Anthem is the next in line when it comes to loot shooters. A game about exo-suits and living your ultimate Iron Man fantasy. After a dreadful VIP demo, the question remains: will it soar high or crash down instantly? Here’s our second opinion on the public demo of Anthem.
Anthem has to succeed… Not only for all the players who bought their edition already but also for the sake of existence of Electronic Arts. Electronic Arts had its fair share of hiccups and they need a win. I mean, there’s a lot of pressure on Bioware, who are the developers of EA’s next big game Anthem. This game has its community already divided into two major fronts and the game isn’t even out. You have the lovers, the skeptics, and the mindless “grudge against the company EA” or the “ranting group” about a game that they’ve never played. However, all opinions aside… It’s about your own opinion and how you feel about the game. I’ll start sharing my thoughts on Anthem and I’ve got to say…
… They’re positive but I do feel like they haven’t proved anything YET! Let’s start with the positive things about last weekend. First of all, congrats on getting rid of the server issues and “infinite loading screen”. During my playtime, there were no issues concerning the server or experience loss, for that, I’m grateful that they’ve fixed this issue, even though the demo should have been called a BETA instead of a demo. Nevertheless, my time during this DEMO was amazing and I’m looking forward to Anthem. It definitely has the basic mechanics that could make this game work but the future of this game is definitely in the hands of the developers. The flight mechanics, the combination between your abilities work and the gunplay feels amazing. I had a blast playing the only available stronghold in the demo and I was pleased to see that my “loot” addiction has been fulfilled for a great deal. Anthem is a shooter game, just like any other but it’s definitely different.
The flight mechanics are the mechanics that really won me over. They did a very great job to make the player feel like they’re cruising through the sky like Iron Man. This is a mechanic that will definitely convince a lot of players to play Anthem. Each class is also very different when you’re comparing them to each other. You have the Colossus, which is a big tank with lots of explosive power but it’s also tremendously slow. You also can’t rely on your regeneration shield to heighten your chance of survivability, however, they do come with an Iron shield that blocks most of the damage and this gives you a lot of opportunities to defeat your enemies but you’ll have to be careful since all of your tactics are based on “getting close” and “taking the heat” off of your companions. The Storm javelin is all about damage and prepping your enemies for a devastating combo team attack. Instead of being slow, the Storm javelin allows you to take the battle from afar. The hovering mechanic of the Storm lets you float a lot more than other javelins, which gives you a great overview over the battlefield. The interceptor is a fast-paced javelin that allows the player to get behind enemy lines, take out important strategical placed objects and get out. A hard javelin to master but an amazing one to play. The ranger is your classical “to the front” kind of soldier. It’s a jack of all trades, a versatile javelin that’s up for any kind of job with its amazing ultimate ability that thins out the enemy rather fast.
At the end of the weekend, the developers teased us with some “cataclysmic” events. In the far view of the field, you could see a gigantic firestorm that opened up some kind of gateways for elite mobs to spawn right in the field. This “changing” event will occur multiple times during Anthem’s playthrough as it opens up ways to change the living world of Anthem and make it a lot more challenging. It was also a great way to show off the weather mechanics that look amazing with the Frostbite engine. These kinds of events can be compared with the beginning/ ending of a Fortnite season. This “cataclysm” changes the world of Anthem and fills it up with more challenging events that build up the tension before another major launch of content within the living world. These are events that can be joined, even if you’re javelin is low-skilled. The events will scale your javelin to a decent level to make it challenging and yet rewarding for your playthrough. This Cataclysm was just a tease of what’s to come in Anthem, an extra branch in the end-game content. Don’t be confused with the Shaper storms that are part of the end-game, more info has yet to be revealed about this content but these two events can be compared with the Destiny strikes as well. More challenging and more rewarding.
I had a blast during the weekend and even though it was a BETA, I mean a DEMO, the game ran fluently and was a blast to play. I will definitely pick this game up but the game’s still a decent way to go in order for them to convince all of the other players that were lost during the first VIP demo. I’m scared about “running empty on things to do” when I ended the main story. I hope there’s a great number of things to do. Bioware stated in a tweet that there’s nothing to worry about, we should have a decent amount of things to do like Strongholds, replayable missions with a harder difficulty, live events and of course a lot more in the future. It won’t take long before Bioware will release a Post-Launch schedule of free content and if we are to believe all the “Game Changers” video content that has been posted by Anthem ambassadors, we all have nothing to fear.
I’ve got high hopes for this game and even though, we may still not have seen the full content of Anthem, I’m opening myself up to see some surprising features when Anthem officially launches. There’s no need to see the game’s full content, a couple of weeks before the official release because I know Bioware won’t let their fans ( of what’s left…) down. They’ve got too much to lose on this one, so I’m hoping for the better. I can see Anthem becoming the next Destiny we all need. A game that has the basic mechanics people love and the passion of developers that’ll make the game grow, even into something much more bigger and better than they showed off a couple of months ago during the E3 convention. Time will tell if Bioware survives the turbulence of all those negative clouds that are parked over their airplane “Anthem”.
tested on PC
