I don’t know at what point I stop being a new gamer and just become a gamer. I keep wanting to start these reviews with “well I’m a new gamer, but….” In case you’ve missed my previous reviews, I first moved beyond Sonic and Mario-style platforming games in 2014, when I’d moved up to Austin and had a lot of free time to kill. My first games were the Mass Effect trilogy, and I played them over and over and over again. I’m predisposed to love games that are heavy on plot and have scaleable difficulty levels (everything on narrative/easy forever, thank you).
So when the next big game from Bioware, maker of Mass Effect and Dragon Age and therefore all of my favorite games, was announced as an online cooperative combat heavy game, I was pretty sure I was just never going to even pick it up. But a friend of mine who purchased the game on launch day had a physical copy he let me borrow for a few weekends, and here we are.
But first, the details.
Anthem (2019)
Developer: Bioware
Publisher: EA
Platform: Xbox (also available for Mac/PC and Playstation 4)
I’m about 20 hours into the game, and I’m very much embroiled in a love/hate relationship with it. Do I love to hate it? Do I hate to love it? Do I just love and hate things about it in equal measure in a way that doesn’t tip the scales in either direction?
Sure. Yes to all of it.
Not entirely sure what would be considered game spoilers, but I haven’t gotten to any big plot points yet. Are there plot points? I’m still not sure. No spoilers, probably.
If there’s one thing that Bioware has been known for since its early days, it’s rich storytelling and complex characters, though that began to take a nosedive after EA purchased the company in 2007. This isn’t going to be a history of the problems of Bioware, or even a history of the problems involving the development of Anthem, which have been well documented elsewhere. This is purely going to be about my experience playing it for the twenty odd hours that I’ve played it.
The story of Anthem is laid out for you in a roughly ten minute mini-movie prior to you even being able to control your character. I’m going to be 100% honest and tell you I didn’t really pay attention. I didn’t realize it would be that long; I didn’t realize I wasn’t going to be getting this information anywhere else; and at some point I realized it didn’t particularly matter to the game play, so I’ve never gone looking for it.
The basics: You’re on a planet that isn’t ever named. There are relics of an ancient civilization that harness an energy called the Anthem of Creation (hence the name). Unstable relics are a problem, so one early mission and a lot of later ones are all about shutting the relics down. Humans call the alien civilization the Shapers. Hundreds of years before the start of the game, humans were slaves of an alien race and built these exosuits (later called javelins) using Shaper technology. There’s a thing with a giant in the beginning of the game where something really bad happens and a cataclysm starts in a place called The Heart of Rage (and you better believe this is coming back later in the game), but to be honest if you want that level of detail and you haven’t already played it, I just urge you to read the wikipedia article about the game.
There are four different styles of javelins you can play in. All but the last of these clips are in the storm javelin, which allows you to do SPACE MAGIC, but there’s also the ranger, colossus, and interceptor. Each has different strengths and weaknesses and it really boils down to how you like to handle your combat. I haven’t unlocked the interceptor yet, but the storm javelin is definitely my favorite of the other three.
At the start of the game, you’re a freelancer (shortened to lancer) with your javelin operating with a psychic cypher who helps guide your missions out of a home base called Fort Tarsis. You get to pick whether you’re playing as a male or female and you get to pick a face, though this only seems to be relevant in the loading screen which, due to some glitch or other, has only loaded for me about ⅓ of the time.
Because that’s another thing. Unlike every previous Bioware game I’ve played, this game is in first person at the forts where you aren’t wearing your suit and would be able to have a conversation or see your face, and third person any time you’re in a suit. I guess they just didn’t want to animate that many unique faces? So when you’re interacting with non-player characters they’re looking right at the camera, which isn’t a way I’ve ever played before and which I personally find deeply unsettling.
The game is 100% online and cooperative. Sure, you can solo missions, and I have, but even I, the most antisocial gamer ever, don’t recommend it. The difficulty doesn’t scale when you’re playing solo vs when you’re playing with a squad, and it’s taken me 30 minutes to pick away at the shield of one “boss” level outlaw playing on normal difficulty.
The cool thing about this game from an introvert standpoint is that from what I can tell, because I did eventually find my headphones and plug them in, you can only hear the other members of your team when they invite you to play on a squad. If it’s just random matches, there’s no chatter. Most of the time, players will gather in a circle at the end of a mission and use the pre-set communication functions to wave at each other, which I find pretty charming, but that’s about the extent of the interaction.
Various characters you meet in Fort Tarsis will give you missions to go on to advance their personal plots as well as the main storyline, which seems to involve going back to the Heart of Rage at some point, though I haven’t gotten there yet. But you can up the loyalty of certain factions, like sentinels, by completing their missions and helping them in the field.
So why do I have a love/hate relationship with it? I’m glad you asked. The flying mechanic is basically the coolest thing that has happened to me in a video game since I first started playing them. I love that you can fly. I paid $20 for this game on ebay because I loved that I could fly around this actually truly beautiful map. I love that it has a cool down period and an overheating mechanic because it adds to the strategy and I just really, really love flying. It changes the way I do combat and I love that it’s introduced something incredibly new to a thing I’ve been doing for a while now.
I like that this game is easy enough (at certain difficulty levels) that I, the most timid and awkward of gamers, can start to feel like a god of maps and combat. The first time I came out of a mission with the highest score, I felt like such a bad ass that I wish I could have bottled that moment up for the other night when I played a stronghold on hard and needed to be resurrected in the first five minutes.
But the game is glitchy as hell. The first match I played with a group I ended up getting stuck in place on a map, no matter what direction or how I tried to move, I ended up back where I was. This didn’t end until everyone else had moved on and the game reloaded me to their location. This has happened a couple of times and even crashed my entire Xbox to the point of needing to be turned off and reset. Once, I started a random public mission, sat through the excessively long loading screen, and then was punted immediately to the XP cash out at the end of the mission, somehow earning XP for a match we hadn’t even played. The loading screens take forever, and just equipping a particular weapon takes you through about five different screens.
Instead of playing multi matches on a small map with groups like Bioware has done previously, people join you on the story missions you’ve been assigned by the NPCs. You start these missions and can make them public or play them privately. If you make them public, other people are supposedly matched with you, though that has only happened to me one time. You can also play random missions, which are missions that you’ve already played. For some reason, this is somehow more boring than playing a multi match on any of the Mass Effect games and gets super repetitive really quickly. Supposedly this was done to up the replayability, but since these missions aren’t especially interesting and you can’t be guaranteed that you’re all starting them at the same time (which will hurt the XP you’re awarded at the end), I can’t see that it really helps with interest levels.
I’m also not sure why, if I select random mission and a difficulty level, I get a full squad, but if I select a particular mission I get squat. As previously mentioned, I played through a stronghold the other night and I was only there because someone invited me to a squad, and it was just the two of us until the very last room of the stronghold.
My friend from whom I borrowed the game described getting kicked off a server while playing a stronghold in the early days of the game and not being able to join his friends again because his spot had already been taken. So it seems there’s been a steep, steep decline in available players.
You can also freeplay the map to collect crafting materials and have random encounters, though I also kind of hate this method of play as well. Even if I’m playing the freeplay on the easy difficulty level, these random encounters, required to open tombs to move the story along, are so difficult that I end up peacing out back to the loading screen so I don’t die. From what I can tell, the idea here is that other people would join you in these random encounters and they’d be co-op. That’s never ever happened to me when playing the game, and there are only ever one or two other people on the map when I am.
So that’s less than ideal. I will also point out that the map is pretty small and doesn’t seem to ever expand, so freeplay will get pretty repetitive after a while. Already, planned patches and expansions have been delayed or canceled for this game. I’m not sure what it means for the game’s future.
This game is definitely style over substance. It seems to have been hastily assembled without much thought given to how fun it would be to play. It definitely follows EA’s new model of microtransactions. Instead of using in game coin to purchase upgrades and crafting materials, you can use real dollars to purchase in game dollars to use for these transactions. There’s no part of me that cares enough about anything offered in the game store to use real dollars on it, except for the N7 vinyl decal and I paid for that using my mission winnings.
I imagine if you have a group of four dedicated friends who all have the same level of interest in beating this game and therefore will always have a full squad for things like strongholds and the tougher story missions, this game is probably a lot easier and a lot more fun. That isn’t what I’ve got though, so I’m left to tough it out alone a lot of the time.
In the end, my impression is of a beautifully rendered empty shell with all of the glitches you’ve come to expect after the disaster that was Mass Effect: Andromeda’s launch. And yet I keep playing and I probably will keep playing until I beat the main storyline at least once, because that’s the completionist I am. Came for the curiosity, stayed for the torture.
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