

They don’t subvert it, expand upon it, or ask me to use combat in creative ways. Unfortunately, the missions don’t flatter that combat. There’s no strategy my squad just shoots at the same large dude for 35 minutes straight. Only three Stronghold missions are available at launch, and the third one culminates with shooting a large dude for 35 minutes. Strongholds are considered to be the pinnacle activity in Anthem. The endgame, the reward for powering through the campaign, similarly suffers from drudgery. What sounds like a fun, Indiana Jones-esque romp ends up being a massive checklist of mindless objectives to complete (e.g., “find 10 collectibles”) before you can continue the story. That repetition is bad, but it’s nothing compared to a heinous mid-campaign mission that focuses on opening tombs. A handful of basic objectives (e.g., “stand at this spot for a while,” “collect six of these floating things and bring them back,” “kill anything around here”) repeat over and over again throughout the 15-hour campaign. When my buddies do appear in the world, they are so far behind me that they automatically teleport to my location.Įven when my squad syncs up, Anthem’s campaign struggles to remain fresh and varied after its first few hours. They report missing the dialogue and mission objectives that I’d listened to while they were still loading in. Playing with friends on PC, I find myself loading in faster than everyone else, then waiting for them to catch up. The load times become especially problematic when I play with other people, something Anthem heavily encourages.
#Anthem pc metacritic Patch
A day-one patch will seek to address their length, but their frequency will remain an issue. Either way, they are numerous and momentum-breaking. Depending on your platform and hardware specifications, they may be as short as 10-20 seconds or as long as several minutes. For a game that’s all about changing loadouts, this is, to say the least, irritating. This will require four more load screens.Ĭhanging gear in Anthem is painful. The assault rifle feels bad, and I want to switch back to what I was using. I start another mission to try out my new assault rifle. In order to equip that loot, I must travel into the Forge, where all gear is equipped. Turns out there was a purple assault rifle in there. Upon completing the mission, I’m given a list of all of the loot I’ve found. A pop-up on the screen confirms that I have found an Epic piece of gear.

I kill an enemy, and a purple diamond pops out of it. Here are the steps to equip new gear in Anthem:

In loot-based games, there’s nothing more exciting than seeing a new piece of gear drop, equipping it, and then trying it out on the enemies you were fighting moments ago. And I’m not alone.Īnthem is a game about being powerful and finding powerful loot.

I am death and destruction, tossing freezing grenades at mechanized infantry, calling down lighting on spidery hordes, or slicing hijacked turrets at close range. I can leap off a building, fall 50 feet, and zoom away with a jetpack, never touching the ground.Īnthem feels like I’m in control of a Marvel movie. As a Freelancer, I shred through dozens of alien scorpions or marauding bandits in seconds. These soldiers for hire pilot Javelins, 9-foot suits of armor with rocket boosters, lasers, and other implements of destruction. The action gameĪnthem is a sci-fi third-person shooter filled with heroes called Freelancers. But too often, they’re in conflict, with one genre’s pacing and philosophy undermining the other. Occasionally they meld into something new, evocative, and complementary. On the other, a slow-paced, dialogue-heavy, quasi-interactive character drama. On one side, a speedy multiplayer action game. But the studio’s leads have vowed that what BioWare does best - storytelling - hasn’t been abandoned in the process.įor better and worse, that’s true. Known for its lengthy, dense, single-player role-playing games, BioWare now takes its shot at a cooperative multiplayer action game, promising a changing world that will entertain players for hundreds of hours over multiple years. Anthem marks a new direction for a beloved game studio.
