$40 too much and 6 years too late
Take a trip with me back to 2016, Blizzard Entertainment just dropped their new IP in decades and it is selling like gangbusters. Overwatch took a formula that was established by Valve’s Team Fortress and gave it a new style, and flair and it was there and that’s how it become the King of Hero Shooters. Naturally other people wanted to replicate that success, one such team was Firewalk Studios and after 8 years their take on the hero genre has landed.
Concord is the latest in a line of hero shooter type games but with one stark difference from the others; Concord cost $40 instead of being F2P. Two teams known as Freegunners will go head-to-head in a small variety of modes. At present, there are only six main game modes, which are all a mixture of respawn and no-respawn rounds, and all play like tried-and-true multiplayer shooter offerings. Concord is a good-looking game that’s for sure. I loved the loading screens before each match, they depict the team’s starship coming out of what I assume is hyperspace as the smaller landing vessel heads toward the planet. Each level has a different variety of this but as a space fan this really helped make me feel more immersed. These graphics carry over to each match as each of the Freegunners are highly detailed (for better or worse) and while some of the planet environments shine, others are just kind of middle of the road.
MSRP: $39.99
Platforms: PC (reviewed), PlayStation
Price I’d Pay: Should be F2P
That’s really all the praise I have for Concord, you may have noticed that I had a caveat to the Freegunner comment. Well, that’s because that even though these characters are highly detailed for some reason the various designs have split the audience. Personally, I didn’t have an issue with any of them, each character seemed to exude a style; it just seemed that the style was taken from characters in other games. For instance, the character Lennix, the spikey gunslinger is very clearly the Cassidy (formerly McCree for those vets who may have left) of the group. This isn’t an inherently terrible thing, but after being in development so long I was expecting more originality, of which there is some on the roster.
Further adding to my issues is the class system which is in place, in the majority of these type of games there are tanks, support and offensive/attack. Some games change the names of these but for the most part these are the roles, its easy to synergize and quick to understand, which is something that Overwatch did really well. Well in Concord the characters are split into six different classes: Anchor, Breacher, Haunt, Ranger, Tactician, and Warden. Each class offers a unique crew bonus, such as a faster dodge cooldown or improved mobility. Can you tell by the name of the class who does what, because I can’t. Further more there is a character; Jabali whose kit makes him a mobile healer; his class is Warden. Are all Warden’s healers, nope; in essence one cannot just pick up and dive into Concord or they can but it will be really rough, I speak from experience. Some sort of training mode would have done wonders here.
The way Concord is choosing to present narrative is odd too, to their credit the team is promising a deep story that is going to be told over the game’s seasons by a cutscene that is realized each week. I have yet to find a character that a care about having seen the first part and I really doubt I will. I feel bad for the team because they clearly poured a lot into creating these characters but they just don’t resonate well. Aside from the weekly videos there is a “Galactic Guide” which is an interactive encyclopedia of the Concord universe but amounts to a giant text dump. Again, I spent some time reading a few of the very long entries but I just didn’t care about any of it.
There is certainly a joke to be made about Concord and sour grapes, a little less than a week after launch my wait times for a match were at 2-4 mins and this was Friday and Saturday nights, which I thought was when people were gaming. This doesn’t bode well for the future of Concord, despite the fact that the team has new Freegunners, maps and modes in the development pipeline. Of all the errors I think this game has made with its release, the most egregious is the $40 price tag. In a time where the majority of hero shooters are F2P, even the upcoming Marvel Rivals is promising all characters will be free at launch and in the future; hell, even the KING – Overwatch 2 is free-to-play. So why, on God’s good green earth, did Sony think they could ship this game at $40 and find success? I don’t know, I am just a guy who reviews games; that question is for other minds, but as far as Concord goes, just wait for it to inevitably go free-to-play if you are truly curious.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.