Anthem “launched” yesterday, kind of. PC Origin Premiere players get the full game, Xbox EA Access players get a 10 hour trial. I have burned through most of that, as Xbox will be my main, and have almost caught up to my Xbox account on my PC account, where I’m repeating the same content, but I’ve unlocked the javelins in a different order to mix it up just a little bit.
BioWare and EA both have a tremendous amount riding on Anthem, the newest entry in the loot shooter genre, and what is supposed to be a recovery for the studio after Mass Effect Andromeda. Anthem wants to pull pieces from every established game in the genre, Destiny, The Division, Diablo, Warfame, Borderlands, while also being its own thing. And in that, I think it succeeds.
I am very much enjoying my time with Anthem overall, and I am genuinely upset I can’t make further progress on Xbox for a week, because I am itching to play. With that said, there’s plenty to critique as well, and I’m going to do my best to lay out my current thoughts based on these first ten hours, bolstered by past experienced in the closed alpha and demo as well.
What Works
Simply put, if a game in this genre isn’t enjoyable to actually play, it’s never going to work. This has been the draw of Destiny, where you have Bungie’s top-notch FPS gameplay leading the charge in terms of why people are addicted to that franchise. I am surprised that BioWare, frankly not super well known for top notch combat in games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, where gameplay often takes a backseat to story, has done a very good job of making action-oriented third person gameplay here.
For all Mass Effect Andromeda’s faults, one thing it did start to get right was the fast-paced combat. And we can see some of those lessons translate into Anthem here. Despite being third person, this has completely abandoned the concept of being a cover-based shooter in favor of sprinting, flying and dodging at all times, making each encounter a veritable sci-fi action film of combat.
One advantage Anthem boasts over its rivals Destiny and The Division is that its classes feel wildly different from one another. Playing a Storm, hovering over the battlefield, is the polar opposite of playing as a Colossus, who rarely leaves the ground. Interceptor, with its endless speed and focus on melee abilities, feels like a class pulled straight out of Warframe. Combine their assault approaches with a variety of skills and in the Colossus’s case, different weaponry, and you can make combat keep feeling fresh even when encounters are all relatively similar.
I have also been pleasantly surprised by the story component of Anthem which honestly, I have been worried about, even through the early tests. The concept of tying so much story stuff to first person conversations in Fort Tarsis seems like a risk, and while no, this was never going to be Mass Effect with its fifty-choices-per convo system and huge decision making moments, what is here, works. The voicework, animation and writing here are all top notch. Standouts include Owen, your “handler” on your missions, Brin, a nervous Sentinel liason, and Neeson, a local gossip voiced by Joe La Truglio who is essentially directly channeling his Brooklyn 99 character, Boyle, which is hilarious.
Yes, much of Anthem’s story is kind of sci-fi nonsense and typical light vs. dark stuff, but there’s a depth to these characters and this world you can start to feel even early in. The choice to give your freelancer a voice as opposed to the silent protagonists of Destiny and The Division is a good one, though I do find it a bit odd that I picked out a face for my freelancer and have yet to see it once in ten hours.
This is a beautiful game, both in the larger, grand picture of the sprawling ruined world that looks stunning on Xbox One X, but also in the detail of the fabric and metal patterns of your javelins, as Anthem features arguably the best cosmetic customization this genre has ever seen. I think it may turn out to be kind of a genius idea to make all armor cosmetic and buyable/earnable, and instead to tie stats into the “component” system which doesn’t change visuals at all. It’s like having permanent transmog turned on, and I think they’ve hit the nail on the head here in terms of freedom of design.
Finally, for me personally, Anthem’s performance has improved dramatically since its early tests. Not all the way to perfect, mind you, but if the demo was broken probably 90% of the time and working smoothly about 10%, it’s now the reverse. 90% of the time things are fine, though in that last 10%, the final few hours of my trial, I started to see some old problems. Some hard crashes and the 95% loading bug that plagued the demo. On PC I had a few crashes eventually as well. There’s a day one patch coming on the 22nd that’s supposed to fix a lot of this, but for me it has been way better than the absolute mess we saw in the demo.
What Doesn’t
While Anthem gameplay is fun, I’m starting to grow a little concerned about the repetitiveness of encounters. More or less everything is taking place in different parts of one, giant map zone, but even if it’s gorgeous (and it is gorgeous), every encounter, whether it’s with Outlaws, Scars or Dominion, feels roughly the same. It’s fun, due to the nature of combat I described earlier, but every mission seems to be some variant of “clear the wave, silence the relic, reassemble the pieces, stand on the thing.” It reminds me of the early days of Destiny where all its missions were little more than locked doors and clearing waves until they opened.
The endgame does feel like it’s going to be somewhat sparse up front here. Strongholds are essentially hard “strikes,” to borrow Destiny parlance, and there are only three of them to repeat endlessly. World cataclysms and legendary contracts remain relative unknowns in this early stage, but for now, it does seem like it could end up being a bit dry.
Load times are bad, and how often you have to load is also bad, like going in and out of the Forge or when you respawn in an encounter. The entire respawn/revive system in general is realllly bad, as you sit there without being able to either spectate your teammates or manually respawn yourself after say, 30 seconds, at the mercy of revives from teammates you can't even see.
While combat feels good and the loot can make for some interesting builds, the act of looting remains a problem. There’s A) too much garbage loot B) there are rarely big power jumps that feel noticeable and C) relegating all loot gathered to the very end of a “mission complete” screen after collecting it in the wild disconnects the act of kill X enemy/boss with getting that loot, and it’s not a very well designed feedback loop, which is essential for a game like this. I can get over not being able to swap gear in the wild, but the way loot is collected needs to be looked at.
At the end of my trial here I’ve hit a point in the game that I know everyone is going to be…less than thrilled about. So far, things have been fine. Run story missions, do contracts, do a stronghold or two, but now there’s a main storyline quest step that has you open four tombs. But to do this, you have to do a massive series of checklist challenges that include things like 50 melee kills, 25 material harvests, 15 chest openings. It’s a mountain of busywork that grinds the game to a halt for hours, seemingly as a wall to keep people from blazing through the story. While some of the challenges are fine, and they are retroactive, some feel bugged. You only get credit for a chest opening if you open it instead of a team member, which is problematic. Also I find it hard to believe that I’ve played this game for 10 hours and have only 1 of 3 multi-kills I need to complete one of the challenges. It’s one thing to have something like this as a side-pursuit, it’s another to hook it directly into the main storyline and stop all progress until this busywork is done. It’s a bizarre decision I don’t understand.
Overall
I like Anthem, I really do. I do not know if this is going to turn into some 800 hour Destiny epic I stick with forever, but I am enjoying what I’m playing so far and the good far outweighs the bad for me. There are clear problems that need to be addressed, but again, I’ve said before that literally no game in this genre has launched without a large stack of issues to fix. And it feels like Anthem is going to launch in a better state than most, even if there’s still work to be done.
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