Anthem

Release for PC, PS4, and Xbox One: February 22, 2019

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Genre: Online Multiplayer, Action RPG, and Shooter

The best way to describe Anthem is as a cross between Mass Effect and Destiny. It is quite obvious that this game was designed to be a direct response to Destiny’s early success in the hybrid MMO Shooter genre, but like many EA games of late, it was rushed, unfinished, and over hyped. This is not to say, however, that this game is all bad. It has its positive traits, but they are surrounded by a lot of rough edges.

To start, this game has some of the best graphics I have ever seen in an online game. Or any game for that matter. It also has cutting edge animation and voice acting, specifically for characters like Owen and Dax. Not only are both of these characters animated to the finest detail, but they are hilarious not just in their lines, but in their body language as well. Finally, perhaps one of the games most defining features is flying. This is done in a suit of mechanized armor called a ‘Javelin’. Flying is an essential part of every mission or task that takes you outside of Fort Tarsis, the games central hub. It looks amazing, and shows off just how sprawling and detailed the landscape of Bastion really is. These aspects of the game are the diamonds in the rough. The rough will need more than just one paragraph dedicated to it.

The most important aspect in any self respecting RPG is character creation. In order for a player to truly be able to get into the mind of their digital self they have to be able to create it. Anthem does not allow you to do that. The only “Character Creation” at the beginning of the game is choosing the face of your Freelancer from a list of preset options. Once you choose that, its over. There are no sliders or customization options of any kind. A tweet from executive producer, Mark Darrah, states “We have focused our personalization efforts on the Javelin. For the pilot you will pick a pre-generated head from a list”.

These “efforts” he describes are laughable. The only customization options you have for your Javelin are the material (most of which you cannot tell the difference between) and the color. If you want to change the actual appearance of the armor you can, for a price. The Legion of Dawn edition of the game comes with a Javelin skin for each class, but this version is $20 more than the standard. The only other way to get armor skins is to buy them from the in game store. You can do this with either in game currency or shards, a currency purchasable with real money. To put it in perspective, I was able to buy a helmet with in game currency, and then I couldn’t afford to buy anything else without shards because a lot of the armor sets come as a package deal of four.

To top it all off, the default helmet for each class will open during certain cut-scenes so that the pre-generated face you chose will be visible. But any other helmet that you can get, including the Legion of Dawn helmet, remains closed permanently. Each class has a cinematic that appears briefly before loading into an expedition (most of the time it gets cut off by the loading screen, even though it should simply be the loading screen). Even this cinematic is affected by the closed helmet issue. Each class also has a unique Javelin appearance. The Colossus is a huge lumbering tank. The Ranger is less bulky but, by no means slim. The Storm and the Interceptor are both form fitting, which makes it quite obvious that the Storm was designed for male pilots and the Interceptor was designed for female pilots. The gendered look of these Javelins doesn’t change regardless of which gender you choose for your pilot. This is what I hope was an oversight on the developers’ part.

The largest problem with the game right now is the high latency, lagging, and frequent disconnection. I would expect this from a game on Launch week, but I didn’t expect it from a game a week and a half after launch. Any time a player loses connection from the game, the entire game restarts. The intro logos play, and you have to reconnect to the server with a load screen, and then load again to get wherever you were before you disconnected. It seems as though Fort Tarsis is an “offline” area as there are no other players to interact with. So if a player disconnects while in Fort Tarsis, disconnecting shouldn’t matter. The game should be able to reconnect in the background and not effect players whatsoever. If you disconnect on an expedition (which will happen a lot), things get trickier because that’s the multiplayer part of the game. By far the worst offender is free-play. This is the part of the game where you can freely explore the world with no specific mission or objective. The first time I tried to load into this, my game disconnected before I could load in, then while trying to load back in it disconnected again. When I finally got into the game, I fell out of the sky multiple times because the latency was so high. This is not simply an internet connection issue as according to threads, this is happening for the majority of players.

Once you can actually play the game, you are faced with another challenge. Anthem doesn’t believe in tutorials. You start the game in a Ranger Javelin, but you barely do anything other than watch cut-scenes (which were pretty amazing I’ll admit). Once you start playing for real, you can choose one of the four Javelins. Good luck learning how to play them though, because there is absolutely no instruction. Side note: if you play as a Storm, the objective is to be in the air as much as humanly possible. You should only be on the ground if you are overheated. The game also doesn’t explain what free-play is or how to harvest material even though a main story quest requires you to understand both. Lastly, it doesn’t explain Strongholds and how they are different from other expeditions. After the quest it stays on you map and the quest you got to go there never actually completes.

It is clear that Anthem was supposed to be BioWare’s attempt to break into the multiplayer market, as their main titles are historically brilliant single player games. They have a lot to learn about online play because playing with others is difficult to say the least. When in a party or “squad”, group members can go into any expedition that the party leader has unlocked, but they won’t receive credit for the quest that takes place there. This shouldn’t be possible. If a player doesn’t have the quest that unlocks an expedition, they shouldn’t be able to go on that expedition. When you return from expeditions, and start cut-scenes or go about your business in Fort Tarsis, the party is dropped and you have to re-invite everyone before venturing out again. The expeditions usually start with voiced dialogue between the quest giver and your freelancer, but this dialogue begins when the first person loads in. If you are the last to load in, you probably missed it all and your squad it likely already on their way to the first objective. The dialogue should play individually for each person in the expedition or it should wait for the last person to load in, thus keeping everyone on the platform until the last person is ready.

The things that probably solidified my feelings about this game happened at the end. First during the final battle in the Heart of Rage and during all associated cut-scenes, my cloak lost all physics. I made it silver, so it looked like I was wearing a windshield protector on my back the whole time. My partner wasn’t in his cut-scenes at all, so I guess I got the better end of the deal. Once this battle was over, the story was over, and I was in the end game. I was surprised by this. The story felt incredibly short. I could have finished it all in less than a day of continuous play if I had been so inclined. Aside from that there is no end game. You can replay expeditions or do contracts, but that is about it. There is no story or any other element to keep you engaged.

I can’t sum up my feedback for Anthem in one paragraph, but I can choose some of the biggest things I think the developers need to work toward. Normally I would never say this, but this game should not look toward the future. At least not yet. There are way to many issues in the here and now for the developers to even be thinking about new content or story. The biggest things Anthem needs to work on are as follows:

Fix the connection issues. It makes it almost impossible to play the game most of the time. I play on a PS4 but I can’t imagine it is any better for the other platforms.
Customization needs a total rework. Don’t make a game with amazing graphics and then not let us create a character with them, and if you’re going to claim Javelin customization is the trade off, there had better be easy ways to obtain armor pieces, like as rewards from expeditions.
Story. Story. Story. I always look for story and in Anthem there was not enough. Especially for a BioWare game. It is too short, and honestly, I care more about Matthias and Dax than I did about Faye and Haluk.
Make that awesome cinematic before expedition launch the actual loading screen. The loading screen doesn’t need a preamble and it certainly shouldn’t interrupt it.
Better tutorials and explanations of the game. Don’t assume everyone is a veteran player. What if I’m a twelve year old and this is the first video game my mom bought me?

This game needs a lot of work. There isn’t much more to say. It has a lot of potential and in a lot of ways its better than Destiny, but in more ways, its not. I honestly can’t say I recommend this game as it stands. Maybe if they knock $20 off the price, or if the developers take a hard look at the game and actually try to make it better. As it stands, I give Anthem the very generous rank: