Overall, I like the look of this model.
Ok, so I grant, as someone who started playing the original hex-map table top game and put many hours as a kid into lead miniatures (yes, LEAD!), it's not 100% cannon with what
I picture from my memories of TRO 3025, but that's OK. It is a game, after all, and as other posters pointed out, the images change from release to release, and there is no reason at all to believe that just as the Mustang or Corvette looked slightly different from year to year (especially in early production phases of those models) that Defiance Industries (or what was left of it) would not choose to or be forced to do much the same, for any one of a number of reasons, including technical refinements, equipment or parts shortages or changes that required a slight redesign, and the simple march of both time and progress.
And, as this game takes place
after the emergence of the Clans, what Atlas' remain functional are either very newly built, or have been
heavily repaired and modified in the last 200 some-odd years, so the chances of any original individual Atlas chassis looking the same in 3050+ as it did the way it walked out of the factory is slim to none, especially given that they were designed sometime after 2750, but prior to Kerensky's exodus - nearly 300 years prior: It is not at all unreasonable to consider this simply an updated model of the Atlas as designed and produced sometime after 3025.
My only issue is that it
does look a bit weedy or malnourished, but again this might be due to armor and chassis advances, and it presents an otherwise smaller target, which is always good.
Also, the connections for the legs at the hip seem a bit under-protected and vulnerable for an assault-class battlemech: I'd always seen the huge shoulder pauldrons not as room for actuators heavy enough to carry the gun load so much as extra armor to prevent the loss of critical weapons via a stray or well aimed shot to a weak joint connection. I'd like to see maybe a slight redesign, but I'm far more interested in playing the game than I am in waiting around for modellers to make inconsequential visual changes to an already stunning game that won't have any effect on gameplay.
And as for all the people complaining about weapons load-outs on the model,
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Atlas_(BattleMech) lists 9 different variants from the basic configuration, and that doesn't even consider the various ad-hoc configurations that would have come into existence over the years.
