Review: Anthem doesn’t manage to buck the trend that plagues its genre

Anthem is Bioware’s take on the latest Live Service model that plenty of studios are trying so desperately to latch on to. Destiny, The Division, Warframe, Path of Exile, and so many more, all have something in common: They were all pretty bad when they launched. Whether it was lack of content, bugs, a boring endgame, disappointing content updates, or any combination of the above, they all managed to crawl their way out from that rut, and over time, produce something absolutely stellar.

Destiny hit its stride with The Taken King expansion, and while many would argue that Destiny 2 was a step back in terms of content, it once again managed to save face with Forsaken. Warframe was a one map corridor shooter with pay-to-win mechanics which now has evolved into a sprawling universe of varied missions, open world areas, over 30 diverse characters to play as and dozens of gear to craft and kill baddies with. The Division, like all the others, was also plagued with bugs, low loot drops and a non-interesting endgame loop, and 8 months after, it finally began to take shape into what the game is now.

What I’m trying to convey with this anecdote is that despite Anthem releasing years after many of those games, and had the opportunity to course correct any of the other games’ problems, it ultimately fell into the same trap, and unfortunately, contains a bit of every problem listed above.

Before I go and list what Anthem does wrong, I would like to start out praising what it does extremely well, because underneath its mess of bugs and lack of interesting content, is a gameplay loop and gameplay mechanics that are genuinely fun.

If there ever was a modern take on an Iron Man game, I would hope that Bioware would be the ones in charge, if at least just for the flight mechanics. I can’t really think of many things that are as satisfying, as sprinting off with your Javelin, jumping in the air and pressing your stick in, which activates your thrusters and sends you flying through the game’s gorgeous world of Bastion. Not only does it look amazing, but it also feels amazing. Doesn’t even matter whether you’re the hulking Colossus who has some noticeable heftiness to his movement, or the extremely agile Interceptor, that can basically dance around enemies thanks to its swift movement, every javelin feels good to control, whether on foot or in the air.

This sense of freedom is further appreciated, especially in the game’s Free Play mode, when you can literally fly around most of the environment, banking through narrow ridges, doing a deep dive into a lake and then thrusting back into the air, flying over and under various structures, or just jetting off to check out one of the many breathtaking vistas. The world of Bastion is a fantastically realized one, and even though it doesn’t function in a similar way like San Andreas in Grand Theft Auto for example, which allows players to navigate easily thanks to location memorization, its grand scope, and alien-like environments, both above and below water, were addicting to explore.

Lastly, Anthem’s combat is just plain fun. Each of the four Javelins feel distinct enough that switching between them will alter your playstyles quite a bit. The Colossus and his shield are great ways to tank extra damage but also pummel through enemies to take care of them fast. The Storm deals with elemental attacks, and has some of the best combo set-ups in the game, with his ultimate being one of the most satisfying skill to use in the game.

Weapons, even though hit or miss, provide intense moment to moment gunfights, with the Masterworks and Legendary guns specifically thanks to their special properties. One of my favorite Masterwork guns was the Thunderbolt of Yvenia, which is a scout rifle that has a percent chance to summon a lightning bolt on an enemy when hit. It was goofy and badass at the same time and made the chase to see most of the other guns in the game a big draw for me.

Unfortunately, this is where the “but” comes in. For all the fun I had flying around with my friends around Bastion, shooting Scar and Dominion in the face, taking down Titans and finding rare loot, there was always something else standing in the way. Whether it was a design decision, a bug, or a missing feature, it always reminded me that Anthem, like the other games I listed in my opening paragraph, is one that fails to impress on a grand scale during its initial launch phase, but will most likely improve as time goes on.

It goes without saying that the loading screens are some of the biggest downers in the game, and really break up the wonderful pace when in a mission, though arguably even when you’re in the home base of Fort Tarsis. There’s a loading screen for basically everything: Starting a mission, opening and closing your Forge, moving from area to area, finishing a mission and going back to Fort Tarsis.

It wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say that players will probably spend almost equal time looking at loading screens, that they will be playing the actual game. And not just because there are so many, but because of random occurrences like server disconnects, that happen way too frequently, even a week and a half past its original release (or two and a half weeks if you count those with early access). It’s so bad that me and my squad often joke and say, “I’ll just skip upgrading my gear this time, so I don’t have to go through two loading screens.” The sad part is, while that comment was said in a joking manner, we were still 100% serious.

Speaking of servers and load times, I’m not quite sure which of the two to blame for this very specific issue, but dismantling items is an absolute chore in Anthem. Going to your vault, you’re able to see every item you own, separated by tabs and categories, which then lets you make informed decisions on what you need and what you don’t. Dismantling an item, which is done by holding square, then takes an additional 2-3 seconds to process before you can move on to the next one.

Even worse, Anthem has the option built in to tag items as junk, and then mass dismantling them all in a separate screen. The only problem is that marking an item as junk takes literally the same amount of time as just dismantling them, meaning that it actually takes longer to do this, since you then need to navigate to the separate junk screen to dismantle everything there. Oops!

Item management headaches are further compounded when trying to dismantle weapons or gear that might be equipped on another Javelin that by now has been outclassed. You can’t dismantle it without switching to that Javelin first and then dismantling it. I thought I would beat the system by equipping it on my current Javelin, which I thought would unequip it on the other one, but nope. It requires to be unequipped from every single Javelin.

Fort Tarsis, the game’s main quest and story hub is by far the worst thing about the game, and completely breaks up the fantastic momentum of combat. Walking around from one end to the other and having conversations that for the most part have meaningless decisions isn’t what draws me back to it. Being a Bioware game, I expected more from these characters, and perhaps my choices in dialogue, but by the end, I just wished that Fort Tarsis was cut out entirely.

The story didn’t really make a lasting impression either, and while it had some good beats, especially in the beginning with one of the best cutscenes in the game, the first person perspective-style storytelling just didn’t work for me. Since the story plays out from only your character’s point of view, you never get to see what happens with the other supporting characters or the main villain. The Monitor seemed interesting enough, but by the end, I wasn’t really sure what his motivations were, and likewise, I didn’t have a sense of accomplishment for taking him down.

There’s also an eventual character turn that feels somewhat earned, if only a little bit, but the subsequent run-ins with that character have no emotional impact whatsoever because you never see their side of the story, they’re simply told to you, and that’s just plain boring.

Let’s turn the page to the actual gameplay, because while I did previously praise the heck out of it, and still believing it’s easily the best part of the game, it’s not without issues.

Bastion is a giant place to explore, which is fantastic for those that will dedicate their time to doing so, but not having a rudimentary waypoint system is annoying and quite frankly baffling. The last thing I want to do is keep opening up the map screen, which by the way isn’t quick or seamless, just so I can double check I’m heading in the right direction.

There’s also this extremely annoying feature that will teleport you to your allies if they’ve reached the target objective, nevermind that I can literally see them on my screen and it would have taken me seconds to fly to them. No, instead I’m forced to look at another loading screen until it puts me right next to them. For a game that prides itself on its flight mechanics, this is an extremely egregious use of tethering that’s not conducive to exploration or even travel across Bastion.

Then there are smaller annoyances that can certainly be patched in and fixed, such as not alerting you in any way, whether visually or with an audio cue, that your squadmate is down. Sure, one could argue that their health bar is clearly visible on the left side of the screen, but when you’re on Grandmaster difficulty, trying to ensure that you’re both shooting and dodging enemies that can literally one-shot you, the last thing you’re looking over at is your squad’s health bars.

It’s also annoying that specific challenges that I’ve set to track, don’t at least pop-up when I’m completing them, which means I always have to stop to open a menu, and then tab over to the challenges menu and then click inside the tracked challenge to see how far I am. It’s also a bummer that there’s no inventory or stats screen whatsoever, which means I can’t look at my current build when I’m out in Bastion, nor can I see what my exact DPS or defense is. For a game that relies on the loot chase, not having either of those is just plain silly.

Free Play, which I’d argue is definitely one of the highlights of the game, is also plagued with annoying server shut-down timer if you’re there for too long. Be ready to see that the server is shutting down every… single… minute… for two hours. Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

Then there’s the question of endgame, which at this point is lacking in the amount and variety. Once you beat the game, you’re presented with extra challenges such as play 25 strongholds, 25 quickplay missions, 100 world events, and then once complete you move on to another checklist. Granted, that’s not the endgame per se, but more speaks on the repetition of what you’ll be doing once you hit it.

Chasing gear will solely consist of running missions on Hard, then Grandmaster 1, and eventually Grandmaster 3. Like in Diablo, the higher the difficulty, the better the gear. But that doesn’t mitigate the fact that you’re still running the same missions over and over, not to mention only three strongholds (equivalent to Destiny’s Strikes). Sure, Legendary contracts are a fun event to partake in, but you can only do those once a day.

The fact that quickplay is currently busted doesn’t help the endgame situation at all. Quickplay allows players to randomly join together in a randomly selected mission on a selected difficulty level. The problem is, out of the many times I’ve tried it, only a handful of those actually worked.

In one instance, I found myself defending against an infinite onslaught of Dominion soldiers, never moving past that particular checkpoint. In another, I connected to a mission that was just about to end, collected the final mission item, and then never taken to the mission complete screen. Another strange one I encountered involved flying through checkpoints to get to our destination, only to find that the game gave us a teleport warning by the final checkpoint, and then teleporting us back to the first one, making us stuck in a constant loop.

The cherry on top of the endgame disappointment stems from Bioware’s 90-day road-map. While it’s great that they have a plan in place, finding out that the game’s major event called Cataclysm isn’t coming until May, which is 3 months after the game’s release, is pretty unforgivable. Especially with The Division 2, which is a game that will also operate on a very similar Live Service model, releasing in just about a week. Bioware needs big events to draw players in week after week and holding out on Cataclysms until May is not a good way to do that.

Lastly, it also bears mentioning that my friend’s PS4 Pro and mine ended up completely turning off on separate occasions. As in, I’m loading into a mission, and my screen goes black, and my PS4 light bar turns off. It completely hard powered my console, and while I was able to turn it on normally after and resume playing, I’ve never experienced a game that would turn off my console completely like that.

So where does that leave Anthem? As you can see, even though the core game of shooting and looting feels great and is legitimately fun, it’s overshadowed by all the bugs, missing or broken features or just the lack of content. There’s no doubt that if EA allows Bioware to support the game for a year or longer, that it’s going to be amazing, just like all the other games that needed time in order to thrive. But if I’m supposed to be reviewing the game based on its current iteration, then right now Anthem just isn’t there. The spurts of fun can’t make up for the constant headaches of server disconnects, hard crashes or mission bugs.

There’s true, untapped potential, and I’d love to see Anthem grow into something bigger. I want more zones to play in with more varied biomes. I want to see more crazy alien wildlife running across Bastion. I want more enemy variety. I want to at least where some characters end up in the game’s lackluster story. I want more Javelin armor pieces because Fashion Javelin is totally something I’m interested in (thanks Warframe!) I want a more rewarding loot table at higher levels. I want the game to be more optimized and run better. I also know I’m not alone in wanting all of these things. But like I mentioned before, this all depends on EA giving Bioware the time and resources to do so, and Bioware hopefully remaining dedicated to the game.