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Anthem is an example of the direction the industry is taking and I am not a fan at all.
We have here a triple A game that has been clearly set up by talented people, but it seems to have been designed by a conference room filled with men with gray skin and dressed in £ 2,000.
It's a loot shooter where all the loot is made up of variants of the same boring shotguns and assault rifles. Kids love real world guns.
You shoot these insects of the real world on insects and humanoids, which results in their numbers – the higher the efficiency of your weapon, the higher the number. Children like numbers.
It's a game design based on Google's performance indicators and trends.
It's a BioWare title, of course, and what would a game from the creator of Mass Effect be without the player's choice? Anthem. It would be a hymn.
Here, conversations have two inconsequential dialogue options that slightly change what is said without any impact on the story or your relationships. This sounds like a direct response to the brutal reaction against Mass Effect Andromeda, a game shot by shareable gifs of awkward facial animations.
These facial animations were probably a matter of scope. Andromeda was a real RPG with hundreds of thousands of phone lines and branch paths. The budget went elsewhere. In Anthem, all the money has been invested to ensure that it can not be mocked by gifs. It sounds phenomenal and the performance capture is one of the best I have ever seen. It is also lacking substance.
You go to a mission, shoot things, hold something interactive from time to time, go back to the center, swap the crotch of your rubber chrome mech, then go back and do it again. Absurd levels of visual decadence are not enough to hide the deep imperfections of Hymn.
The illusion works almost, though. During the first hours, you will be distracted enough to believe that it is a good match. When you hover over a waterfall with the stars in your eyes and some alien fungi appear, creating clouds of neon spores that frame the scene, you'll be surprised. Playing on a GTX 2080ti is one of the best games I have ever seen. There is also a lot to say about the novelty of a game that nails the 360-degree movement. Minute per minute, it feels good. The problem is everything else: mission design, history, pace and even personalization.
The attraction of Anthem rests largely on the Javelin. This is your own technician and you are free to spoil them, modify materials on different parts of the body, change color and even apply vinyls. But if you dream of doing a role play with some kind of mechanical mechanic, constantly changing rooms to get colder booty as you go through the story, you'll be disappointed.
If you have pre-ordered, you get free coins and can exchange your Javelin's legs, arms, head and body for a different armor. Apart from that, you only have two other choices and they are all stuck behind an absurd amount of currency in play. The customization is clearly designed to push you to spend real money. Even in this case, there is practically nothing that can tempt you.
The story is not even an incentive to walk. BioWare's brilliant global construction contains lightning bolts – mostly hidden in Codex collectibles scattered around a soulless hub – but you risk getting lost in a lot of fake words if you do not give it the trouble.
At some point, the game stops trying to chain you and you are asked to open a handful of tombs loose. You head for the map, fly to the graves and meet a list of challenges to unlock them: get 50 deadly attacks with an assault rifle, 20 melee attacks, participate in five world events, etc. . It's blatant, a dull padding that kills the dead who roam.
Each mission is automatically matched to random players if you do not associate. You leave in a team of four and accelerate to reach your goal as a unit. The map is large and unreadable, so you always follow the waypoint markers. Of course, as this is an open world game in 2019, you will also find collectibles that you can vacuum to use as craft materials. However, you are always tied to whoever is at the front of the pack. If you are too late, you will encounter a loading screen before being teleported to the one who rushes in front of you. There is always a bit of cock running in front.
It's also a team game where there is almost no teamwork. Of course, you can always combine your ultimate abilities to quickly eliminate a boss. You can also combine different moves – attacking an enemy frozen by one of your allies, for example – but the battlefield is so busy with special effects that it's almost impossible to coordinate with the intent. From time to time, you'll just have to cut the power at the right time and the game will tell you that you've made a combo. Yes, the team work!
If you are killed in action, your allies can also resurrect you to bring you back to battle. Once you are stunned, there is no way to let your allies know that you are dead – you just have to hope they revive you. Otherwise, you will spend the rest of the mission watching your character shot. You can not even access the pause menu in this state. Even without the bugs where the volume is totally reduced, the game hangs or the netcode teleports you through the sky and into a wall, the most serious problems of Anthem can not be solved with a patch.
I entered the anthem with an open mind. It's a game I wanted to succeed from a studio I've always been attached to. Unfortunately, that's all that everyone was afraid to reveal. It's a hollow experience that has been designed to address the widest possible market while providing more money for those trapped by its doggy design.
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