Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Anthem




Picked up BioWare's Anthem for $20 and just finished the main campaign. This game gets a ton of bad press, but if you just play it as Mass Effect in battle armor, it's fine. Not great, but fine.

It definitely feels like a BioWare game awkwardly grafted onto social loot shooter mechanics.

For example, it's got the mission, talk to people at base, mission cycle from ME, but none of the people you talk to go on your adventures or impact the game or campaign in any way, so you wonder why you're bothering.

Dialogues give you a kind of Renegade/Paragon reply option, but again, they don't seem to make any difference (your choices are essentially things like 'agree pleasantly' or 'agree sarcastically'), so again, why bother?

There a some good things. The suits are fun, flying is cool, environment designs are nice.

Combat is okay, if nothing special. Guns are kind of dull, just shotgun, AR, sniper etc archetypes, which makes the loot (ostensibly the motivator in loot shooters) a bit pointless, but at least the special abilities are fun to play with. Combos are a thing, as they were in ME3, so you can play around with freezing, burning and shocking your opponents.

Anyway I suspect the guns all actually perform the same regardless of displayed stats, to allow high and low level players to do missions together. The only thing that seems to matter is the cooldown on your abilities.

Enemies are seriously bland. Missions either defend the point or kill the VIP style, which gets a bit repetitive, but then I suppose the grinding in any social shooter is part of the territory. With the loot being so drab, though, there isn't really much motivation to stick with it.
 

Some of the basic things are pretty bad though. The UI for menus in particular is pretty crap and unintuitive. Inventory is straight out of ME1.  

In general, the game does a very bad job of explaining the mechanics. Like if I level up my "Arcanist" ranking I get access to "blueprints" but I've no idea which ones. Or at a high level you get to use "consumables" but it never tells you what they do or how to access them.

But overall I feel like I got my money's worth. I don't need a game that demands I play forever to keep up. Okay story, kind of fun combat, and I'm satisfied.

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