DISCLAIMERS:
- the demo was played on the Xbox One S using the version of the demo intended for United States audiences
Three weeks before the full release of Anthem, EA released the Anthem™ Demo for anyone willing to download it. Anthem seems to be EA’s answer to Bungie’s Destiny and Digital Extreme’s Warframe. In this article the reviewer will give their impressions of their first experience with Anthem.
Unlike its arguably greatest competition, the first-person shooter Destiny, Anthem is a third-person shooter. The player carries a gun that controls in a way that anyone who has played a shooter in the last ten years or more will be able to recognize. The player also has two additional abilities with cool-downs, a melee attack, and an Ultimate. These also control fine, though the base abilities and Ultimate given to the player in this demo aren’t particularly creative or interesting. Arguably the main draw of Anthem is the verticality of the game. Players can jump more than once without touching the ground, and also have the ability to fly by pressing down on the left stick which makes the player run while on the ground. This controls well enough, and the game even allows the player to slow down and hover so that they can aim at enemies in the air without moving too quickly. These flying abilities are tied to an overheating system, which causes the player to lose their ability to fly for a short time if they use their flying abilities too much. This of course helps to balance the game and forces the player to fight the grounded enemies fairly, but a system like Monster Hunter: World‘s where stamina only drains while outside of battle would have been appreciated. Overall, the player’s abilities, while basic, all control well enough and are satisfying enough to use. Beyond that though, the gameplay in this demo isn’t particularly fun or engaging. The missions provided mostly involve moving to objectives marked in the actual gameplay, solving some simple puzzles, and fighting the rather uninteresting enemies. The enemies in this demo don’t exactly impress, with none of them being unique enough to require a different strategy than just pointing and shooting at them. They also hardly seem to fight back, and when they do in hardly interesting ways, on the base difficulty the demo places the player in. The environments present in the demo don’t really explore the possibilities provided by the movement in Anthem either. The game also puts the player in a group with three other real people by default, which doesn’t help make the battles feel any more interesting or challenging, especially because there seems to be very little interaction between players that makes them feel worth having with you besides for the extra damage they provide. There is also a hub world that for some reason forces the player into a first-person perspective with incredibly slow movement. This seems to be where most of the story is going to be told. Thankfully it seems rather straightforward to get in and out of this hub world quickly. Overall it is hard to see how this gameplay is going to hold up after the hundreds of hours EA seems to expect players to put into Anthem.
Technically Anthem doesn’t exactly impress either, despite using EA’s Frostbite engine that made the Battlefield games look and run great. The geometry is frequently obviously low quality, the water is some of the least impressive of this console generation, and the world detail is surprisingly low. Overall the game looks like the textures and the rest of the geometry still need to load in, but they never do. One good thing about the presentation is the animations of the characters in the hub world during cutscenes, which are executed rather well. The performance of the game is the biggest crime though. The game targets 30 FPS, but most of the time is falling even below what many players call “cinematic” frame rates. Even people who don’t know everything there is to know about frame rates will be able to tell that the performance of this game is far from good. The hub area with the first-person perspective also seems to never actually hit 30 FPS, and also features some motion blur that is far too powerful, making it hard to tell what you are looking at when turning the camera at all. The frame rate in this game makes the 30 FPS of the Destiny series feel butter-smooth in comparison. The loading times are also somewhat lengthy and where they are placed on the map isn’t always obvious, which makes them feel rather jarring when they do show up during normal gameplay. The reviewer also found that enemies frequently disappeared from the game without any animation, with them existing one frame and not the next. At least the server seems to be working completely fine now, unlike reports from early demos that there were many problems. Again, this presentation and performance doesn’t make playing this game for hundreds of hours seem like a particularly good experience. Overall, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine this same game running the same way on console hardware of the last generation.
In terms of music nothing in Anthem really stands out (from this demo at least). Sound effects are about what you would expect and nothing feels particularly off about them. There is also voice acting which is also done to about the level one would expect from a western AAA game. Overall the sound in Anthem isn’t spectacular but is at least not annoying to listen to.
Like most demos, there is not much to judge the plot based on here, but what is presented didn’t seem particularly interesting. The writing also felt rather lacking, with the reviewer basically regretting spending the time to read just about everything given to the them.
The demo is at least somewhat generous with how much you get to play it compared to most demos.
Overall, save your roughly 20 GBs (on Xbox One) and play something better with your time. If you still plan to get the full game, the reviewer would recommend to hold off for a little while to see what the overall response is to the full version of the game before buying it.
If you decide to purchase this game through one of the links below this blog will receive a commission.
