Preview - Hands on with Concord
When PlayStation and developer Firewalk Studios revealed Concord by that incredible cinematic trailer, I was in. The characters, the world and everything in between was exactly what I love, but then the bad news came. This game would be a PvP 5v5 shooter and offer nothing for solo players, but as I will never dismiss a game until I have played it, and with the closed beta now done, I have played and now I can report on it.
As a beta, there were of course going to be issues around both the performance and the visuals, so I am not going to worry about those, thankfully all I saw were very minor. Instead, this is going to be around the gameplay, which I can report was fairly smooth and had some fun moments to enjoy. But I didn't love what I played and there's nothing inherently bad about it, there was nothing about the maps or the characters or even the weapons that was like this is really bad you should stop playing. The reason why I didn't love it is it just never clicked with me, and again I know this is a beta and the full release will have more options and more things for me to enjoy, but if I can't get behind the game now what makes the full release any different.
As with all other characters shooter games you need to pick a character that works for you, due to the beta not having all its modes available, discovery was done in game. Discoveries from that cinematic reveal trailer led me to play as Haymar, a character who can throw fire essentially. I did mess around with a few other characters, but I found Haymar just worked for me. Regardless of which character I played, they all had the same basic setup, one main gun and two abilities that recharged overtime after use. My initial thought for Haymar’s weapon was that it was so slow, it didn’t move fast, nor did it reload quickly and I worried I was going to be at a disadvantage. Thankfully, the game lets you swap to a new character upon your death, so I opted to change to Kyps, who is basically a pink android looking character. But the same thing was happening here, the main weapon felt slow to fire and reload, not to mention both characters don’t reload if you are running, so I knew something was going on.
As I said earlier, there was no real testing ground in the beta, so it was a trial by fire and by jumping back into Haymar, I was able to discover how best to use her fire abilities. While her main weapon is slow, if you look down the weapons sights, you can charge up the attack, which in turn lets you unleash a powerful attack. This is totally pointless when you are surrounded by enemies, but when you are facing one single enemy, if you have the dodging skills, it is worth it. When you are surrounded by more enemies, the secondary attacks are good, Blinding Flash is perfect if you need to get out of the mix, whereas Wall of Fire gives you a little breathing room. Something that I found after a good number of rounds is that each character works best when you are running around with another member of the Northstar Crew and that is because of the classes.
Going into the beta, classes were something I assumed were there, but just never paid any attention to, but here in the slower FPS action, a crew mate is worth running with. There are six classes and they are Anchor, Breacher, Haunt, Ranger, Tactician, and Warden. Each has a reason to play them, but each also works best with others. Haymar is classified as a Warden class character and they are a beast at dealing out damage, but as I often found running around solo means your attacks have to land, else you will get wiped. In matches were someone was playing with Emari as their character, I would often run with them, as while slow Emari can take a ton of damage, which worked well for me. I also found Daw’s healing to be great and Lennox’s more open combat style, both great to run around with. There are characters like Kyps or Duchess who have their strengths, but I could not just find the groove with them.
So with all that, why didn’t it click, I think there are two reasons, the first is that the gameplay just felt a little slower than what I was expecting. Don’t get me wrong it is smooth, but it ain’t as fluid as I was hoping it would be. Given that most characters can hover or jump quite high, it seems as if they would have speed to spare, but it seems that is not what the developers were going for. The other reason is likely the reason many folks were turned away from it when it was revealed, its just another character shooter. Now there are more character shooters than ever and a good chunk of them are free to play and on the same platforms, which makes a paid variant harder to swallow. I have never been a big multiplayer guy and the hero shooter genre even less so, so for a game in that space to get my attention it needs to do something more than just have different looks for familiar playstyles.
Concord still has another beta weekend ahead and it could make me change my mind, but for now I can’t see myself diving into the full release. The games characters look amazing and from the half dozen I put time into, play great, but with the slower pace and reliance on multiplayer, it may not be the space adventure many were hoping for.
Concord is currently set to release in August 24th for both PlayStation 5 and PC, you can order or wish the game now for both platforms. A Digital Deluxe Edition will be available as well, which will grant players 3 days of early entry into the game.
