Anthem

Anthem is an imperfect and evolving game, but if you are looking for a rewarding experience in terms of gunplay, fighting and settings, you will hardly be disappointed.

A rich narrative composition, multifaceted and enveloping, is the setting for a frenetic and amusing gameplay, which draws strength from a surprisingly effective movement system, able to offer a unique flavor both to combat and exploration.

We prefer to highlight the playable elements that make Anthem fun to play at times. Everything else that surrounds the Bioware game has yet to improve and add more content to mitigate the feeling of repetitiveness, because the history and the world of Bastion has huge potential that at the date of its release still seems untapped.

Anthem is an ambitious project and it paid off for BioWare in some measure. The gameplay is spectacular, the story is good and has a challenging endgame. But annoyances sometimes spoil it and it's up to BioWare to fix those problems for the future.

Anthem is a white canvas for BioWare. Its future is all about content and the quality of its story.

Currently, if you play with the mindset of just wanting experience the game and take your time with it, it’ll likely be a fun experience. However, if you tend to have the mindset of needing to be max level NOW and have all the best gear NOW it will probably not be fun.

I feel that it’s repetitive and that the loot is out of balance, but I also see that it has a good core. Maybe it’s a remnant of the original game, or perhaps it’s enough to build on. What I can tell you for sure is that it not a proper $60 game that’s been in development for six years.

Anthem is certainly not a perfect production, considering the bad AI, the disappointing netcode and the way the online works. However, it has few (and not negligible) qualities, like a well-defined narrative universe, an excellent gameplay able to take advantage of the diversity of the javelins, undisputed protagonists, and a top-quality artistic component. Despite the few endgame activities present at the launch, Anthem still manages to adequately stimulate the development of the character, thanks to a good distribution of rewards.

The controls of Anthem are intuitive and engaging. Flying through the world of Bastion is a sight to behold, and coordinating with your team on higher difficulties like Grandmaster is rewarding. Despite some questionable design choices and shortcomings, Anthem has a strong foundation that has potential to be a genre leader, but isn’t quite there just yet.

Anthem has as much potential as room to improve. Gameplay is great, which means you'll have lots of fun flying and fighting, but right now there are too may flaws to overlook.

Anthem could be a great game and sometimes it can be an enjoyable ride, but as a loot shooter it's a flawed experience, dragged down with many problems and leaving you with a sense of hunger.

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.

BioWare will need to build quickly on top of its shimmering jet-fueled foundation to hold people's interest, but folks looking for a new neighborhood to move into might want to give Anthem a try -- either now or after fixes and updates.

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.

Anthem feels a bit award as a Bioware studio game because the narrative is clearly something that wasn't given priority, to the benefit of combat and exploration. The game still needs more content to live up to the promise made by a publisher as big as EA.

After a while, suspicion sets in: perhaps EA doesn’t believe in BioWare anymore, and had them release not only unpolished, but basically unfinished product to cut losses and avoid another total rework. [Issue#237, p.44]

Anthem is a painfully average RPG from a developer that is capable of so much more.

As it stands now, the game involves a lot of repetition, and what little plot exists unfolds at a snail's pace, is poorly explained, and lacks the necessary context to make sense of it. It's capable of being a very fun shooter, especially when friends comprise the rest of your squad. It's just that the rest of the game feels far from the polished content for which Bioware is known.

Eternally repetitive missions, outrageously long loading times and a completely irrelevant story. That could not be everything. But after the credits, I was disappointed again: that was actually everything.

Anthem is a hymn to laziness, where a great potential is held back by strong repetitiveness, the absence of some basic features and the artificially increased level of difficulty. Moreover, BioWare and Electronic Arts made an incomplete product, a mere idea of a full game with the promise that each patch will bring us closer to what we might call a final product. Still, is it possible to have fun with a group of friends and spend some pleasant time exploring or fighting? Sure, but the experience will quickly turn into an infinite loop devoid of any goal.

At the moment though: the missions are severely lacking, the weapons are too basic, there’s a big disconnect between story and game, and having so many loading screens (especially with the Forge) is annoying. In general there’s just a severe lack of content, and forcing players to grind what should be optional achievements instead was a terrible stopgap solution. If you get Anthem now, you’ll have fun for a little while… but then you’ll be waiting for the real game to start.

It is frustrating to rate Anthem. The game looks great, plays even better and has an intriguing setting to boot. However, the fragmented world design, overabundance of loading screens and severe lack of content considerably drag down the experience, at least for the time being. Still, this is a live service game after all and the folks at BioWare have the chance to right this ship by adding enough content in the upcoming months, though it won't be easy.

BioWare is good at making complete worlds, like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. We wonder why it chose to offer us only half a world with Anthem. It looks amazing, but it needs a lot of work if we want to enjoy it for the next couple of years.

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.

We really like the core of Anthem, but not in this state. There are not only plenty of bugs and issues, but also many design flaws and progression issues. We haven’t lost hope, and we really hope BioWare and EA can make Anthem the game it deserves to be.

Six months or a year from now, Anthem, like many of the other games before it, may be a wholly improved experience and complete its redemption arc, but right now it may as well be AAA Early Access. I’ll continue to play it for as long as the combat remains entertaining, but if you’re on the fence, you may want to wait a while on this one.

Anthem has energetic combat but it saves too much of what precious little content it has for the endgame, making playing through its mismatched story a tediously repetitive grind.

With a marvelous open world and a dynamic action gameplay, Anthem has surely a lot to offer, but it forgot to bring with it a good AI system, various types of enemies, a more diversified missions set, and, of course, deeper teamplay and storytelling.

Anthem's story and combat, both showing plenty of signs of BioWare's (former) genius, forcefully come together in a game that seems to have gotten the wrong genre. Sadly, Anthem is a mess, way more than it deserves to be.

It's obvious that Anthem didn't have enough development time, but had some great potential. It's a real shame, that everything turned out this way. Even now, the game can bring out positive emotions. Hasty climbers have sudden falls. No matter how ironic this proverb may seem, it's incredibly relevant for Anthem.

Above all, I’m surprised that even on the drawing board someone thought Anthem looked like a good game.

Anthem manages to offer up moments of fun, with occasionally chaotic action, Javelin gameplay variety and freeform traversal. But an overly convoluted and forgettable story, underwhelming RPG elements and outdated design choices make for a rough introduction to this brave new world.

Anthem struggles to deliver an engaging and ongoing experience to return and grind every day. Even if you manage to look above its flaws, like underwhelming loot design, mission structure and rigid combat, there is little joy to be found in this game.

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.

Lots of potential and visually arresting, but lacking and flawed in execution. It needs more baking.

Flying, fighting and exploring while in one of the four javelins feels great in Anthem. The combat is varied and fun, the world is gorgeous and ripe for discovery, but too much hassle with various menus, loading screens and poor design keeps me away from the fun. The story and characters are good, the second half of the story it even better, but the characters and nuances that Bioware does so well is hidden in texts and journals, and not given enough screen time to really shine. Fort Tarsis slows down the pace too much, and repetitive quest-design doesn't help. Endgame-content is lacking, with parts of it broken, other parts not working, or just not enough variety as the game stands right now. But I still love the feel of playing Anthem, which makes it a good foundation to be built upon.

There’s no doubt that Anthem is beautiful, and its core of flying, shooting, looting, and upgrading your mech is fun. The campaign’s pacing is off, however, speeding through pivotal moments in the story and doling out filler content to keep players busy. Despite its cast of charismatic characters, many relationships and interactions feel forced and lifeless. Anthem’s biggest setback is how it too frequently turns fun into work.

Too many elementary mistakes were simply made here: the mission design is too monotonous, the story is poorly told, the technology an impertinence. To make matters worse, the makers neglected the endgame. Thus, the former RPG specialists here have finally lost the trust of many fans.

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.

For all the interesting lore and intrigue of the world, most of it is hidden behind layers of library entries that players shouldn’t have to read through.

Anthem is a game with a superb gameplay that fails in delivering an entertaining experience due to a campaign with no flow, a heartless story and repetitive missions, even in the endgame. Anthem clearly needs months or even years of polishing and content to be what it wanted to be at first.

I want to like it, but damn does it make it hard. Like the games that came before it in this genre, I’ve no doubt that Anthem will get better and bulkier with updates over time, but if Bioware takes too long in getting there, I fear most of the player base will have moved on. For what it’s worth, Anthem does show a lot of promise.

Defying classic RPG storytelling , Anthem‘s missions and campaign lack the variety, momentum and character-building that define the best games in the genre, and especially the best games from BioWare itself. That said, the voice acting is often great, the environments are incredibly beautiful and the action can be fantastic but eventually Anthem feels like all that colorful combat, sound and fury are in the service of nothing very interesting or innovative.

Beautiful and mechanically robust throughout, but weighed down by repetitive missions, a flabby structure, and a lot of the people you meet in Fort Tarsis. Even the strongest beats become tiresome if repeated or drowned in white noise, and that’s Anthem in a nutshell.

Anthem is a strange flawed adventure with glimpses of greatness buried behind an abundance of obtuse design decisions. What so many players love about Bioware is here, but fragmented in such a way that it becomes unrecognisable...The core of Anthem – being its fearsome gunplay and angelic flight mechanics – are stellar, yet they’re held back by the mission structure that dictates them. Things could certainly improve with the introduction of deeper dungeons and endgame content, but right now Anthem is sadly underwhelming; a victim to the template it’s trying so hard to emulate.

Anthem is a song that we've heard a few too many times before. Here's a game that promises a grand vision of an open world, of a co-op RPG shooter that you can play for dozens of hours with your friends, but at launch it simply doesn't live up to expectations. The core exosuit flying, the Javelin design, the interwoven combat and the gorgeous world BioWare have created are all excellent, but at launch it's lumbered by bugs, technical hitches and odd or uninspired design decision. I want to like this game, but sometimes it doesn't make it easy.

Even if it has some good ideas, plays very well and is dashing technically-speaking, Anthem is a huge disappointment. Because of its repetitiveness and lack of real attractiveness in terms of story and characters, it feels more like a technological showcase without a soul.

Under this pretty coat of paint lies one mediocre game that is ultimately disappointing.

Seldom do we play games that are so fun to play, while also being super disappointing. There are so many problems, but underneath there is a very good game that can't even come through wearing a powerful exosuit.

There are flashes of brilliance, especially when it comes to the flying, but confused storytelling, boring loot, and unsatisfying missions don’t justify the game’s massive time investment.

Anthem offers amazing combat, astounding visuals, and excellent all-around production value, but suffers from baffling design choices and awful writing that hold it back from being something truly special.

Anthem has good ideas, but it struggles significantly with the execution. It's a co-op game that works best with no one talking; it buries genuinely interesting character moments and puts its most incomprehensible story bits at the forefront; its combat is exciting until you get to the boss fights and find your wings have been clipped. Even the simple, exhilarating act of flying is frequently interrupted by the limitations of your javelin, and you never quite shake that feeling of disappointment--of knowing, throughout the good parts of Anthem, that you'll inevitably come crashing back down.

If you want to see Anthem’s lush jungle and glistening Javelins, do it right away — this game is losing audience fast, and there’s almost nothing to do after the campaign ends. Or check it out on YouTube to save yourself some nerves and money.

We are really afraid, because Anthem could be last game we see from BioWare. The game has big issues from both gameplay and performance aspects. The lack of content is biggest problem it has.

Anthem's disjointed story, boring loot, repetitive missions, and shallow endgame are all disappointing. At least it's pretty.

Bioware jumps into the world of looter-shooters failing to fix some mistakes long present into to genre while making some of their own. Despite fun combat and beautiful graphics, it just fails to live up to the hype with its bad loot system, lackluster story and general bad design of some of the core points of the game.

Like Destiny, like No Man's Sky, like Fallout 76, like The Elder Scrolls Online, Anthem could be a great game by next year. But that doesn't make it a good game now. Right now, Anthem is not good. And given what's come out of BioWare in the past and the kinds of lasting, impactful experiences that the gaming world knows BioWare is capable of delivering, that's truly sad.

Anthem has sadly not resonated with any part of me, and no matter how much time passes, I don’t think this will change.

Anthem is ultimately severely flawed, and very unfinished. There's half a good game in there, but it doesn't do enough to diminish the overall feeling of emptiness and repetition.

Anthem is a soulless experience, possessing very few beats that elicit any kind of joy. It's a sad song, sung by someone who doesn't believe in their own message, and it shows. If Destiny was the hit single, Anthem is the bad cover.

Anthem is a frustrating experience. There's a core gameplay idea that's fun, but it's not enough to keep the experience alive in endgame and beyond. It wants to sell us on flying and combat, but Grandmaster levels stop that dead. It offers a wide world to explore, but offers no reason to do so. Anthem ultimately doesn't feel like the best BioWare can do, and that's a horrible shame.

Unfortunately, I feel like fixing this game goes beyond patching glitches, fixing bugs, and then cramming in expansions. To bring this game up to the must-play level, many aspects of the game need a full overhaul.

All I can do is review the game I was given though, and the game I was given is mediocre. Functional? Sure. Flashy? Absolutely. But it’s a puddle disguised as a lake, a universe with so much potential that makes good on almost none of it. To make matters worse, I don’t think the core loop is interesting enough to keep me playing. The tougher end-game enemies are so damn spongy, and the shooting isn’t nearly as tight or as punchy as Destiny, a game that kept me playing long past the point I’d exhausted its similarly dreadful story.

Anthem offers near unlimited potential, with certain features, taken separately, representing a marvel in design. Combined together and it proves to have a lot of style but very little substance.

What disappoints so much about Anthem is that there are sparks of potential in there. Flying around in your Javelin and queuing up combo attacks with other players can be a blast. But then you discover that you’ll have to back out to Fort Tarsis during Freeplay every so often in order to continue earning experience points. Or you’ll be killed and stuck staring at a red screen waiting until a player feels like reviving you. Or you’ll want to customise your Javelin and find there are no interesting cosmetic options that aren’t behind a paywall.

With all of that, I cannot recommend Anthem to anyone at launch. There is simply way too much bad to allow for the good to truly shine through. The endgame content is really good, but the boring grind and unbelievably shallow story on the way there do not justify a $60 purchase.

Although Anthem has potential, BioWare's first attempt at an online RPG has failed. Currently, the market is full of titles which are more tuned and have better content. [Issue#294]

I can confidently say that I wouldn’t have completed Anthem if I didn’t need to write this review. No amount of pretty environments or impressive flight can make up for the sorry, incomplete state this game was released in, and given the flimsy foundation BioWare has laid here, I’m not confident in Anthem’s ability to survive as a loot-based co-op service. Until there’s more content, variation, and stability, players should definitely steer clear of this one.

The lasting impression is of a game that, for all its charms and potential, simply wasn't quite ready for takeoff - and that what might have been won't arrive for a couple of years yet. [Issue#331, p.102]

Somewhere beneath the mound of filth lies hidden potential. It is, however, suffocated by bugs, bad game design, terrible story and endless repetition.

Anthem needs more than just new content. A lot of work needs to be done on a wide variety of the game's fundamental elements before it can join the ranks of other redeemed loot games like Diablo III, Destiny, and The Division. Whether EA will give BioWare the latitude to overhaul the parts of the game that need it--and whether it's even technically feasible for them to do that in the first place--are questions with uncertain answers.

Right now, despite those fabulous jetpacks, Anthem stumbles more than it soars.

How did BioWare, veterans of making games with fine-tuned progression systems, make this uninteresting slog of bad loot and dull advancement? How could the developers that gave us Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and even Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood create such a technically incompetent mess of loading screens and disconnects?