Mass Defect.
If you follow games media then by the time you are reading this, you will have already seen the headlines dooming EA’s first real stab at a ‘Live Service’ game. While some of the hyperbole can be chalked up to click baiting, there is no smoke without fire and I am here to tell you that Anthem is not a game you should rush out and buy.
After Bioware released the highly anticipated Mass Effect: Andromeda to lackluster reviews and meme worthy gameplay many thought that this could be the beginning of the end for the famed studio. However, things started to look up shortly afterwards when Anthem was originally revealed at E3 of the same year. EA were promising an epic sci-fi game, set in a massive open world. Turns out, things couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One (Reviewed)
Price: $59.99
Mulitplayer: Co-Op
Price I’d pay: $19.99
The world of Anthem is a strange and mysterious one, with the Anthem of Creation being the source of all life there. The Anthem creates things called shaper relics that are scattered all around the world and these can be very unstable and dangerous, as when they are tampered with, they have the ability to create these tears in the world where beasts can pour out, as well as dangerous environmental hazards. It is in one of these hazards, the Heart of Rage, where our story starts. Players take the role of a newly recruited Freelancer, someone who takes contracts from folks in order to help them solve problems, caught up in an assault on the storm trying to silence it. Things don’t go according to plan and only the player and their friends, Haluk and Faye make it out alive. Fast forward a few years, and the once praised Freelancers are now disgraced and theyare no longer in contact with their two buddies. However, players are out there taking up what little work is available, trying to make a living and help put the Freelancer name back in everyone’s good books. Normally, a Bioware story is something to behold.
You only have to look at their previous games to see the special kind of care and attention that they pay to the worlds that they craft. Unfortunately, Anthem falls incredibly short in this area. Do not expect some kind of sprawling intricate narrative that pulls you in with its character building and complex relationships and choices that define your experience, none of that is present. The voice acting may be of a really high quality but the material they have been given is predictable and well-trodden. The main villain of the piece has zero personality and very little depth when it comes to his motives. Even his name is dull, The Monitor. All we know is that he wants to harness the Anthem of Creation so that he can mold the world to his own liking. He also only appears in the game in three cut-scenes and as an end boss fight, which turns out to just be a joke with nothing to do except aim and shoot. There is also a part in the game that essentially locks story progress behind a set of challenges that took me over 3 hours to complete.
These challenges are the sort of thing you would expect to find in a side menu that offered me something when completed. But here it’s a main mission and felt very out of place. I can only imagine that it was placed in the game to pad out its runtime and to also stop EA Access subscribers from completing the main campaign in the 10 hours they had to play the game for free, because without that mission, players could easily plough through all the main missions under that time. Having loved the original Mass Effect trilogy, primarily for the characters and story, this is a massive blow.
Now in order to be a Freelancer players need a Javelin. A Javelin is the name giving to the metal suit of armor a Freelancer wears; which has also been created using shaper technology. Think of it like Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit. There are four different styles of Javelin, each with their own traits and features and players get to pick any one of them at the outset. The Colossus is the biggest of the bunch. Slow moving, but heavily armored and specializes in defense and drawing attacks away from other Javelins. Next up is the Ranger, an all-rounder that is definitely the closest relative to Iron Man, utilizing missiles and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. Then there is the Interceptor which substitutes defense for speed. The fastest of the Javelins which is also the one that does not have a cooldown on their melee attack, meaning that they are all about getting up close and personal. And Finally, there is the Storm. This suit is basically a wizard, having the ability to harness the elements such as fire, ice and lightning in their attacks. My personal favorite is the Storm, but there should be a Javelin to suit all play styles. The only issue was that once I had picked my first Javelin, I could not switch it out until I reached a higher level, with the 4th slot being unlocked at level 26. This meant that if I picked the wrong suit, it was going to be a while before I could try another out.
The suits each have slots in which to equip gear, which is how one powers up the suits in the game. There are 3 slots that are dedicated to attacks; two ranged attacks and an ultimate and another set of slots where buffs can be applied. These range from increased shields at the cost of armor, increased ammo capacity and other types that can increase power; all in the service of seeing the power number increase. Gear is obtained by either finding loot out in the world, or by crafting them but the loot players find is limited by the current pilot level, so there is no chance of finding a rare item if one is only just starting out, which is odd as there is nothing stopping players using a level 20 item on a level 1 pilot. But that isn’t the only problem this game has with loot. First of all, it isn’t very exciting.
The guns are just a standard fair with two or three variations of each style of weapon. Shotguns, assault rifles, SMGs and LMGs are all present and they all feel great to use. But until players complete the game and start getting into the endgame, they offer very little variety on stat boosts and I never really felt that one gun was that different than another in its same class. Disappointing as the gunplay really does feel great, and having to wait until the main campaign is over before I started finding Masterwork weapons and blueprints was a missed opportunity to reward players. The other problem I had is that the special and ultimate attacks cannot be changed. Each Javelin has their own, but they have to be used with that particular suit, so players cannot swap them out between them. I would have liked to have been given this option, as there are things I like about some suit over others and being able to craft a Javelin to better suit my style.
Once kitted out it’s time to explore and the first thing players will find is thier home base, Fort Tarsis, named after the legendary Freelancer General Helena Tarsis. Here is where everyone will spend all of their time in between missions. It’s a very large place to get around and isn’t helped by the fact that one moves like a sloth when out of thier suit. It really put me off exploring the base and conversing with some of the inhabitants because it just took too long to move about. It made even more annoying by the fact that some of the conversations with the side characters make up some of the better parts of the story. Unlike the main quest there are some really well thought and were some of my favorite parts of the game, focusing on the lives of these people after the Heart of Rage destroyed their home.
Along with chatting to people, the fort is where players will pick up missions. There are a variety of main and side missions which ironically don’t really offer that much variety. Nearly all of them involve flying to a place, defending an area, flying to another place, and rinsing and repeating. It follows the same sort of theme the original Destiny game did, but is made less exciting due to the poor loot system and monotonous scenery, because although Anthem is an incredibly pretty game, the worldI was exploring had no distinction to it. One part of the map looks like any other so traversing it just feels boring and for some reason the developers made it worse by hampering the one thing that made travelling fun, the flight mechanics. Each Javelin has the ability to fly and the act of flying is some of the most fun I have had in a game in a while. But flying is on an incredibly short timer, with it only lasting about 10-15 seconds without needing to either land or fly into water to cool off the jets.
Players can find pieces of gear that can boost the jet’s ability, but even with the most powerful of these equipped, flying is still hamstrung and feels like a missed opportunity. I can understand them not wanting players to cheese the hovering ability, something that could give you the edge in certain battles, but seeing as there are times in certain missions where flight is disabled, it seems like a weird move to enforce both of these mechanics and take all of the fun out of exploration.
As Anthem is a Live Service game, the ending is just the beginning, with the promise of more engaging content once everyone hits the higher levels. These include a never-ending succession of random Freelancer contracts (which are basically the same rinse and repeat missions as before) along with the quest line that asks players to complete a series of long-term challenges that will re-ignite the Legion of Dawn, General Tarsis’ Freelancer order. But with the content being pretty much a replay of previous missions, there was little to entice me to carry on much further, especially given the amount of issues I experienced when playing the game.
To start off, there are the load times, which were just ridiculous. Taking anything from 2-3 minutes to launch start up the game, launch into a mission or return to the fort. I got so sick of staring at the same old loading screens. Then there were the crashes. Over five times the game crashed to the Xbox dashboard and I would have to say over 30 times that the game crashed during a mission and threw me back to the main screen. Not to mention all of the bugs that caused missions to not load correctly or events not triggering which resulted in me having to exit the game and lose all the progress I made. It is plain to see that just like Mass Effect: Andromeda, Anthem was a victim of EA’s financials and needed at least another six months in the oven.
I am sorry to say that Anthem has fallen short in pretty much every way. Not only do I believe that Anthem was never originally conceived to be a Live Service game and was hijacked by EA to jump on that bandwagon, but also that this game was released in an unfinished state. This has left such a sour taste in my mouth because when Anthem is working well, it can be a real fun time; flying around, getting into intense battles against humans and beasts. But it has so spectacularly failed in all other areas that I simply cannot recommend this game. And with The Division 2, a game that has experience in the Live Service sector only weeks away from launching, I feel like this Anthem will just fall on deaf ears.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
