Anthem I’m only three hours in with my Interceptor but I’m really struggling to understand what some of the reviews have been saying regarding a lack of story- Before I get to the story aspect of the game and the confusing mixed reviews, I’ll talk briefly about combat. All classes feel completely different and you’ll need to change the way you think and engage in combat when using each class in order to play to their abilities and stay alive. Combat is fun, so much fun. They nailed it. My favourite so far is the Interceptor. This class is outside of my comfort zone usually but I feel like a cybernetic ninja mixed with power ranger mixed with wolverine and Ironman. It fun frantic and fast.
Story: So Anthem, like Mass Effect puts you in an existing world. It doesn’t spoon feed you every tiny detail – unless you take a few seconds to read the codecs scattered around – which most reviews didn’t do because perhaps hat was too hard for them to do. The rest of the story is told through awesome and well acted cut scenes which pair a very clear picture of who you are as a warrior and who the enemy is and their objective. I can’t understand how this was unclear when reading reviews from IGN or Gamespot- The characters you encounter throughout are well designed and acted (graphics and facial features are a bit underwhelming though when compared to other recent titles). The constant banter between your character and his cypher (telepathic teammate) is great and fills gaps when travelling to next mission. Level design is incredible and the freedom you have is great. My only issue and point I agree on with the critics is the load times and that you can’t just hit pause to change load outs. I guess I understand that they are trying to make it feel like you’re going to a particular point (forge) and changing loadouts in a more “realistic” way, and that once you’re out of the main hub you just focus on combat, but it feels a bit restricting if you just want to change out a sniper rifle for a shotgun when the stage transitions to tight cave battles.
Anthem is a lot of fun and the world is immediately immersive. It’s early days but the fire mechanics are there and the story is clear and not as complicated as reviews are reporting. The final version of this game is so very different from the demo we all had access to, I was surprise as to how different it is. Don’t let reviews put you off in thinking that BioWare missed the mark, because they didn’t. Their world building, their narrative and music to immerse you is all their