— It’s like the blind leading the blind. —
EA has been stumbling of late. Recent releases have failed to wow critics and players alike, aside from Apex Legends which EA was convinced would fail. I should mention that EA had no say in the development of Apex Legends, if that gives any idea of EA’s competency and eye for quality. That being said, the time has finally come for EA and BioWare’s newest game (or “Live Service”, whichever you prefer) to launch. Does it live up to the hype? Is it the big hit EA needs? Or is it just a soulless Destiny clone that stumbles out of the gate? Well, bolt down your javelins, check your weapons and fire up your thrusters. It’s time to review Anthem.
— Graphics and Immersion —
Anthem’s graphics can be pretty on the eyes in many respects. It can be quite relaxing as you fly by beautiful waterfalls sprawling throughout lush floral landscapes. Dark caves can inspire a sense of foreboding and dread as the light begins to fade and you start to see various webs and skorpion eggs scattered throughout the dark corners. Underwater caverns can be haunting with glowing fungi that will give a sense of awe and exploration. The ambient sound really sets the tone as well, sprinkling itself among a backdrop of low mood music. The problem with the ambience however is that you rarely seem to have a chance to hear and enjoy it as you spend so much time soaring through the air with the sound of thrusters blazing in your ears. The music itself seems pretty reminiscent of the music in Bioware’s Mass Effect series, which I couldn’t tell if I actually enjoyed or if it more just broke my immersion by making me nostalgic for an older game. Nonetheless, those who take the time to slow down and take in the sights and sounds of the Anthem’s world will be pleasantly surprised at how amazing this world can look and sound.
Best to enjoy it while it’s nice and quiet, however. When the shooting starts, you will see the beautiful gameworld disrupted by loud, impressive explosions launching dirt and smoldering smoke into the air. Flaming mortars can engulf the immediate area in roaring flames while ember-imbued cold snaps freeze enemies and surrounding areas solid with snow and ice. On top of this, you’ll have bullets whizzing by you and red sniper sights trying to home in on you as you frantically run and gun or attempt to sneak around in the shadows, depending on your preferred playstyle. Things can get especially hectic during bigger firefights, promoting the feeling like you are in a genuine warzone. Such carnage comes with a price however. With so much happening around you and so many explosions and other graphical effects filling up your screen, more often than not you will be so busy trying to control the situation at hand that you probably won’t be able to take the proper time to fully appreciate what you are experiencing. It can also make it very difficult to keep track of combat at times, especially in tight quarters such as caverns and hallways. God forbid a colossus launches its mini-nukes in an enclosed space because you’re gonna be running blind for at least a few seconds, which could mean the difference between life and death on higher difficulties when even a javelin’s ultimate ability seems to just piss off enemies more than substantially hurt them.
The javelins themselves are especially pretty to look at as well. The meticulous detail put into the various javelin limbs and pieces can look outright realistic with the right material and color shading in the forge. Metallic pieces actually reflects light like real metal should. Plastic and leather patterns look realistic as well. One of the downfalls to how good the javelin can look unfortunately brings out the limitations where the rest of the customization system is concerned. As far as I can tell, the standard edition of the game shipped with only two alternate skins for each javelin and changing out heavy weapons and components does nothing to alter the physical appearance of the javelin itself. So, what could have been a deep customization system with colors and materials is essentially marred by the lack of skins as well as not being able to color or change the materials of individual javelin pieces. Rather you are limited to changing primary, secondary and tertiary templates only. This is not to say that you cannot make your javelin look awesome. However, I feel like the developers really missed an opportunity here by limiting the customization system and the amount of skins available.
— Gameplay —
For the most part, Anthem delivers on its gameplay promises and most of the javelins bring something unique to the table. I definitely felt powerful stomping and shield bashing through enemies with the Colossus javelin while using my flamethrower, mortars and rail guns to light up the landscape. Hovering in the air almost indefinitely with the Storm javelin while using its powers to zap or fry your enemies is very satisfying. The Interceptor javelin is the fastest of the four, capable of zipping around to land quick, strong melee attacks or quickly repair downed javelins. Finally, the poster-child Ranger javelin finds itself as a jack of all trades, with access to all weapon-types which can lead to it being quite versatile. However, I also feel like this hurts the Ranger in some respects, as I switched to another javelin as soon as I could because as nothing really stood out to me about it during gameplay.
Traveling around the Anthem world started off quite fun and engaging. No other game I’ve played in recent memory quite matches the feeling of excitement you get the first few times you leap off the ledge and activate your javelin’s thrusters and head off toward adventure in way that would make Iron Man proud. Stopping on a dime by switching into hover mode, changing direction and then thrusting off again was thrilling and enjoyable. However, as I started to clock hours in the game, what was supposed to be a big selling point of the game started to fall short for me. This was because of the overheating mechanic in place that basically limits how long your thrusters will carry your javelin across the open sky. To be frank, I feel like the time allotted for flight it is far too short, especially when the one of the core gameplay selling points is supposed to be built around flying for travel purposes and even combat in some instances. This is even more painfully apparent for the Colossus javelin which flies and handles like buttered toast. Of course, there are a few tricks like deep dives and flying through waterfalls that can prolong your flight time. However, most of the time you find yourself needing to fly upwards for whatever reason and waterfalls only seem to be concentrated on certain areas of the map because I can never find one when I need it. For such a huge game world that all but requires flight to get around effectively, the fact that I always seemed to struggle to efficiently fly to the next objective makes the overheating mechanic very annoying. This is not to mention that about half of the attacks from various enemies will also instantly overheat you and ground your heavy, metal ass faster than an jet made out of duct tape. So yeah, overheating constantly while firing off weapons and combat abilities in flight, I could understand. Overheating constantly while just trying to get around the game world effectively, not so much I’m afraid.
One area where the game really falls flat is the loot. For a game billed as a looter-shooter, I have to ask, where the hell is all the loot? From what I’ve seen, the same loot you find at the beginning of the game is the same stuff you earn at the end game, models and all. And no, recoloring a pre-existing model does not count as a new model in my book. As you pass through the colored tiers, the weapons and components start to add “inscriptions” which are basically percentage increases to invisible stats that you can’t see anywhere. They also eventually get a special passive perk once you hit the masterwork tier as well. The problem I run into with this is that all gear basically feels the same aside from doing more damage. I never felt like my armor or shield was getting stronger either. Without being able to see these invisible stat totals and many masterwork perks being seemingly useless, there was never a “wow” factor whenever loot dropped. My javelin seemingly operates the exact same at epic tier as it did when I first started the game. Once I am decked out in masterwork tier gear, that might change. But for now I’m not going to hold my breath. Lastly, the rate at which masterwork and legendary gear drops tells me that it will most likely be a slow and painful grind. I should note, that as of writing this review, BioWare has pushed their “loot patch” hotfix and is currently live on the servers. Unfortunately, after playing for a few hours, I still see no real differences thus far.
— Story–
AnthemProbably the worst area that Anthem suffers in my opinion is the half-ass storyline that it attempts to tell. From the beginning to end, the storyline is uninspired and easy to predict. We’ve all heard this story before, aside from particulars tidbits unique to Anthem. I will admit the story does start off solid however. But then it fizzles out during the middle, only to start ramping up again at the every end. And then, just as the storyline is getting bearable, I dare say even good, it just ends with a minor teaser to try hook you into coming back when the next content patch drops. It wasn’t very effective to say the least. So what about the characters? Unfortunately, most main characters are easily forgettable and the few memorable ones get minor exposure during the story and then get dropped to the sideline, never to be heard from again. The side-quest givers and other random NPCs you meet are so cookiecutter they could pull a chocolate chip cookie out of their ass. The length of the story is nothing to be proud of either. I managed to finish off the main plot, all side quests and boring conversations within a total of 20 hours of casual playing. In fact, I had played through more than half the game just by playing the 10 hour EA trial. I seriously think I spent more time in Fort Tarsis listening to all the cutscenes and useless side conversations that added nothing to the actual plot than I did running actual missions.
The think what really grinds my gears is that I can tell that there “was” a good story here, somewhere. It’s so obvious that the story was written and then chopped and split up with one or two small portions spoon fed to us in an effort to lengthen the “live service” model that EA has such a hard on for. Why do I say that? That’s because if you look at EA and BioWare’s roadmap for the game, we apparently are only in Act 1 with Act 2 and 3 making an appearance later this year. So we were sold only a third of the story for price of a full one. Further evidence that suggests this is how out of order certain set pieces of the game seems, like certain characters showing up in an early stronghold mission for commentary like you already know who they are when you haven’t even met them in the actual storyline yet. Or a certain cypher being your handler in freeplay before you’ve even met them yet as well, though this particular instance seems to have been patched so it could’ve possibly been a bug in retrospect, but I digress. Furthermore, there’s the issue that the story atmosphere seems to flip-flop from genre to genre on more than one occasion. So we have science and technology, but there’s also magic in some form apparently with little paranormal sprinkles tossed in occasionally. The story is just so random and incoherent at times, it’s like Anthem just isn’t sure what it wants to be.
— Additional Thoughts —
Despite Anthem performing rather well in some areas, there are definitely some particular areas that fall rather short for me and are worth discussing in greater detail. The first thing I noticed even when starting up the game and playing through for the first few hours is how much content appears to be missing. In fact, the few first updates shown on the EA and Bioware roadmap are quality of life updates and features that I would argue should have been in the the game at launch. Things like leaderboards, multiple unique strongholds, multiple unique world events, an actual full, satisfying story etc. These things should have been finished and shipped in the game upon release. As it stands now, we have a game with a short and chopped up plot. Three strongholds with only one being unique and the other two being rehashes of story missions made harder. A minimum amount of weapons and gear that do nothing for our javelins until at the very least you get to the masterwork tier and even then it’s iffy at best. By the way, where the hell are the unique elemental weapons we were promised? Oh that’s right, they’re not in the game. I distinctly remember BioWare’s E3 presentation in 2017. Right now it seems that announcement “gameplay” trailer had more content in the few minutes it showed than the majority of the shipped game of today has. I say “gameplay” because it’s obvious they outright lied about the announcement trailer being captured in real-time gameplay. If it was, Anthem had some serious downgrades, even on PC.
One glaring area for me is javelin playstyle and performance. Despite all the javelins feeling moderately solid out of the box, certain annoyances make me feel like they are not reaching their full potential. Almost like something is missing from the equation. Take the Colossus javelin for example. While all the other javelins’ shields automatically function at all times, the colossus javelins must switch theirs on and off with an actual physical shield. If it is not deployed, they will take damage directly to their armor. Furthermore, once the shield is deployed, it only protects against damage coming from directly in front of the javelin. Any damage from the side or from behind still hits the armor directly. To make it even further annoying, while the shield is deployed the Colossus javelin cannot use any weapons aside from its shield bash melee attack or ramming itself and the shield through enemies. This put me in the situation of basically running around and ramming enemies over and over at higher difficulties, only stopping to use actual weapons and abilities when I wasn’t being fired upon. In spite of the Colossus javelin supposedly having the most armor and survivability, in reality it gets tore up by enemy fire just as fast as other javelins when it doesn’t have its shield deployed. Stacking armor seems to have no effect on this plus I noticed my armor bar was different in almost every mission I recently went into, although I hardly ever change gear at this point. I’m not sure if my stats are being synced to every one else in the mission at hand or if this is a bug. Regardless, this effectively takes the Colossus javelin out of its element at higher difficulties. Keeping the enemies’ attention and wading through them at close range as advertised just isn’t viable at that point.
As a disclaimer, I have only played the Colossus javelin thoroughly. However, the time I did spend with the other javelins made them feel like they were not completely thought out in some respects as well. Interceptor javelins in particular seem to have issues at higher levels. Being built for quick, single target melee attacks sounds good on paper but many enemies at higher difficulties either fly or are basically death incarnate at melee range, effectively taking the Interceptor Javelin out of its element in all but the hands of the most skilled players. Not to mention it’s very easy to get surrounded at higher difficulties since enemies have exponentially higher health pools and shields. As previously noted, the Ranger javelin is versatile but feels bland after an extended playthrough which not necessarily bad if you want to have adaptability. However, in my opinion, they don’t really feel like they have an identity when compared to the other javelins. The Storm Javelin, from my experience, appears to the be the most well thought out javelin, seemingly having few setbacks aside from paper-thin armor. I could go on but these are just some of few things that just really irk me. I don’t have enough time or website space to carry on as much as I would like to.
— Overall Score: 6 —
Anthem is a sometimes glorious, yet mostly soulless game (I mean “Live Service”). The epitome of a beautiful letdown. What Anthem does get right, it nails perfectly. Beautiful landscapes, superb sound and solid gameplay with thrusters, weapons and whole lot of explosions. These cornerstones create a wonderful foundation which should have developed into an absolute dream of a game. Unfortunately, that’s where the soul ends. The thin system designs, minimal loot system and horridly subpar storyline litter the shell of a game that at one point might have been very good. Maybe even great. However, the game has obviously been chopped and split up in an attempt to hook players with an IV drip of supposed “continual” and “free updated” content. The problem is, first impressions are everything and right now I’m not really impressed nor do I feel the need to stick around and see what the IV drip feeds us players next. The bottom line is Anthem can make for a fun time blowing up with your friends, but there’s not much more to it than that right now. So if that’s your thing, then God bless ya. By all means, go play the game and have a good time. For others though, it’s probably not worth the time invested.
If it wasn’t already apparent with other recent games, Anthem should prove now without a shadow of a doubt that games as a “Live Service” is failed idea. They usually fail to impress out of the gate and also fail to keep players interested in the long term. Plus, there’s always the moral argument of selling a fraction of a game at full price with the intention of “fixing” it later. The morality of the situation is called into question even further when you consider that most games like Anthem were obviously finished at some point. However, publishers like EA or Activision come in with the intention to chop and screw the game into pieces for the sole purpose of selling those pieces of the game to players later on when they should already own it in full after paying that full price. Or, alternatively, they release those pieces of the game as supposed “free updates” in an attempt to foster fraudulent and unearned goodwill from players. It’s unethical and it needs to stop. Anthem had the potential to be one hell of an amazing game and it might still be one day, who knows. As it currently stands however, Anthem has a long way to go before it feels even close to complete and some of us just have more important things to do with our time.
