Anthem’s VIP Demo is now active from January 25th to 27th and having gotten access to it myself, I felt it would be fun to give my thoughts and first impressions of the game based on this demo. It’s a game that I’ve been fairly hyped for ever since its reveal at E3 2018, mostly because it’s a new IP from BioWare who haven’t had a new IP in years after having focused their development on mostly Mass Effect and Dragon Age games since the late 2000’s. What was shown at E3 wasn’t too much but it did reveal the setting, what the game would be like in terms of gameplay and they have steadily released footage from the game ever since that reveal.
So it’s clear that EA and BioWare are putting a lot on this game and wants to be very transparent about how it’s going to play. On Twitter, fans have been able to directly ask someone at BioWare about the game and this kind of open relationship with the public is very rare to see nowadays and I am very thankful that BioWare have chosen this approach since their E3 reveal. But that being said… how is the game? Let’s talk about the game itself, more specifically the VIP demo. This won’t really be a review of the game per se, but more just a bit of a ramble on my first impressions of it and my experience playing the VIP demo.
So right off the bat, I cranked all the graphical options to Ultra just to see how my system would handle it. Good news is that on my PC which has a Radeon RX 580 with a Ryzen 7 1800X it looks amazing and runs mostly well, with the occasional framerate dip. I would probably blame this mostly on bad optimization, but for the most part the game was perfectly playable. Of course, the Frostbyte engine already has a reputation for delivering eye candy for even some of the lesser games made using it. And it definitely lives up to that reputation here. The game has gorgeous lighting and a very attractive middle-eastern influenced setting that still feels alien enough to fit the game’s sci-fi tone. I had some issues with lighting glitches where some of the lighting would just show mosaic patterns, but that happened after I installed an experimental AMD driver for the game so it might just be that.
The gameplay is pretty straight forward and it definitely feels like a third person Destiny to an extent. A lot of people have made the comparisons already and yeah, they are fair comparisons. If you’ve played Destiny you know what to expect. In the full game there will be different “classes” in the sense you’ll have access to different Javelins (Javelins being the exosuits you use in the game). In the VIP demo I only had access to one suit which I believe was the Ranger suit. It was pretty fun to use and felt really nimble. I especially loved the flying controls and how easy it felt to go from standing on the ground to soaring through the air.
In fact I would say the game has some of the best exo controls I’ve had in a game so far, definitely rivaling Destiny and even going further than it. The amount of control you have over the javelin feels really daunting at first, and I actually had some trouble getting adjusted to the new controls at first. But once I got into them, stuff like flying, hovering and sprinting became second nature to me and really helped out with the battles.
The difficulty felt a little steep. I played on Normal and felt like I got my ass fairly handed to me a lot of the time. But this is the sort of tactical shooter I can see being more fun if you can get 3 friends to play with you and you all can have different javelins with different abilities and you can get your attacks synced. See the game has a bit of a combo system where attacks can chain together and really bring enemies down much quicker than if you’re just standing around shooting at them. I find this to be really rewarding for players who communicate with their team mates and work out strategies together, and it keeps the game from being just another mindless shooter.
Your Javelin is also equipped with an ultimate attack that can be truly devastating to enemies. The Ranger I was playing shot a barrage of homing missiles that brought an enemy’s armor down about 75% in a single attack. It makes the ultimates feel really powerful and worth using. While I played the demo on my own, I definitely hope I can gather some friends to play the full game with or the open beta which releases on February 1st.
Now if I were to have any criticisms so far, it would be that the music isn’t all that great. It’s this kind of orchestral stuff that doesn’t really stick in my head or grab me emotionally, and just feels like it’s “there”. I know some people like this, but personally I would’ve preferred more synthesizers and more of a memorable score. I also ran into several serious issues with the demo. For one, it would frequently just lock up during loading, always on the very final bit. No idea why. I had to force quit the game every time and restart it, and then it would connect properly. Became very infuriating for me. And the final cutscene didn’t trigger properly so I never got to watch it.
Other than that, I would say Anthem is a very intriguing game so far. The setting is the really unique thing about it. And I am really looking forward to exploring this world more in the near future. And it may look like a glorified Destiny clone on the surface, but in my opinion it seems almost more fun than Destiny so far. At least in terms of movement. I would still say Destiny 2 has a stronger opening.
But that’s pretty much all I have to say about Anthem so far. I’ll probably be able to give a full review later when I’ve gotten my hands on the full game. In the mean time, you can still check out the VIP demo on Origin and don’t forget the open beta next weekend.