The Sands Whisper Your Name

Atajrubah has a lot of promise but a ways yet to go.

The visuals are rough but still quite pleasant to look at. There's a bit of distortion around the edges of the models (notably trees) and the characters move in awkward ways at times.

The inventory and crafting menus are...primitive and not terribly helpful. There's an unexplained "crotch" slot that I'm wierdly curious to see what eventually goes there. I'm guessing it's a belt but stranger things have happened in games.

There are no crafting recipes as of yet and while the basic process of playing the game is relatively familiar to people who've played survival games, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to actually do yet. I do like survival games and the Arabian theme is new in terms of the survival genre.

The game does snarl the video drivers and crash rather regularly on my machine. This is not a point in its favor but I'll withold outright hate because I don't know if this is a problem exclusive to my rig or not.

Atajrubah could be a really solid addition to the survival genre if it follows through on full release with the promise it's showing in the open beta and fixes some of the more glaring issues.

A couple of things that *must* be fixed before launch:

- Day/night cycles are somewhat erratic. Sometimes at night it's like someone just turned out the lights and there's no indicated way to make fire or light of any kind. I did respawn with a torch a couple of times but there was no indication of how to light it so I just stumbled around in the dark. The shadows also move incredibly fast as the sun moves across the sky, faster than your character can actually run. This isn't major but it is definitely disorienting and visually odd.

- The game does not pause when you open the menu. This is a pretty serious problem for obvious reasons.

- Items do not stack and that's a pretty crippling flaw when one arrow takes up one inventory slot. I'm willing to bet this will be fixed later on but for now it's not a pleasant bug.

- The crashing does not add to the experience.