Anthem Review
Played on Xbox One (base)
Developed by BioWare, Bioware Austin LLC
Released 25th January 2019
Played Co-op
With development shortly starting after the release of Mass Effect 3, Bioware would spend the next 6-7 years working on what seemed like a promising title of Iron Man-like exosuits, surviving an alien planet in the form of a co-op experience. However, like in most cases, EA strangled much of the game's life away, forcing the team onto a game engine that felt uncomfortable with the teams' ideas, forcing microtransactions into the core game and ending any future repairs the game could've gotten on the 24th of February. But hey, at least they were impressed with the last-second flying mechanic.
Story
The story did not engage me. The story follows you, a Freelancer, someone who operates these mech-suits called Javelins. After the events at the Heart of Rage, an event that lost the faith and mythological greatness of the Javelins as they tried to silence the Cenotaph, you are hired by an agent of Corvus to stop the Dominion's leader, The Monitor, who is attempting to access the Cenotaph once again by accessing shaper relics. It is a narrative that feels bland and basic of "bad guy does bad guy stuff to get a thing to do more bad guy stuff, only to be stopped by a rag-tag crew".
The emotional complexity and intrigue of previous BioWare games are nowhere to be found and many times have I been unsatisfied with the game because of the story. There were points at which I didn't care about the narrative and struck up a conversation with my friend just to stop the dullness of the game. The only positives among this mess were a couple of scenes that I was interested in and focused my attention on. The pacing is another thing that wasn't painfully bad as it wasn't jarring but instead settled on a fine line of nice story-telling, even if the story being told wasn't worth my time.
Gameplay
The gameplay at first glance was enjoyable. Being able to pick between four Javelins; a stomping behemoth Colossus, a balanced Ranger, a fire, lightning and ice manipulator Storm and an assassin-like Interceptor. Combined with the element of a looter-shooter and having the ability to unleash mayhem with your Javelin's moveset and abilities was great. However, this was not the case for the second, third or the rest of the 15-hour experience. The looter part is extremely annoying and belittling as you only start getting rare items from hidden chests and missions near the end of the game, in other words, forcing you to get legendary items after spending much more time after completing the campaign. The shooter part was almost pointless. Even though all the guns that I tried out, had an extremely good kick-feel in them and the bullet blasting sound effects resonated alongside it, they didn't feel useful as the abilities you can customise have better crowd control and damage outputs, with them demanding at most 10 seconds in between uses.
Another aspect of the gameplay was the highlight of the 2017 E3 reveal: the flying. While the flying felt smooth and enjoyable, it doesn't last long as you could overheat quickly and without any high points to nosedive from, waterfalls to fly through and no rivers to scrape through while flying to cool your jets down, you are forced out of your aviation for a couple of seconds before resuming on your 20-second flight. This not only broke my enjoyment of the traversal but it slowed my progression to a staggering halt alongside the frequent minute-long loading screens.
The monotony and repetivity of the story missions were also appalling. You either stay in an area and wait for the bar to reach 100% (capture the objective style), recover fragments or collect orbs. That is the variety among these missions. The only time you get a change is when you are suddenly forced to complete a set of challenges in Freeplay, such as completing 4 world events or collecting 15 plants, to access an unrewarding tomb. You do this four times and each of the four times, your reward is a tiny bit more progress in the story; not even a cool weapon or ability to use from the tomb of a legendary-status Freelancer. Navigating around the Freeplay map is also frustrating as you need to trust your gut instinct at which turn to take as the game doesn't include a marker feature while looking for the semi-cool world events. The enemies also don't offer much uniquity, not in gameplay nor design and the arena you are placed into always looks the same, discouraging the thought of flying around to either get to a better vantage point or stumble across something worthwhile.
Bossfights
The boss fights were also disappointing. The number of opportunities the game had, to deliver incredible fights was astonishingly high. They could've included an encounter against another Javelin, an early-on fight with The Monitor, or an even larger and intimidating Ash Titan, but instead, they settled on an once again repetitive and mind-numbing fight. The fights are always against slow, heavy damage dealing foe, that seems to have the same moveset with one or two differences. They also all have a problem of high latency between active attack frames and hit registration, however, this didn't affect me too regularly. The lack of attempt at something fun and different is saddening as the most fun I had against a boss was during an optional one, which could be found in a stronghold. The reason this fight was entertaining was that I and my friend got to melt the health away on this thing, unlike the time we took it on by ourselves during the demo days of this game.
Characters
The characters ranged from being great to annoying garbage cans with uninteresting backstories. The only characters that earned my respect and favourability were Faye, Haluk and Matthias. They truly felt like they had a story to share, one that'll make me connect to them on an emotional level. They truly felt human and weren't some frustrating characters that I had to deal with for a couple of missions. The rest did the opposite. This is disappointing to see after the considerable amount of enjoyment I had encountered with Mass Effect's characters and even if they were annoying, I'd still feel like talking to them for their point of view on the world. Meanwhile, in Anthem, I wanted to skip cutscenes because of these agitating characters, even if it meant I were to miss out on some important lore. The characters are quite poorly performed due to the writers of the development team, however, at least the voice acting is of the same decent quality you'd come to expect of a AAA game.
Atmosphere
As much as I did not enjoy the game, the atmosphere is good. The soundtrack mixes a nice orchestral tune with a sci-fi melody and the effects from the fire blasting or the shockwave bouncing are a beauty. The lush grass and flowing rivers are one hell of a sight but unfortunately, that's all. The map you are in for the whole of Freeplay and the campaign is just one large area that repeats its surroundings of either forests, mountains or swamps, all of which still look similar. The only other time you see a switch is when you go inside the plain caves to end up staring at nothing but some gloomy lighting and enemies.
Story- 4/10
Gameplay- 4/10
Bossfights- 2/10
Characters- 5/10
Atmosphere- 6/10
Bad
There aren't any redeeming qualities in this game for me to recommend it to you. The ideas are cool and the potential is great but the execution is so terrible I probably would've put it as the worst game of 2019, had I played it on launch.
