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Joker Reviews: Anthem (Demo)
Anthem never appealed to me.
As someone who played Destiny, I had a sneaking suspicion I knew what Anthem was going to be about, but hey, free is free, right?
So I downloaded the demo.
Starting the game up, it gives you the most basic of prompts, one that stood out to me was this:
Choose your Pilot Voice: Male / Female (this cannot be changed during the demo)
Odd, but okay. This is how you choose your gender.
The game loads up quickly enough, and I'm greeted with a series of tutorial boxes. Go here for this, do this for that, really generic stuff, but instead of explaining what certain things are, the game just kinda expects you to know everything.
Normally, this isn't that big of a deal, as every game that tries to do this atleast keeps some consistency with other games of it's genre, to allow for a nostalgic feel, one that is specifically designed to draw you in. I can respect that attempt. It's there to keep things solid and to make you feel right at home.
Except Anthem think's it's Final Fantasy 13, and uses it's own vocabulary.
After skimming through the boxes, I get a general idea for "Go to this dude for... something, and go over here for the forge?"
Sure, whatever. The game drops you into a desert looking town, in a first person perspective, and the first thing that really stuck out to to me (in terms of gameplay) was how horrifically slow you are in town.
Experimenting, I found L3 let you "Sprint", but all it really did was make your screen shake very minor like you were sprinting, with next to no difference in actual movement speed.
Determined to get past atleast the town, I followed the nav point to the first person.
He starts talking to you in a very bored, non-organic manner, which is not a great start to this, by the by. I was already a bit annoyed with the movement, and now the less then stellar voice acting from this guy is already painting the picture for me, but I press on.
He starts talking about a previous mission, and you get some super generic responses akin to "yeah, we kicked ass" or "We barely made it" and with no real noticeable difference of these, the text moves on to him telling you to go talk to dude B, about a manafold.
Doing so has the guy talking, with the same kind of bored "I'm just getting paid for this" vibe from the voice actor, and I ended up actually skipping most of the dialogue.
The entire sum of the conversation is basically this: "We need you to get the Manafold to further customize our Javelins, but we don't know how it works or how to do this, so go out there and get it" That was a good 5 minute scene, too.
Crawling my way through town, I found the next waypoint pointed to my mech suit.
Jumping in, I took off to go explore by my lonesome. Since, after all, this game was advertised as "YOU CAN PLAY ALONE OR WITH FRIENDS".
Choosing the story mission, it took me 3 minutes to realize how the clunky menu actually works.
You had to choose the Mission tab, then choose the mission, then back out of the mission tab, then wonder over to the social tab, and ready up, then hit an extra button to freaking launch the mission. Obviously, my patience was starting to wear down with this.
Finally, I'm in the suit, I'm in the game, i'm ready to rock and ... why do I have 3 other human players with me?
"YOU CAN PLAY ALONE" echos in the back of my head. Kay.
Ignoring this, I push on and start experimenting with controls, not knowing how to access the controller scheme (yet) I play with it.
I accidentally found out how 90% of the controls work. L1, R1 for powers, L2 aims, R2 fires (standard shooter shtick), R3 springs, and L3 in the air enables flying mode.
That last one took me a hot second to figure out.
Fun note: Weapon switch is HOLD SQUARE. Reload is TAP Square. This is a terrible system design for any game, as I frequently ran into issues of the game refusing to switch weapons when I run out of ammo.
Me and Ranger Suit Dan take off to go fight the enemies in this game.
Some trash mobs show up, so I use the assault rifle. The wildlife is very classic "fantasy exploration of uncivilized wilds" so I can see how some could be wow'd by it, but this isn't the first time I've seen this stuff. Not by a long shot. It gave me nostalgic feels of taking on Blood Gulch in Halo, though, but sadly, that wasn't the last time I got Halo vibes (more on that later)
Finally getting a feel for the controls, the grenades have a surprisingly nice auto aim, where if your recital is red on the enemy and you check it, it will auto correct the throw to be a perfect face plant. You also have a War Machine (Iron man 2) pilebunker esque missle that just kinda, zigzags and has a small little "Puff" as things die.
Triangle lets me bash enemies, so comboing Triangle, L1 and R1 lets me pull off "Combo damage" for enhanced deathness. Kay.
Getting to the mission waypoint (and hitting the wall quite a bit, as the flying seems jankey as hell), I get to a spot where there's more people that I just murdered, but with a few big units in the background.
I just cleared the Mass Effect 3 esque mission of "stand in the circle till the bar fills up" and get greeted by this.
This didn't seem so bad, until they spit in my face and clogged my screen. Now with the inability to see due to graphical particles, I get shredded pretty quick.
Annoyance of the spike in difficulty, me and the 3 other randos push through (whom all have spiffy colors, while my default piss-yellow colors stand out).
We eventually get to a part in the mission where the manafold is chilling and locked, and there are three giant color coded panels. The game wants you to choose the right combo to unlock the item. Okay, so... how?
We spent 20 minutes doing different combinations, as begain scouring the area. There is literally nothing in the zone that even remotely hints to the answer to this, so we hit Google.
turns out some poor sole brute forced the code (it's Yellow, Purple, Red, by the way) so we got the item and moved on.
The misison ends, and we all stand in a line in a very Overwatch type of "Mission win" screen, where we see our stats (that are all exactly identical. Same medals, same exp, same score) and it shows me what loot I found (in a very Destiny manner)
Back in town, I caught my eyes on a button prompt, and on a very small, and what I thought was background decoration computer, it says "Press X - The Forge". Me being me, I accidentally tap Square (which is apparently X in this game) and it lets me in.
I can finally change the loadout of my Javelin, got better gear, weapons, and... couldn't change my color?
(Hours later and a second stab at this with a friend, turns out you have to press right on the color panel, and it lets you choose from material Pattern, or material Color. It's not even remotely obvious, as a friend of mine couldn't figure it out either.)
The game finally lets me know that I can unlock another Javelin later on. (Google let me know that's lv 12. You start at lv 10)
i quit at this point and I come back into this game with a friend later to try and really give this a test run.
We unlocked Javelins, I grabbed the Storm, and he grabbed the Colossus.
As a quick rundown of what we found out about how badly balanced this game is:
The Storm flys alot. It hardly overheats and can stay in the air for very long. it can use it's powers instead of a gun and I'm constantly raining Fire and Ice down on the enemies in a large explosive effort (you get lighting as a random drop later).
Once I'm done wrecking everything, I get an Ultimate, from which I'm giving 7 seconds to spam fire-lightning-ice death on enemies in massive AoE nuclear style death and things die.
While in the air, I'm given a Magneto-esque barrier and my ult refreshes my health, shield, and overheat flying time.
(The Ranger's ult is a quick, shoot everything while missiles deal that did shit damage, in case anyone was curious)
The Colossus on the other hand was... sad.
It has no energy barrier. It has an extended health bar. It uses a shield instead of having a dodge power.
It is not able to attack and hold the shield out at the same time.
It got the point where I was better off hovering infront of him as his shield, then him actually take damage, since his died very quickly, very often. This was very upsetting to both of us, as the idea was to have him be the tank, and I snipe things from safety. (He was really looking forward to this game, where I wasn't. This was kinda crushing for him)
So we explore and found a random side cave full of enemies.
Refining our kill strategies, we burn through most of the cave.
When we get to the last one, we're just raining death on things, sometimes getting issues from enemy Storm units, only for both of us to die instantly.
Not entirely sure what happened, as we were both full health, (me at full shields) and then BAM "Square ot Respawn".
Confused, we came back in slower, to scope it out. Turns out, there was a Legendary Outlaw in there. The balance of the game went as follows:
Outlaw - I can kill in 2 hits, they almost can't hurt me
Elite Outlaw - 3 hits, each hit does bout 5% of my shield
Elite Storm - burn his shield, then he dies in 3 hits, can take about 1/5th of my shield a hit
Legendary Outlaw - Chip damage sponge and has the power to 1 shot us.
Kay.
I popped my ult, and interestingly, I nearly instantly killed this legendary unit. Power balancing.
Going through, we decided on doing the stronghold before bailing on this demo. The stronghold is this game's version of end game raids.
The entire time, we had issues with snipers instantly killing us (This took me back to my legendary run attempts on Halo), having to hide because it felt like we were underleveled, barely pushed through as we cleared it, and had a very unclear condition for wining.
We had to fly around, get some floating light orb, and then take it back to a series of rocks sitting on a black circle. There were not actual prompts or indication we needed to do this. One of the people (again, 4 man parties) accidentally brushed up against it and blew the rocks up, which changed or objective counter, letting us know we were on the right track.
It also took us underwater, which would have been a really neat thing, if it wasn't for the fact that we couldn't see shit, and the flashlight only illuminated a small spot. Getting disorienting, we found the hard way that you can also drown due to an oxygen meter that wasn't noticeable.
Pushing through that, we finally hit the objective of "Stand in the circle", from where the game would keep zapping us with lightning, drain our jets making us in a constant state of overheat, and then fight off waves of enemies.
As the group Storm, this was particularly devastating, as your shield only really works when flying. I died quite a bit in this.
We finally pushed through a second underwater section, and found the boss.
This sucker was a fairly large creature. It took us 5 minutes to get the damn thing to come out of it's hole, as we apparently needed all 4 people standing next to it to start the fight.
The fight was a tad underwhelming. It turned around, and one shot any of us who got to close, and crawled away. (There was atleast 15 revives during this fight alone) It tanked a lot of bullets. I found the Sniper Rifle to be a tad over powered here, as I could do over 9,000 damage, while everyone else did 200.
It took enough damage, and crawled into the ceiling, from which we had to fend off a wave of trash mobs. The mobs dropped ammo, boss came down, rinse and repeat this pattern for 10 minutes.
The boss didn't even drop loot on death.
The most annoying part of all this? My HUD kept glitching out and poppin up my Ultimate Move prompts, when I didn't have it actually on, and it made my ammo counter, map, and health/shields vanish until I had to waste my Ult to make it go away.
This popped up every 5 minutes or so.
Overall, this was a very underwhelming issue, and my friend immediately canceled any plans of buying this game.
The biggest take away from all that was this demo was an easier version of the final produce, and will have a micro transaction economy.
This is not a good combination, as bosses take entirely too much damage, you dying in one shot is not fun, and the game gave you 100 coins to buy new gear to customize your mech, from which we could not earn any coins back during the demo.
Overall, I don't think Anthem will be doing well, which is a scary though for Bioware. EA will give this game a free-to-play market, while making you pay for the game, and in my honest opinion, that's the greatest gaming sin any dev can ever do.
This is a hard pass. It was boring in the start, getting the Storm made me consider getting the game, and then the endgame content destroyed any fun this game may have had.
Hard pass.
eh, free is in fact free
nice paragraphs