Anthem Reviews
The game's bland mélange of competence feels like the deliberate, calculated, focus-tested murder of ideas.
Anthem is a game with unmet potential at every turn. The gameplay is fantastic and recreates the '30 seconds of fun' that has made its competitor Destiny such a success. But in its current state of bugs, server issues and poor design decisions, it is planted firmly in the 'play it in six months' category.
Anthem is a blast at times, but its best moments are separated by too much grind and an inconsistent story.
There's a good game somewhere in Anthem. Somewhere behind the loading screens, asking for meaningful endgame content. Hopefully in the next few months, when BioWare starts launching its post-launch content and quality of life fixes, the game will become what it's meant to be.
Anthem mimes shoot-and-loot games, but doesn't do enough to stand apart from the competition. Plus, bugs and tedious level design mar a potentially entertaining title.
For all its flaws, it has to be said that Anthem is a lot of fun. Some 60 hours in, between both PC and PS4 where I’m onto the endgame in both, I still enjoy the moment to moment gameplay.
Bungie fixed Destiny. Massive fixed The Division. Bioware have all the pieces of the puzzle, but right now Anthem isn’t living up to its potential. It’s bad, but not so bad it can’t be fixed.
Anthem feels less like an evolution for BioWare and more like a deviation into conformity.
Anthem is a constant emotional see-saw. There is a lot of fun from flying, shooting and admiring this beautiful world, and almost as much frustration due to a surprising amount of bad ideas and issues. Some won't be bothered by them and keep flying, and others will go somewhere else. Anthem is a game to both love and to hate at the same time.
Review in Polish | Read full review
Anthem is not “for me”, yet Anthem is trying desperately to be “for everyone.” It is a slow, sometimes terribly frustrating game with nonetheless incredible flying mechanics and adequate shooting. It is the future of videogames, built to be played forever and yet somehow forgettable—the sustenance meal of the online shooter-looter genre, inexplicably buoyed by a company known for legendarily good writing forced to hide its own characters behind mission talk-overs and loot notifications.
Anthem is a game that despite poor optimisation, agonising load times, bizarre design decisions and an unbalanced loot system, can actually be a lot of fun to play. The open-world, story, characters and combat are all solid, the rest, not so much. Anthem has potential to be a good game, it just isn’t right now. It could be one day though.
Comparison aside, Anthem can be a fairly chilled game to play with friends, despite explosions big enough to fill screens, and this is 100% the way to play the game. The constant challenges to defend areas or collects things are made less of a chore with a competent ally. Also, having a friend to cooperatively combo with helps push all of the over the top fun to the surface. The niggles are still there and present but it is much easier to forgive when not solo. With all the glorious map there to fly around, the vast ways to cause explosions and cooperative play, Anthem is well worth playing, especially once the roadmapped content starts to come online.
Anthem is a painfully average RPG from a developer that is capable of so much more.
We hoped beyond hope that Anthem would show the world just how sci-fi online action role-playing games were done. What we got, however, was far from that and without some serious improvement, Anthem could take Mass Effect: Andromeda's crown as BioWare's worst ever release.
What frustrates me the most about Anthem is that the things that work in the game's favour are really well implemented. It feels like a complete waste to have these awesome traversal and combat mechanics utilised in such an uninspired game
In a matter of weeks Anthem has marveled with its engaging action and technical incompetence. As a power fantasy, the game achieves many co-op thrills but the highs are often spread too thin over questionable design choices. BioWare's pedigree feels suppressed by a game that needed much more time in the oven.
Despite its myriad of issues, I still enjoyed the fun gameplay of Anthem and plan to revisit the game after it has developed a larger suite of content and events for me to experience.
Wearing armor and fighting like the Iron Man is really amazing, but this game at this time is also full of flaws. The story is dull. The gameplay is repetitive and boring. What's worse, there are too many bugs and network issues. Maybe it will be a great game when its DLCs come out.
Review in Chinese | Read full review
Anthem's technical shortcomings, dull combat and pretty but messy environments combine poorly with a narrative that uses pointless binary conversation choices, a thoroughly typical, snarky protagonist and worn out tropes to fuel it's characterization and plot. These elements come together to make Anthem a chore of a game that's highly unlikely to satisfy anyone but the most desperate groups of loot motivated gamers in it's current state.
When everything clicks, Anthem is great. But it is a game with major flaws, and how much you enjoy it will depend on both your ability to tolerate them and BioWare's ability to fix them.