Concord review – supersonic shooter

Sony’s controversial live service shooter is finally out but does it have a long term future or will it quickly be mothballed?

Much has been said recently, about the relative risks of making a live service game versus a more traditional video game. The logic goes that any reasonable quality single-player game has a good chance of selling well, even if it’ll never join the likes of Fortnite and Minecraft in the list of best-selling games. By comparison, only a tiny proportion of live service games ever become major hits, with most being put out to pasture only months after launch. Unfortunately, Concord feels like it’s going to be one of the latter.

Although it seems doomed to have quite a short half-life, Sony has already tasted success with live service games this year, thanks to Helldivers 2. But that was made by an external developer, whereas Concord is by the Sony-owned Firewalk Studios. It’s supposedly the first of 12 such games, being made by Sony’s other first party studios, although whether that plan still exists is very unclear.

Helldivers 2 will have given Sony hope, but Concord faces the unfortunate reality for most live service games: launching amid complete apathy (its peak record on Steam is currently just 660 players) and so quickly forgotten it’s almost as if it never existed at all. Perhaps Concord can turn around the poor word of mouth at launch but at the moment that really doesn’t seem likely.

Concord is not a difficult game to describe and that’s part of the problem. It’s basically Overwatch with different characters and… that’s pretty much it. Naturally, some of the details are different but the game’s main influence is very, very obvious.

There are many lessons for the industry to learn from Concord, not least the fact that increased development time for video games has more problems than just increased costs. It also means that what seemed a viable and fashionable idea when development began can seem the very opposite by the time it actually comes out.

Development of Concord began eight years ago (the same year that Overwatch was first released) which is a shockingly long gestation period even by modern standards. Back in 2016 the idea of a hero shooter – an online shooter where every character has unique weapons and abilities – was new and exciting, but now it feels very overplayed, with even Overwatch 2 suffering in popularity.

However, we should stress that Concord is not a bad game. It’s not incompetent, it’s just unnecessary. It actually does some things better than Overwatch; its gunplay is notably superior – amongst the best of any recent game – and the 16 playable characters are varied and interesting, with some real standouts amongst their number.

There’s the obvious archetypes, such as the nondescript space marine, the sniper, and the minigun welding tank but even they usually have an unusual ability or two, such as sniper Teo being able to leap vertically into the air and Emari the tank (or anchor as the game prefers to call them) who has a shield as well as a gun, but can only use one at a time.

The weirder characters include pyromaniac Daveers, who shoots initially harmless napalm at people, before igniting it with a wrist dart. Robot 1-Off also has no projectile weapon but can hoover up ‘trash’ to make a powerful bomb he can then throw at enemies. Duchess can create large barriers that persist even after she dies, while Roka can hover in the air while firing missiles, and Lark the plant alien can teleport between spores you set-up beforehand.

The three main characters are Lennox (the most popular of the standard gunslingers), Star Child (a tank that talks exactly like Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy) and Haymar, who wields a wrist-mounted crossbow that is difficult to use effectively and definitely not for first-timers.

16 characters is a lot and no doubt one of the main reasons for the game taking so long in development, but it really doesn’t matter how many there are when the overall gameplay experience is so overfamiliar and unexciting. It doesn’t help that the maps are so visually uninteresting, making little use of the sci-fi setting, and the game modes so equally predictable.

Firewalk have attempted to suggest that the game’s storytelling will distinguish it from its peers but the game’s debt to Guardians of the Galaxy is so obnoxiously obvious it’s hard to imagine that being true. It’s hard to judge at the moment, because only a couple of cut scenes are currently available, but apparently more will be released at a regular pace in the future. At the moment though we still have little clue as to why anyone is fighting or why they want to be a ‘freegunner’.

The graphics are very good, which was presumably also meant to be a major selling point, but none of that matters when the experience is so thoroughly underwhelming. In the end, the most distinctive thing about the game is the long time to kill for most characters. Which is another way of saying you can survive more damage, before dying, than most online shooters, which makes it useful for newcomers to the genre.

There’s also the Rivalry playlist, which lasts seven rounds and forces you to play as a different character in each. Although you can get around this by using character variations, that have slightly different abilities but count as separate choices. It’s a fine idea, but when that’s the closest a game comes to having a unique selling point you know you’re in trouble.

Although things look grim for Concord at the moment, the other benefit in making live service games is that, unlike most single-player games, it is possible to turn their reputation around after launch, with additional content. There’s already lots of talk about Concord’s future roadmap and a steady supply of new features, but that isn’t really the game’s problem.

The fundamental issue with Concord is that everything it does has already been done by other games, in most cases several years ago. It doesn’t even try to come up with any new ideas and seems to think that just having lots of characters will be enough. Concord is very competently made but it does nothing better than any of its many rivals and, most importantly, it does nothing differently to them either.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed) and PC
Price: £34.99
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Firewalk Studios
Release Date: 23rd August 2024
Age Rating: 12

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