Developed By: Firewalk Studios
Published By: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Platforms: PC & PlayStation 5
Reviewed On: PlayStation 5
Review Code Provided By: Sony Interactive Entertainment Asia
Hero shooters are an overpopulated genre with games like Overwatch and VALORANT already taking a big market share of players. Blizzard recently took a hit with the release of Overwatch 2 which opened a crack that gave other game developers a chance to grab a share. Enter Concord, a Hero Shooter published by Sony Interactive Entertainment and Firewalk Studio which consisted of ex-employees who worked on shooters like Destiny, Call of Duty and HALO. Everything seems like a recipe for a great game, right? RIGHT?
Visually stunning, but hard to enjoy
The game is a looker, to be honest. It is one of the better-looking games if you compare it with other hero shooters currently on the market. The game did a good job of making characters look real compared to the others with a more anime or cartoonish vibe. I’m not saying the other art style is bad, but Firewalk manages to make its realism art style work.
Where the game takes a hit instead is in its maps where it feels very unappealing. Overwatch has dynamic cars or stuff happening around you while you fight. Heck, even the upcoming Marvel Rivals has destructible environments. Concord maps just feel like you are placed into a gulag to brawl it out. There are no wildlife, interactions or animations, which makes the environment feel dead.
Speaking about the art style, the character design in this game is just plain lazy. Most characters look dressed like any day people you see on the street, and they are going to war wearing that. Take IT-Z for example, she looks like a fan of a pop star singer. Emari looks ready for battle but what is that armour design? Can’t believe ex-Bungie employees are unable to design better armour.
So, no matter how graphically great the game looks, it is very dull to look at. To put it in layman’s terms, a square box will always be a square box no matter how much pixel you invest into the model.
Putting in a Little Story With A Lot of Lore
Seeing from the trailers, the team at Firewalk Studio added story elements to the game. A cutscene will play every time you enter the game and it will indicate what week it is indicating at what point the story is. I am not sure how the story will progress as the game goes for now, the story seems like a short intro for now.
If you are interested though, there is a bunch of lore that you can read and unlock as you play. Be prepared for a wall of text to read as there is lore about the planets, events and more. One thing good is at least you can occupy yourself by reading the lore while waiting for your next match.
Space Theme Audio
The game uses Synth type music which overall fits the genre as you are fighting in space, but the game soundtrack is barely noticeable. During a match, the soundtrack is nonexistent maybe because the developers wanted people to be more focused on the gameplay which allows you to hear footsteps or arriving gunfire.
Voice acting in this game is good overall with random chatter being thrown around when using an ability or helping a teammate by healing. Even with all the madness happening I never felt overwhelmed by the audio even and managed to sometimes know what was happening thanks to the sound effect.
Overall, the lack of a soundtrack which will slowly feel repetitive during loading screens is luckily covered by sound effects and voice acting. There are areas of improvement but as far as I am concerned, they are nothing to worry about at this point in time.
The Crew System – A Double-Edge Sword
Before we get into the gameplay I would like to talk about the unique mechanic in this game, the crew system. Initially, you want to select 12 crew members who have crew bonuses you want. You then have to swap between the characters with crew bonuses to activate them in the game. So take for example BAZZ which gives the ‘haunt’ crew bonus which increases mobility. You have to play BAZZ for at least a round before you can swap her out to give bonuses to your other characters in your roster.
This mechanic looks interesting and encourages swapping characters at first but then it is really like a double-edged sword. First is the limit of having 12 crew members only out of 16 which locks your character selection. The game does allow you to pick the non-crew members but they will lack the crew bonuses during matches.
Second is how teammates can select the character first and lock you out of your plan bonus path. During most objective matches you want to have mobility to reach and capture the objective first but with having only 3 characters for mobility currently, you might not have a chance to get that bonus if your teammates do not swap characters the whole game (In which there are some players).
Third is how the crew is not exchangeable during a match. When you create and select your crew in the main menu, there is no way to change it anytime in the match even before starting the match. This makes changing crew depending on objective and map impossible.
Now to be fair, the game mechanic is great and overall gives players a higher ceiling but it is just too cumbersome. Even now as of writing of this review, I have met people who do not know how to use the crew system and just main a single character. This also makes it so that players have to at least know how to play at least 6 characters of different crew bonuses which some just do not find fun. I have also seen players who just blindly suicide or get killed to stack the bonuses which, if you are playing Takedown (The game’s version of Team Death Match) if all 5 players do this then the game will end at 30 kills for the opposing team.
Overall though I love the thought that the developers put into making this game unique, but the crew system just feels not ready even more so with the non-objective-based game modes.
Being a Freerunner
Being a hero shooter, each character or Freerunner as the game calls them, has unique abilities. Most characters also have a dodge mechanic which allows either a quick dash or some hover mode. The abilities are versatile with some players feeling right at home with certain characters feeling reminiscent of other games.
There are also several weapons which I find unique like 1-Off which has a vacuum that sucks in enemy projectiles that works like a pseudo shield and charges his abilities. Lark a spore-like character has a gun which shoots a random floating ball in a direction which bursts into small needles to track nearby enemies. Little things like this do make the game feel a little more unique.
All the character has abilities that suit their roles and are further enhanced if played as a team and I would like to emphasize the word IF because if you are not playing with friends, this game can be a very bad experience.
First, let us talk about the 2 Team Deathmatch-like modes which are Takedown and Trophy Hunt. These modes have no reason to be in this game. Yeah, they appeal to the casual players but that is also where the issue lies. Even being a team-based game, most casual players will just wander out on their own and get killed. If you are lucky, players will group up but from my experience so far that is maybe a 5% chance every game they will.
Now let’s go on to the more objective type modes which is how the game I feel was meant to be played. Sticking as a team is the most important thing in Concord and having an objective to rally upon helps when playing with random teammates. Sticking together as a team somehow just makes Concord fun and you start to see how character synergy works.
Sadly, to be honest this doesn’t work all the time as there are players still ignoring the objectives and just going for kills but in my opinion, this comes down to mostly one thing and that is what I am going to talk about next.
Crappy Map Design
Yes, I am being blunt, the maps in this game are not just bad visually but also how they are laid out. Most maps are just mirrors of one end to another which is fine for a Team Deathmatch type game, but I do not know if the developers know they are making a team-based game. So, let’s round up the issues.
First, the maps are just too damn big which makes even meeting an enemy a rare occurrence if they do not turn up for the objective, which is even more obvious in Takedown matches. Unless somehow each team has agreed to meet in the middle of the map and duke it out in Takedown or Trophy Hunt, you will just have random gun fights anywhere across the map which highlights another issue.
Second, the mobility in this game is just bad. Having a big map is one thing but having characters move slowly is just as bad. Characters like Emari and 1-Off move at a snail’s pace and I have highlighted this during my beta impression with how slow some characters move especially those in the ‘tank’ roles. By the time you are there to tank, your damage dealers are already half dead if not dead.
Last is how the objective rotates around the map in Signal Hunt. The first capture point is usually in the middle of the map but after that the next one spawns randomly on the map. I have been in a match in which the capture point spawns nearer to the enemy every time which forces my team to push into them. Also, with how big the map is, there are a lot of paths you can take to the objective which punishes the uncoordinated team attacking while an equally uncoordinated team just has to defend a spot.
You can have multiple paths into an objective, but you must somehow funnel players to work as a team with map design. Look back into Overwatch where there are clear pathways to a capture zone which draws the players to group as a team. Concord has none of those in fact, the map compelled me to just pick an assassin character to go behind the enemy team and ignore the objective instead at times which is bad in a supposed team-based game.
Issues Which are More than Skin Deep
Now most games have minor issues like overpowered characters, UI and lag issues, but I believe the problem with Concord is at the core of how the developers want the game to be played. First being a team-based game in which characters constantly swapping to counter each other is all great but locking it to only 12 is counterintuitive. Yes, you can still use the other characters not in your crew but missing those bonuses can sometimes mean winning or losing the match. Adding something new to a genre is welcome and does make your game stand out but not ironing out the system feels like you shooting your foot just before crossing the finish line. On top of that, you have maps which discourage team play which I already highlighted.
There are a lot of simple ways to fix this like allowing crews to be changed before a match because some characters work well in some objectives and maps. Adding hot spots on maps and reducing the number of corridors and paths to an objective to help create a teamwork funnel for public lobby players. All this must be addressed in my opinion to make this game even more viable.
One more issue is the wait time for each match. I have an average waiting time of about 4 minutes with a max sometimes going up to 8 minutes wait time. This is very worrying for a game which just launched. On rare occasions, there are matches that start with an uneven team which quickly tilted the result to the team with more players. There are also leavers because the penalty is just a slap on the wrist for leaving a match.
On top of that, the game costs RM169 which is quite a sum for a live service while other games like Overwatch and VALORANT are now free painting a stark contrast on how good you must be for people to pay you money to play a game which is available for free now in the market. Even if you are going to make it a non-free-to-play game, at least communicate why it has to be paid.
What I Liked About Concord
Visuals – The game looks good for a first-person shooter with excellent character facial expressions
Abilities – There are some characters with out-of-the-box abilities which change how you play the game
Team-Based – The game works well when all players work as a team
What I Didn’t
Character design – Some characters look lazy, and armour looks like they took off a retired football team
Game Modes – Takedown and Trophy Hunt feel very out of place in a Team-Based hero shooter game.
Map Design – Does not promote teamwork with big random alleys and paths.
Movement – The game feels clunky with how slow certain characters move and the variation of the speed of movement makes sticking as a team hard
What was this made for?
Concord has a lot to prove and sadly most people have already made their decision during the beta phase. The game is playable, and you can have fun with it but trying to sustain a live service in an already oversaturated market is going to be hard. Add on how the core mechanic which is the crew system is so complicated, that bringing in casual or new players feels like a hard task.
Currently, Overwatch 2 is already recovering its based players with excellent updates and VALORANT is still going strong in the tactical shooter so, I can’t in my mind find a space in where Concord exists. Also, with the upcoming launch of Marvel Rivals which uses Marvel, one of the largest license IPs as a draw to its existing fans, I felt that Concord will be facing an uphill battle keeping its player base as a live service. During the writing of this review, all I had in my head was a featured image of Concord with the word from the Billie Eilish song, ‘What was I made for?’
