Concord Review (Patreon)

Why would you play Concord? It initially seems like a really crappy question to ask, especially for a game that doesn’t really have any massive faults. But as another entry into an insanely crowded and established competitive shooter space, it’s part of a valid line of questioning, really. What about Concord sets it apart from other competitive shooters on the market right now? What does it do better than anyone else? Will anyone be playing it in 90 days? In a genre packed with some of the industry’s most-popular franchises, how does it differentiate itself? The only thing I can really point to here is “well, it has weekly cutscenes that help you get to know the characters a bit better.” That doesn’t really help the gameplay, which mashes up ideas from three or four other, better, and more popular games.

Once you get past that weekly cutscene, which attempts to play each and every single time you launch the game, you’re left with a pretty basic take on the character-and-ability-driven first-person shooter. Probably due to its developers’ lineage and history, it tends to skew down the Destiny school of competitive first-person shooter design when it comes to basic ideas like, say, map size or overall combat pacing. The characters, however, are mostly locked-in. They carry the guns they carry and they have the abilities that they have. For some those abilities are simple, like a smoke grenade. Others plop down healing spores or giant walls or big shield bubbles, that sort of thing.

Yet that doesn’t really make it feel like an Overwatch kind of game, either. I’m hesitant to call it a “hero shooter” because the characters in Concord don’t stand out. They don’t feel unique or interesting. They don’t have enough personality to be “heroes.” The game doesn’t have ults, which is actually kind of a shame if only because each of the 16 characters would probably benefit from some big, flashy ultimate play that gives them a chance to show some personality and, well, maybe actually do something cool for a change. Probably the most interesting thing the game does is tie your ability use to getting kills and collecting pickups, rather than just simple cooldowns.

Like a lot of other shooters with named characters, Concord only lets you have one of each character on a team. So if someone picks your guy before you can, you’d better have a backup. To the game’s credit, the characters have a variety of main weapons, sizes, and speeds, but that also means that if you have a definite preference you might not have a suitable, similar backup when the need arises. Of the 16 characters I eventually boiled the roster down to one that I wanted to play and had some success with, a second that I’d begrudgingly accept as a backup even though I was performing significantly worse, and a third that I was terrible with, but at least seemed to have interesting mechanics.

Mode-wise, Concord is a 5v5 game with three multiplayer hoppers that let you choose from the simple stuff to round-based modes, but they’re all pretty much taken from the grab bag of modern shooter modes. To use the Call of Duty parlance of our times, it has team deathmatch and kill confirmed at the low end of what the game embarrassingly refers to as “the sweatstrum.” The middle hopper has domination and hardpoint. The highest tier, which was originally locked until you gained a few levels but seems to just be open to everyone now, has a mode where you must fight over a single capture zone and another where you fight over cargo. Matchmaking in that highest tier took me over six minutes on the game’s launch weekend, so I wouldn’t necessarily go in assuming there’s always going to be an easy match to make in that mode.

In-game, the action feels slow. The maps have wide corridors and feel open, large, and featureless. Its idea of room design is often just “hey, there’s a big rectangular block in this room, enjoy running around it or jumping over it!” Even the faster characters feel like they’re stuck in molasses, but this doesn’t come off like some deliberate attempt to give the game a more “tactical” feel. Instead it just makes everything you do a little bit less exciting than it might be otherwise. It’s not a headshot game per se, but you do deal more damage with a headshot. It’s really unsatisfying to hear the game rattle off multiple headshot crit noises in a row only to see the enemy you’re shooting still standing. The weapons feel weak, the abilities are often bland, and, well, that’s Concord. Bland.

You might think that “hey, we took the general pace of Destiny PVP, threw in some modes from Call of Duty, and gave the characters abilities like Overwatch” might make for something exciting, but in Concord’s case the final product is significantly less exciting than any of its inspirations. Even its own signature cutscenes undercut the game a bit, since the characters are quippy to a fault there, but show very little personality in-game. If you play shooters, you are probably already playing at least one better game. Maybe just stick with that until Concord pops up as a monthly “free” PlayStation Plus game or something like that.

2/5