We’ve reviewed the horrific and turdular legend of Devil’s Third in October, so since today’s is Allsaints here, let’s speak of the dead, with another review-funeral dirge.
A really long one, too, because we’ll burying this one deep, just to be extra sure.
Don’t take a drink every time i mention Destiny, don’t, your liver will thank me.
And yes, while you can still buy and play Anthem, since physical copies are ubercheap and overabundant, the servers are still live with no announced plans of shutting them down… it is a formality, a pure technicality, air escaping from the lungs instead of his ass, just bring them out when Eric Idle shows up. Or just throw him on the cart as well, again, it’s for the better at this point.
FIY, i followed the absolute disaster this game was, saw it being discussed and unanimosuly declared absolute trash, i red the Jason Schreier’s editorial, i saw the dumpster fire blink at the edge of Alpha Centauri, etc. So i knew the shitshow this game caused, and i eventually picked up a PS4 copy new for 8 bucks from Amazon, because i knew i wanted another unholy artifact in my game collection, sitting next to other abandoned – and most likely by now unplayable – garbage fires.
I saw them announcing the “3 acts” and then backtrack that to oblivion, but i mostly enjoyed this game the best way, the recommended way: not playing it and seeing it discussed and torn apart by pretty much everybody, with even the more positive folks betraying the fact that this was another live-service disaster piece of crap.
The Fallout 76 of 2019, if you will.
But still, i didn’t bother to actually play it yet, as i waited to see if their last attempt to turn it around with a new version called “Anthem Next” (basically attempting a No Man Sky’s tale) would be given the greenlight. Every sign pointed to no, but Evolve Phase 2 did happen (and died not even a year in, but still), so i wasn’t ruling out the slim possibility of it happening. Not yet.
To no one’s surprise, Anthem Next wasn’t approved so then i decided to take out the PS4 disc, install it, let it patch itself to playability, and actually play it now that’s officially a living dead horse, just waiting for EA to kill it 100 % dead by closing the server and making it totally unplayable to anyone else in the future. Dear god, how i hate this industry and its clear malign lack of any interest in preserving its own history. I genuinely hate the “anti-archivism” built into these games.
Btw, i “love” i had to search more than once in my disc-keeping bookcases for the Anthem disk, it’s almost like it knows and it’s ashamed.
The story is…. pretty much Destiny. It’s a glut of lore the narration throws at you to make you think there’s a lot more to the plot, when it all boils down to it being very thin and vague: you are basically a techno Power Ranger, and you and your kind of robosuit operators/fighters used to be heroes, fighting monsters and the anomalies that often also caused huge monsters to spawn.
Not to copy verbatim what other have already said when the game launched… but IT IS a clinical case of “confused lore with plot”, NOT the other way around.
At least this time they actually bothered to include an encyclopedia worth of info on the lore and shit IN the game itself, but you won’t care. Well, that the attitude i went into… and that’s mostly what i came out with, but i will admit i did like the dialogues and narration a bit better than Destiny, even if it’s confusing as there are attempts to make you care about these characters, since the game does still rely on the extensive lore bible for them anyway, and it’s at odds with the gameplay structure and general vagueness of the narration made in order to ape Bungie’s game.
At least your character narrative-wise ISN’T an amnesiac, but might as well have been, since everything else is so vaguely described and… well, “vague” by design, that’s the keyword.
Some of the character designs do remind me of a Star Wars game, like Faye really has a Star Wars-esque design (and The Monitor – yep, its actual name – really gives huge bootleg Darth Vader vibes), and i’m not surprised too much since Bioware worked on the KOTOR games, but still, it’s odd since it doing this while still trying to imitate the “non-flavor” of Bungie’s title, with a story that ultimately i think it’s a bit worse than the one in the first Destiny (speaking of the base campaign, didn’t bother with the expansions or Destiny 2), all things considered.
In that game at the very least by the end of the prologue i got the vague but really simple gist of the conflict in question and why it’s happening. In Anthem i had no fuckin clue against what i was fighting, and why exactly is worth fighting to keep the cataclysms from continuosly happen.
I know that there was a thing called the Hymn Of Creation that i have to watch out for, not sure what this Hymn is, heck, at least Destiny estabilished what the fuck the Traveller was in the intro, here you have to go off as it being “an important thing that exists”. Later you find out there’s a bad guy called The Monitor, yeah, for real.
Still don’t know why or exactly, not caring too much either.
In terms of gameplay Anthem can be described as Bioware basically reworking Destiny as a third person shooter with the ability to fly seemingly borrowed from Dark Void (remember that one?), or at least my mind went to that forgotten game for the flying, because i enjoyed it there. Sure, Anthem controls better than Dark Void, but at least you still will be able to play that in a decade or more.
While the flying mechanic is good in itself (down to them working in heating and cooling mechanics, so you can use frosty temperatures to combat overheating of the suit, or going underwater to the same effect, and stuff)…. it becomes routine because the missions have a LOT of just flying around (really, just boring traversal) a world that wants to be inspiring… all killed by the repetitive mission structure, lack of variety in the objectives, and definitely the overall aesthetic that wants to ape the first Destiny, so desperate the art direction is to make it unoffensive and appealing in the more milquetoast, “safest” way possible.
Sadly it boils down to very little variety: go there, hold button to activate that, stay in the circle so the frigging thing can scan the surrounding and fight enemies that come out, do it again at least 2 more times, or play a game of hot and cold to find the item to scan for info. Sometimes you have to fly around to collect some glowing thingies and bring them back to a shrine, or flying through rings to the next destination, just to give the critics and gaming Youtubers more ammo.
Actually, it’s more correct to say that, innterspersed between the loading screens, we have gameplay sequences with an adequate – and nothing else – combat system for a tps, and lots of boring flying around to the next recycled objective. There is a combo system that has the only spark of “creativity” or nugget of “originality” in this game, but of course it’s nothing special and the game flat out doesn’t explain it to you…. for no reason, it’s really simple to explain: you can hit enemies with ice and the follow up with a thunder attack, and it will cause a “combo”, dealing extra damage.
Not all elemental reactions work to create a combo, it’s not difficult to explain, but even this system is fairly shallow, as it doesn’t account for reaction to natural elementals present, so thunder doesn’t travel through watery surfaces in the enviroment during combat (or out of it). Genshin Impact has a better elemental reaction system, and it’s a free-to-play game.
Weapon selection is quite uninteresting, at best, and you can go the entire game without even getting some of the more interesting/less boring stuff, i didn’t even knew there were energy cannons until i checked the Deposit and saw the types of weapons that – technically – existed. Maybe it’s because i chose a class instead of another, but i doubt it, and what weapons i got they were the usual boring shit: shotgun, rifle (automatic and not), sniper rifles (some charged, some halfway between rifle and automatic rifle) and pointless stuff like fast shooting-pistols, very vanilla stuff.
Even played solo, it’s not really challenging either, with even the higher tiers of enemies fairly easily dispatched with the ultimate skill and little else, and you get all you need to upgrade your suit, get better weapons and components by just playing the story content, i never needed to grind unless when the game forced me to with the “tomb trials” shit, and to deal with the expected cheap difficulty spikes, some that pretty much forced me to go public and try with at least another player.
Can’t have anyone try to bumrush their way to the campaign, dear lord we let them play it like they want it, it would be too much consistent with the way we market crap like this.
Even the final boss is easier, just time consuming, but easier to deal with than the hordes of enemies in that missions. Also, it’s one of those anticlimactic final boss fights that leads you to believe the boss has another phase because it has a segment left in its health bar… but it’s killed via cutscene.
Garbage game have to do this, it is the law.
I guess like just crashing entirely and booting me to the PS4 “desktop” during a fairly long mission.
That is WHEN servers don’t just crap out at inconvenient times, like before you can do the final objectives/part of a mission. I thought the first disconnect was you know, a normal accident, but then it happened again when i was trying again one of the last fighting segments in a mission, booted to title screen, and servers didn’t respond even after 2 retries, so i just ragequitted.
I can’t vouch for how the servers handle now, as i played through this and took notes years ago, but i personally did had a fairly not good experience, as in the servers were mostly stable, but it was not uncommon to get disconnetted (more than once) during a cutscene, let’s just say i couldn’t trust the servers to deal with me going away to take a piss or have a quick lunch.
All of this exacerbated by very long loading screens, leading to found myself stuck on a loading screen that was taking so long i just knew it would never load, so i just quit to the PS4 dashboard, closed the game and tried again. Opposed to how sometimes you would get incredibly long loading screens even with the game patched to hell and back, and in some occasions i feared another crash but no, the game just took more time than usual to even display the loading screen.
Sure, the missions aren’t that long, but they’re not short, especially if you watch all the cutscenes. Regardless, it’s not nice to have the last 30 minutes of progress go up in smokes because the EA servers are stable as a 2 legged giraffe, though even that would have better loading times.
I do enjoy they at least veered more into a fantasy direction, with the animals and some of the world and the ruins, but most of it’s still heavily sci-fi and reminds one inevitably of Destiny, i’m sorry but it just does. The enemy variety is a bit better than the one in Bungie’s game, but it doesn’t amount to much since all the various factions of humanoid mook enemies with guns are de facto identical.
Even when you unlock the free play mode (which has to be played as a public match since the game is superpushy on the “playing with other kids” aspect) which means you can go around, grab materials, collectables, shoot at some of the animals and partecipate in events, and in theory enjoy the world at your leisure, but it’s the same world and it’s somehow worse without the objectives.
Sure there are some extra missions to do, some have story, but still, aside from those it’s just bullshit like racing through rings while flying, and you never feel encouraged to indulge in the side-servings, it’s not like you’ll ever feel like needing extra resources or materials to power up the weapons or craft more powerful attacks/special magics (EVEN after they patched in the loot being actually satisfying NOT by design, but by accident), since the microtransactions bullshit is geared for cosmetic purposes here. Still inacceptable that a major proper game sold at full price has them.
When you’re not on missions or free roaming exploration on the Javelin suit, you move inside the citadel hub, which isn’t much better, not only due to the ability to hear and listen to very bad dialogues, but because it’s boring and tiresome to move around the hub town to begin with, i wouldn’t have minded if they just made all this section menù based or gave you the option to easily access the various shops and facilities without running around the place, which feels disjointed from the grindy looter shooter tps gameplay of the missions, especially as it played in first person only.
But how could i forget, the game is also guilty of pulling one of the stunts i hate the most, as in the “sidecorn force-feeding progression blockade”. AKA we won’t let you finish this game quickly.
Because you see, despite the game marking story mission as “critical” (and often forgetting to mark important people you need to speak to in order to progress the quests), that doesn’t mean just playing those will progress the story, as in the game just expects you to do “optional” tomb challenges that can only be accessed via the free roaming mode in order to unlock the final act.
The game never tells you that, after hours of zero progression i just checked a guide.
Even worse, these “optional story missions” aren’t actual missions at all, they just consist into finding and visiting the tombs of fallen warriors (or just fast-travelling to the tombs, since it’s not easy to get a good grip of where you’re going, even when you play the game enough to start recognizing the scenery and the places, despite not being that different from each other), but you can’t access the tomb itself before you do some random tasks, yeah, they splinter into cumulative objectives, just to force you partecipate even more in the side bullshit, like the “global events”.
Especially these i hate, because there’s no waypoint on the map, they just happen randomly, which means you’ll have to wander about the same old locations hoping one of the 16 types of event missions triggers, watching other fellow players doing the same aimless wander through a world map that isn’t that big, interesting to explore or look at.
Maybe it could be forgiven if the content itself was worthwhile or….maybe it’s just bad design to strong-arm people into the side content, pure “AAA” insecurity and cowardice at its most obvious, because it tells me the developers knew that if they didn’t force players to do the side content, most wouldn’t bother. But then again, games like these aren’t built to be fun experiences, fun is expensable for the god of retention and limitless monetization.
Before they canned any further work and after they abandoned the roadmap, Bioware was able to add the Cataclysm story expansion/late game thinghie.
The campaign can be finished in 10 to 15 hours, i guess, i can’t tell, the game doesn’t let me know the total playtime and i don’t know where or IF it even lets you know that, but i finished the campaign just to be done with it, sure as hell i wasn’t having fun, but the time to play before the official announcement of the “sundown” date was even comunicated… felt right.
There are seasonal events, the Stronghold assault, some post-game content and the Cataclysm event stuff, so it’s not that it lacks content… it that it lacks good content, even just finishing the campaign feel like a boring and long slog, so yeah, i’m not feeling inclined to bother with extra servings.
As a final cherry, it’s a buggy game too, even after all the patches that stopped the game from causing PS4 to soft-crash at random, the default early game guns NOW not being better than the ones you find later, with most of the visual issues fixed… in the citadel hub you can still see character pop up into existence even at a draw distance where you can EASILY see them do so, textures takes 5 seconds to load in when you get closer to them (despite the fuckin loading times) and i still saw NPC “zooming/phasing” through each other just to comply with their scripted routines of walking around or being at a certain place… and sometimes still failing, so i clearly saw them dropping from mid-air to immediatly having their back to a wall. Classic.
Overall Evaluation
It’s hard to look back and feel even much pity at Anthem, as in if we just consider the final product and not the awful mess of a production it was, with the insane toll of crunch on staff.
Even looking at just the final product and the promises made by the marketing, it’s hard to feel particularly bad… or even disappointed, to be more correct, as this one never looked good or promising to me, especially since little was known about it despite multiple E3 apperances, and it looking like a desperate Destiny wannabe in terms of aesthetic and “live servitude because”.
It’s not that it doesn’t work (aside when it flat out doesn’t due to it being a live service) as intended or it’s borderline unplayable, it’s just that… it’s dull, a really dull amalgamation of stuff you’ve seen plenty of times before in games like this, but often done better or more satisfying to play. And it becomes very dull to play very fast, since it’s not even satisfying acquiring new loot and stuff, where at least Destiny nails that satysfing MMO loop to a point, and it had a competent, good gunplay for a FPS, Anthem doesn’t even have that, and with the adequate TPS combat here, the gameplay loop is just not good enough to warrant much of anything.
I genuinely shudder at the thought of conceiving an even more boring and dull experience, which is easier than expected, since YES, it could be worse if they didn’t decided early to implement flying mechanics. But of course even those can fall victim to the nature of Anthem being a repetive and unfinished piece of crap rushed out on the market, so in a couple occasions i saw my character flying but also stutter, like flying forwards and then being relocated backwards, continuosly fidgeting. It didn’t actually affect gameplay, but it’s just odd to see.
Aside from its jankiness, the graphics are good, are what you would expect from a Bioware game, and i do like some of the battle music themes. It’s not a bad looking title or anything, the game looks are its last problem, but it’s no wonder people basically abandoned the game almost immediately after the launch month; it’s not because it was lacking in content or it was too short, it’s because not only it was just adequate and lacking any personality in every department, it just felt pointless even grinding for the late game, or just felt pointless to keep playing, stat.
To quote the director of the game, as he described it in interview before launch “The actual lore of this game is “A world unfinished that has been abandoned by its gods.”
………yeah, that pretty much sums Anthem as a whole.
In a way, it’s a crap game whose legend will live on as the death knell of Bioware as a company in the hands of EA, and a masterclass in hubris, because when you dub your unclear vision for a game “Dylan” after Bob Dylan, waste years actually deciding what it is and then deliver this…. oh boy.
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