I will lead this with a statement, in the interest of fairness – I AM biased in favour of this title. Ever since I saw the first video of the gameplay, I saw the mechanical design, and couldn’t wait to know more. So bear that in mind as you read on.
With that said: Wow, there’s a lot of haters out there.
Anthem is a third-person semi-open-world action shooter set in a fairly large and absolutely lush world, with plenty of enemies to kick the shit out of, and plenty of means by which to do so.
I mentioned the mechanical design. That is what first got my attention, and what continues to do so. The powered armour suits – Javelins – in this game look fantastic, and are fairly open to customisation. Many of the custom parts are available through microtransactions, though I haven’t found any components or items thus far that are ONLY available through premium currency. I’m not the biggest fan of microtransactions, but if they’re going to be in my game, then at the very least they can be vanity items only. Even without them, you can make your Javelins look pretty unique.
I’m not going to specifically call out the various and sundry bad takes I have seen surrounding this game, but I would be remiss if I didn’t draw attention to just how much hostile press Anthem has drawn – even before release, even before the open demo, even before the closed beta (both of which I took part in). You know that feeling? When you see the negative hype train picking up steam very early on, and a cynical part of you just knows that this thing could be the game of the year and it wouldn’t matter?
Well – here we are.
It’s not like Destiny. Trust me – I have put more hours into Destiny than most people would consider healthy, and have enjoyed most of them, despite the game’s several lingering problems. (I am interested to see where Bungie take it now they are out from under BlizzAct but that is for a different review.) The two games feel distinctly different – the entire aesthetic, the plot, the pacing. I think I can see why that comparison gets drawn: it is a “loot shooter” (I hate that phrase) with an open world mechanic that is also in a science fiction setting, and each character type has several different abilities. Much similarity, many wow.
It, frankly, looks better than Destiny. It is designed better. I already complimented the mechanicals, but the character design in general is superb. The variety of NPCs that you deal with in a professional and social sense, the enemies that you take on in the outside world – they look great. Distinctive outlines, unless the enemy is deliberately MEANT to look fuzzy and confusing, which is a look in and of itself. Talking of those NPCs – they have someone with talent writing those scripts, which is a Bioware thing, lets face it. The characters have depth to them, they feel like full beings rather than loot dispensers and mission notice boards. If I have one criticism about the characters, it is that one of them seems to have REAL big teeth – but then another one is wall-eyed, and both of these things are things that human beings have. So hey, who am I to complain?
The landscape itself looks fantastic, too. The world’s verticality adds to the spectacle of the entire thing, with huge waterfalls, titanic ancient artefacts, lush jungle and the ruins of quadrupedal vehicles littering the world. Moving through that landscape feels great – I don’t know how easy it was to put a personal flight mechanic into a third-person control system that is so easy to segue into, but I felt like Iron Man the first time I took a running jump off a clifftop and soared off into the sky.
The story and the lore are hand-in-hand. If you aren’t into the lore, you won’t give a damn about the story. That’s fair enough. There’s a fair amount of side missions, too, and plenty to do in the Freeplay world-roaming mode – though it doesn’t have one activity every fifty yards like some of the later iterations of Saints Row or similar. The actual story itself isn’t as deep or detailed as the Mass Effect trilogy, but then, that’s because it’s not three whole-ass action-RPG games. Very few things are.
One of the parts of the game that seemed to draw a lot of whi criticism was that, in order to progress the main story, one has to unlock four tombs. Each tomb requires the completion of four tasks. Those tasks were, as best I can tell from the surrounding commentary, a huge roadblock that some saw as genuinely unfair. So when I approached that section of the game, I braced myself, took a breath, and…
…found out that of the sixteen objectives, I had achieved fourteen of them during standard gameplay, and the other two only took half an hour or so’s “work”. The apparent lack of chests (several threads of discussion really, really hate the chests) is solved by just flying around and finding events, and doing them. And then you get a chest. It seems the only way you’d find that impossible is if you didn’t want to actually… you know… play.
I mean, I know it is an awful chore to do the things that the game is predicated around you doing, but these are the burdens we have to bear, right?
But there are some criticisms that I feel are fair to level at Anthem, and one of those is that it doesn’t carve out much of a niche for itself. A good question I was asked about it: who is it for?
If I was to compare Anthem to another game, it would probably be Warframe. Warframe has a lot of the customisation of your character, a lot of the interesting mobility options, the weaponry and abilities being used, a nice new open world in a science fiction setting with its own aesthetic. The problem is, though – Warframe is free. I mean sure, when I played it (it may have changed since) there was an aspect of pay-to-win, insofar as unlocking badass equipment could be done with premium currency, but still.
In a world where people already own several scifi shooters with big open worlds, does Anthem have enough going for it to separate itself from the pack? Wherein several shooters don’t need to be different at all to earn a player share (coughcoughCoD) the same isn’t necessarily true for Anthem. Especially with a swathe of gamers slating it, whether or not they are doing so from a position of bad faith.
But I’ll do my part against that. I’m enjoying it. I continue to enjoy it, and I am sure I will get a lot of enjoyment out of it as time goes on. Just doing the stuff that the game is about, is fun. Just running around in freeplay, seeing what happens, seeing who you run into and helping them out, is fun. Remember when games were good if you had fun playing them?
I do.