Anthem Video Review

So, a couple things I did want to touch on at why the game doesn't live up to the hype. Per Destiny, per The Division, per Borderlands, etc, there are NO STORES in Anthem where you can buy gear from. NONE. The only stores in Anthem sell Anthem store gear. Meaning, you have to use gold you earned in game or have to buy 3rd party "shards" to purchase these. The offerings are pititful. Maybe 6 things on the whole page and that's it. Destiny, Division, they all had "stores" run by NPCS that sometimes had super decent loot you could buy. Be it guns, armor, whatever. So, yeah, none of that in Anthem now.

2. There are no real gun varieties to be found until you're late game. You'll walk around with that uncommon or rare auto cannon for awhile but what you won't find is "The Stalker" or "The Widow Maker" or anything like that. Guns are guns in Anthem until you reach 20 and then there are supposedly only 6 rare gun drops that take place. 6. That's it. Also, you can't spec out your armor. At all. You can change the color and the make but you can't swap it out for better pieces. At all. What levels you is your weapons and loadouts. Nothing else. There's not even a skill tree in Anthem. You get to unlock certain perks at different levels but that is all.

3. Loading screens. God almighty man. There's a load for menus, there's a load for exploring caves, there's a load for missions, there's a load for cinematics, there's a load for sometimes talking to NPCs. There's even a load screen for speccing out your javelin. Joy.

4. You can NOT hotswap on the fly. Ever. What you take with you is what you're stuck with until you traverse back to the city. Good luck needing that flamethrower when you left if behind. In fact, you can't manage your inventory whatsoever out of the Forge and storage vendor.

5. Anthem doesn't explain how to communicate with other players. In order for you to be able to talk to another player in your squad you have to go into the settings panel of the game and enable their 3rd party VOIP chat. Most people, including myself, were dumbfounded that we couldn't communicate with one another. Turns out that after digging into the settings there it was. Most don't know this yet. the game doesn't explain it to you either.

6. In Anthem's "freeplay" mode you don't really "free play" as much as you just wander around aimlessly and try to find stuff that you don't even know if you need or not. By level 10 I had hundreds of pieces and parts for stuff I didn't know I really even needed except to "craft" (I use that word loosely too) weapons. The world doesn't let you know if there is a world mission happening, it doesn't let you know anything really. You can explore and even kill bad guys but there seems to be no real rewards for doing so beyond an occasional pop up that you received a common or even, gasp!, a rare weapon of some type. But it doesn't tell you what it is and you have to wait til you return to see it. For example, in order to craft a rare auto cannon you may need 6 different parts of things you'll never remember. Now, if you're like me and do like exploring occasionally, you may already have plenty of these things in stock. However, if you don't, the game doesn't let you tick any boxes to let allow you to follow this as a side quest or just a need to have. You'll constantly be having to go back and forth to the Forge to see if you have what you need.

The game has a lot of promise but what it doesn't have are easy ways to fix what is, inherently, broken. The game is built to use the code it has to run the way it does. In order to fix the inventory or forge or even weapons in the game Bioware will essentially have to return to the drawing board and draw and code up new schematics for the game and then implement them into what is already created and used. It will take them a long time to fix what needs fixing and to implement new ideas in what they have already. The game isn't built to add new weapons without breaking the old ones. Bioware can't add new armor variants because it would break the way the game works now. I'm sure they could. I'm sure it will take months to do so. I just hope that if there is an Anthem 2 that it is reworked in every possible way and they learn from their mistakes.

Hey guys! First of all, very mature and objective review. Having said that, I kinda preferred the older reviewing style, shorter video with a single person narrating. Great job though, thanks

It sounds like the elements of the game don't connect well with each other which reminds me of the same problem i had with ME:A. Every aspect of the game felt like it was designed by a different group of people that never cooperated with each other.

so basically the game is repetitive and she has great B008's!!!

this game would be perfect with 4 years more development. it has maybe a quarter of the overall content it should have. and in all fairness deserves to die slowly.. as it was simply a cash grab nothing more.

For a game that scored a 6, they seem to be dedicating a LOT of time dissecting it. It's almost like they feel "bad" for having to tell BioWare that the game isn't very interesting. They keep kicking the dead horse with all the "how-to's" and endless review roundtable discussions that tiptoe around the bottom line, which is that this is just one more big studio game whose marketing belies the skull-hammering banality of the actual game. To me this looked like a Destiny 3 type thing from the start, cool for about 2 or 3 hours and then you're left with nothing but the slog of an endless grind for some "as yet to be determined" end-game that may or may not ever come. I think it would be worth playing at 19 bucks or so...but at 59 bucks, the gaming community is getting jobbed by BioWare.

So far the best way to describe this game is boring.

I was fighting two rip off Rancors and after figuring out their attack pattern, it got boring. THEN after defeating both of them SURPRISE third Rancor.

I have the game installed and have played for 6-7 hours, but I no longer have any desire to play it. The story is so bad that it actually made me dislike the game world to a point where I don't even want to shoot & loot.

The characters are not likeable and extremely annoying. The SJW politics have ruined this game in so many ways. The NPCs are very unattractive and don't have any charisma.

Don't buy this game, you'll regret it.

Ah crud... :-( I was really hoping this one will be good

"Anthem the game, right? Not... the anthem?"

Starting this new format off with a bad joke. Bold movie, Kallie. Let's see if it pays off.

The old format was much better!

Aaaaaaaaaand just like with Mass Effect and Dragon Age, I'm going to wait about 8 to 9 months for the FINAL / FIXED game to come out before I go after this game. It still turns my stomach that gamers have become this dumb to always accept broken or incomplete games, complain about said games, STILL PAY MORE MONEY ON THEM, and afterwards leave bad reviews.

Sigh...

Anyway, see you in September, Anthem

Despite all the average/bad reviews of this game, the gamers I know who are playing the game and not rushing it, they're enjoying the hell out of it. Goes to show again that you can't take 'professional' reviewers opinions but instead go by the regular gamers opinion.

This was a good review. Haven’t played the game, but I feel like I got a good sense of why I wouldn’t enjoy it despite gameplay videos looking so fun. Hopefully they improve it down the line. Back to Apex.

There is no romance in this game right? I believe I read that awhile back.
Part of the love I had for Bioware was for the romance and terrible sexy times.

bioware is overrated. They havent done anything good since.....forever. Yeah i dont think masseffect is good either.