by exploring the unknown regions. Which can cause things like the Red Sea to be more of a lake… On that note, there is a chance while creating the map that resources and even pirates can be cut off from the rest of the ocean. This can cause some difficulties. Oh… and the world might be flat. Just saying. Highly recommend.

A Japanese gaming take on the Discovery age, you play as the boss of a Portuguese seafaring trading company, and your job is threefold: - Discover the world and fill the map - Reach (the game equivalent of) Japan - Trade with anyone & everyone you discover midway through The second objective is what's presented to you as the pressing objective to reach, but the first one is where the main gimmick resides, as the shape of the world is almost entirely decided by what your employed sailors perceive the world like as they navigate the waters, and certain specific actions you undertake deciding whether the world [spoiler] is round or flat [/spoiler]. The exploration is fun, but the somewhat RNG nature of it can become somewhat of a liability, like Japan suddenly becoming a landlocked country, with cities becoming innacessible due to their docks being smack-dab in an inacessible lake. The trading, however, while necessary to get funds to fuel the exploration, is sadly a bit too shallow & unengaging. Still, if you can get this for a decent price, it's a decent temporary timewaster, if only to see what screwy worldmap you end up with.

With reservations. This could be a very enjoyable game, but there are a few things that should be addressed. 1. A pause button. Time continues to move as you scroll around the map looking for new treasure chests that may have popped up since you last looked at them. The Main Menu doesn't always pause it, as I have had new events happen while in it. I don't like RTS games, so I added that tag for this one, because it plays like one. 2. Mapping. Unlike some other reviews, I actually like the fact that everything outside the "known" world at the start of the game is different with each playthrough. Unfortunately, in my very first game, I had a quest location end up being totally inacessable ... the Red Sea was an inland sea, like the Caspian. No way yo sail into it. And as part of it is "known" at the start of the game, making it land locked is inexcusable. 3. I could do without the repetative running commentary during voyages. 4. Kraken. At first I was exceptionally annoyed at them. Then I realized that what they probably represent are the actual dangers and expense of exploration during this period. Otherwise, I could do without the fantasy aspect. 5. The scale. Sometimes you have to scroll all the way in to see something. That annoys me as it makes the time expended to recheck the map 4x as long. I plan on restarting and trying it again. Currently at 8 hours into the game. As noted in item 1, you always need to re-review areas of the map previously explored for new pop-ups. Get it on sale.

For me, the best point of the game comes from how you can shape the world. The annoying part is that you must watch how the exploration unfolds and it gets boring pretty fast. I also think the game is more of a visual novel with exploration and sadly I don't really like VNs. Other things in the game: The trading is not so engaging The battles are easy, just takes time. The texts and cutscenes can't be skipped Visuals are nice Maybe I'll play some more, but it would be only to see the final shape of my world.

I played the Uncharted Waters games on the SNES back in the 90s, as well as several other Age of Exploration themed titles on the PC (Galleons of Glory, Voyages of Discovery), so I was happy to see the genre revisted with Neo Atlas 1469. I found the spirit of the game to be in keeping with my memories of those old school titles, but the game play mechanics of Neo Atlas 1469 were an ungodly irritation that buried my nostalgia at sea. So, I am going to recommend the game for those who can remember the era I am referring to and also remember what it was like running games in DOS, and warn everyone else away by describing how incredibly frustrating the interface of this game is for a modern title that could have been so much better ... Neo Atlas 1469 manages to take the fun premise of mapping a world divided between science and mysticism and bury it beneath a tiresome heap of jrpg cliches and an interface that simulates what it must be like using a microscope to count every micrometer of the surface of a brown paper bag while someone squeals in your ear every 12 seconds and pulls the bag in the direction opposite of where you were looking. The excitement of exploration became a pop-up purgatory that made me literally hate Miguel (the assistant) for his endless interruptions to game flow, which he conveyed with his four default anime-character emotions. I also learned to hate my admirals for their incessant neediness and the repetitive, pointless comments they made about their voyages. It doesn't matter if you map out a 1,000 league voyage for these clowns, if they bump into some tiny island 20 leagues out, they must rush home to tell you all about it, cancelling whatever other orders you gave them. Can you imagine if after the discovery of each island in the Caribbean, the explorers had to make the trip back to Europe? Well - that's basically what you will be dealing with. The innovation of extreme zoom being used to add depth to the map so that some discoveries are much smaller and invisible when zoomed further out may add challenge, but it also adds horrific tedium that had to be compensated for by providing the player a magic pendulum (with limited charges per year) so that s/he can divine the clickable speck on the brown paper bag that is supposed to advance the plot. Further, some of the things you are searching for are triggered only as time passes, so the player must use the pendulum again over the same territory to find things that were added since the last time you looked. The zoom feature also results in cities and mission sites you have already discovered being obscured, which leads one to imagine how useful a real map would be if some things were visible to the naked eye, while others required a magnifying glass, and still others required the aforementioned microscope. Doesn't that sound absurd? Well - again - that's basically what you will be dealing with. I appreciate when games try to innovate, but the innovations in Neo Atlas 1469 were almost universally garbage from my perspective. The challenge came from struggling against the interface and the annoying design, not from any element of actual play. The trade system is so simplistic, I have no idea how the threatened bankruptcy could possibly occur. Combat is not interactive, it is a matter of throwing ships at the enemy rapidly to wear them down. As long as you have a lot of money, you will win. The hardest part of the quests is waiting until the pendulum is available to be charged again so you can search the ugly paper-bag map for the latest MacGuffin that was spawned where you had already looked. All this being said, if you are fond of the kind of stupidly-obvious plot twists featured in children's anime, there is definitely something here for you.

This game seems alright, but it's definitely niche and has some story-driven events. Although it may resemble some similar old games like Merchant Prince/Machiavelli or Uncharted Waters, it had a very different game mechanic that makes it more of a hybrid of RPG and Visual Novel with (kind of) the exploration aspect of 4x strategy games. It's main big draw is the ability for players to determine whether their expedition's discoveries are true or not. Quite an intriguing mechanic, as it allows the player to control what landmass is discovered for each expedition. I'm recommending it mainly because the game's stable so far and I have not seen any notably big bugs as of yet. However, keep in mind that the game is definitely niche and might not be as fun or entertaining for people not into this. Opinions on the game, in sum: - it has a long tutorial-like section and it can take an hour to unlock the main features, including dowsing for treasure. - its story-heavy in some parts, although after the tutorial-like section, the player is free to do other things in addition to the story events. - some might not be a fan of it, but I seem to like the zooming in and searching for items portion. I kind of get that it is intended to invoke the feel of exploration and searching for treasure in a vast map, but some might also see it as kind of gimmicky and strange, not to mention a little eye-straining. - there's no tactical combat. Just had to mention it. On the other hand, at least there's not much combat to handle directly, so that's a plus for players who prefer to autobattle stuff. - the exploration part is the big feature of this game. Landmasses can generate and the player can agree or deny that the newly explored region look like that. This is one of its main feature, not to mention allowing the player to change the world through this mechanic. - trade is basically kind of like matching resources to produce secondary resources, which is similar to Star Ruler 2's resource system - for example, coffee and milk makes coffee milk. Distance also affects how much gold each trade route produce, as is the speed and capacity of trade ships. Of course, the matching resource part is not necessary for making profitable trade routes sometimes. I think that sums up my review of the game so far...