A beta test best described as Destiny with jetpacks, Anthem’s demo hints at a lacklustre final game.
After playing the demo for Anthem for some time, I began to have mixed feelings over the appearance of the new BioWare logo which adorns the game’s intro sequence. To say that I’m a fan of their stuff would be a bit of an understatement. Games like the very first Dragon Age and the Mass Effect franchise still rank highly on my personal list of some of the best games ever made. When the next Dragon Age was announced at this year’s Game Awards, I was probably more hyped than most. But before we get to any of that, we need to take a good long look at their latest.
In terms of gameplay, there’s very little to be said about Anthem. If I had been playing with my eyes shut, I wouldn’t have been able to tell that I wasn’t playing Destiny and that’s not a good sign. Both the first and second game took time to find their feet. They made mistakes and the struggle to fix those mistakes went on for a long time after release. The last thing we need is more clones. The only truly fun part of the game was flying around, which makes the game an Iron Man simulator. You can soar through the skies and to new missions, but it’s not long before you’re immediately reminded of how mediocre everything on the ground is. Walking into a new area, I was ambushed by a series of loading screens. A lot of games offer seamless transitions. Anthem doesn’t. Instead, you get lengthy segues away from the action, crushing any sense of exploration or immersion. Coupled with latency and occasional rubberbanding, it’s strange to think that you can describe a BioWare game as being boring. But Anthem is. The unfulfilled potential is staggering and frustrating.
What about story? The demo takes a small slice of the story out from the early game. While I accept that it’s hard to get the full picture from just the demo, you can’t help but think they could have chosen a different slice to represent the full game. I was bombarded with the names of groups of science fiction allies, enemies and all sorts of different things. Perhaps the most important thing to take away from this is that I understood absolutely nothing. I had no idea what I was going to retrieve, no idea who I was retrieving things for and only the faintest idea of who I was.
For an RPG of any kind to succeed, it needs to establish the player’s identity early on. You need to know who your character is and what their place is in the world the game developers have created. In the first Dragon Age, you choose an origin and set out on an hour-long prologue that fleshes out the world and gives you the opportunity to shape your protagonist’s personality. This demo gave me nothing beyond allowing me to choose my character’s gender. The main hub feels like a ghost town, fully populated by cardboard cut-out characters chatting about nothing.
This is more of a beta than an actual demo. It doesn’t inspire confidence or make you want to buy the full game. Studios often have their own signatures, which are carried across all their games, whether famous or just infamous. BioWare’s signatures: excellent fantasy storytelling, high calibre worldbuilding and a sense of adventure, are almost entirely absent. The story failed to engage. I was simply a nobody sent to pick up a load of worthless items for a lifeless NPC. The game world was dull, populated with bullet sponge enemies who had some kind of nominal background to them. They were Scabs, I was told. Who were they? No clue. They slumped over dead if I shot them enough times. The only thing BioWare about Anthem is that new logo, taped onto the intro sequence as if by accident. At one time, it promised great things. Now, it seems destined to act as a stamp of mediocrity.
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