Loot shooters and the ARPGs they’re based on rely on short 15-20 minute gameplay loops - you play for a bit, you do an objective, you get a reward, you upgrade your stuff, you do it again. Narrative-driven experiences tend to involve lengthy exposition dumps and cutscenes.
This is an… interesting plan, with two or three tiny flaws that I shall now list: Despite the words “freelancer” and “contract” implying some sort of monetary compensation for your services, we’ve already established that words have totally ceased to have any sort of meaning in Anthem and so all you get for committing these sporadic acts of mass murder is the loot you pick up along the way presumably the higher-ups in Fort Tarsis are promising to pay you in exposure.Īnyway, Anthem’s big innovation is supposed to be that it’s mixing Bioware-grade storytelling with the compulsive gameplay loop of Destiny. You play yet another Capitalised Noun in a long tradition of Capitalised Nouns you’re not a Bhaalspawn, or a Spectre, or a Grey Warden, or an Inquisitor, or a Pathfinder, no, this time you’re a Freelancer who pilots a robot suit called a Javelin and takes on contracts to kill things and grind materials in the immediate vicinity of Anthem’s hub city, Fort Tarsis. Anthem’s world is sci-fi with an awful lot of fantasy tropes mixed in, just like Destiny. There’s a lot of Capitalised Nouns being thrown around, as befits a studio that has decided to ape Bungie writing without understanding 2 that you can’t Capitalise Something without the Something also having Some Meaning - so we’ve got the Cenotaph, the Monitor, the Cataclysm and so on, and all of it has roughly the same overall comprehensibility as staring into a bowl of Alphabetti Spaghetti. I understand the broad design goal behind its existence - that Anthem should be an always-online cooperative loot-driven shooter in the vein of Destiny or The Division– but I do not know what it is about. I usually start these things with a paragraph or at least a sentence explaining the basic premise of the game I’m reviewing, but I’ve been playing Anthem for just over twelve hours and I’m still not entirely sure what the game is about. The difference is that I at least have the luxury of shooting this review in the head if it looks like being the kind of Chaos Spawn-esque monstrosity that Anthem has turned out be. Still, much like Bioware I’ve started now, so I might as well push through to the finish and see what the end product looks like. Given that I don’t think there’s any new lessons to be learned I’m correspondingly reluctant to spend six or seven hours of my life writing six or seven thousand words that I could simply copy and paste out of my other reviews where Anthem is concerned it would have the particularly grim sound of a broken record, because much of what is wrong with Anthem is also exactly what was wrong with Mass Effect Andromeda 1. There’s no need for me to go in-depth this time, and yet it’s going to be extremely difficult to avoid doing so in a review because the game is practically nothing but bugs, flaws, terrible writing and boneheaded design decisions. By extension I also feel like writing a review is somewhat redundant because I know, just by looking at it, what went wrong during Anthem’s development and how it ended up in the state it’s in.
All of those reviews ended up being extremely lengthy pieces of writing both because there was a lot to unpack, and because I felt there was something useful for me to learn from the failures involved and so went extra-deep on the critical breakdown.īut Anthem? I’ve been playing it for maybe a dozen hours and I don’t feel like I need to play it any more because I can see exactly where things are going to end up. Some of them had clearly visible quality in spite of the brokeness and were being held back by failures in the development and design process, such as Civilization 6 and Stellaris, and some of them, like Rome 2 and No Man’s Sky… didn’t.
I’ve reviewed many broken games on here before. Thanks to the drubbing it’s been receiving in the gaming press as yet another high-profile, half-baked release it probably has not escaped your notice that Anthem is broken as fuck. I’ll admit to having doubts over whether it was even worth writing this review.
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