This game had me in wrapped around its finger with the first trailer, I loved old destiny and I loved the javelins and aesthetic of the world that was shown in 2017s E3. However, the beta released in an unplayable state, even if it did have seeds of what I wanted the game to be, it was just not the same game from the E3 showcase. On full release you had to wait about an hour to get into a lobby, which was pointless as there was no way of loading into somebody's session without your game crashing. EA ripped out my heart and shat all over it with this one.

The first part of the review is a Post-release impression. For a more recent (and truthfully honest) opinion, there's an UPDATE tab at the end. Anthem is a frustrating experience. Because it does a lot of things wrong (basic features included), but what it does right it does so magnificently. Personally, it is undoubtedly the most fun I've had on a video-game in a very long time. But unfortunately, giving my opinion here on whether to BUY this game or not requires a certain degree of objectivity. BioWare, I say this as a long time fan of yours: please get your **** together. You can't expect the same treatment if your game releases in the same state half-a-decade-old games released in. You are the last to enter the market, you are supposed to be the best. And you are not. At least not right now. Anyway. Pros: - The game is stunningly beautiful and runs (almost) smoothly. A few bugs here and there, but most were corrected by the Day 1 patch. The world looks good, the characters look good (I'm particularly fond of my Shelancer), the Javelins look awesome, be it their metallic textures or the more refined meshes. Good stuff. - That Gameplay. Capital G because that's how it freaking had to be done. I can't emphasise enough how much they nailed this aspect. Flying, shooting, making stuff blow up feels satisfying, and each Javelin feels unique and rewarding. You guys can be proud of this. -Actual customization. My Javelin is unique. I know that because no sane person would associate the colors I chose. But thanks to that, I'm 100% sure it's unique. Happy to have the opportunity. -The music. Listen to "Valor". Thank me later. Cons: -The story. This is a BioWare game, and I can very clearly state that it has a story equivalent to any standard 2010s FPS. See the average summer action blockbuster? Add in one or two potentially interesting characters, and you have Anthem's campaign. Choices ? What ?Where ? Everybody's going to experience the same thing. Not bad per se, but easily the least convincing story told by the master storytellers. -Content. Three dungeons and the same three repeatable contracts at Lvl 30. Yeah, not a lot. -Some strange choices. No stat page ? In a stat based game? Also, why doesn't the suiting cinematic happen during loading screens ? A lot of the decisions they made are this confusing. -Loot RNG and drop rates. So umm, either remove the random aspect of those inscriptions (which can give you a 0% bonus on a Masterwork or Legendary item at the moment) or let us have a lot of them so that we have more chance to draw something usable. Investing time isn't rewarding when all the loot you get is worse than what you already have in the endgame. Anthem isn't a bad game. It certainly isn't as bad as Fallout 76 like the congregated score suggests. It has its (incredibly exhilirating) moments. I spent 35 hours on it since its official launch, and I think that's enough of a return of investment, espcially knowing that I will still play it for a long time. But it feels like it needed a little while longer in the oven. It looks like the devs care about this game though, which is very encouraging. That is why I believe I'll wait for the next updates and come back in a few months to update this review. However, and more importantly, I'll borrow a sentence from my ME Andromeda review that heavily saddens me: this just isn't what we've come to expect from a BioWare game. UPDATE: Okay, this is now ridiculous. I take it down a few notches because BioWare is seemingly incapable of taking responsibility for its f-ups. That Roadmap ? Not respected. Communication? Absent. Content? What a joke. Updates breaking the game even more than it was before ? How did you manage that? You had the foundations to build a decent game from where you stood, but I'm sorry, this is a failure. One of the biggest I've ever had the misfortune to witness. And it's BioWare. Sigh. Scrap everything. Change how you work, your view of videogames and your methods. Never thought I'd say this, but let Dragon Age 4 at least go up to Mass Effect Andromeda's quality if you really can't do better. Let this thing rot and let's never talk about it. Ever. Again.

Este juego me genera sentimientos encontrados, ya sabía a lo que me estaba metiendo, pero el diseño de las Alabardas me gusta un montón, esa es la razón por la que le doy dos estrellas al juego, me cansé de repetir la misma mecánica misión tras misión, pero la gota que derramó el vaso fue la escasa variedad de las armas y en lo personal lo mal que se sienten de usar. lo abandono porque no quiero perder más el tiempo en algo que no lo estoy disfrutando y es una lastima que no se hayan puesto el objetivo de arreglarlo.

Let's get the obvious out of the way- this game was not ready for release. It feels like a cash grab on EA's part who wanted another Destiny on the market. The concept of Anthem was appealing, grab an iron man suit and unleash the awesomeness. This was not that. Anthem is a dull, boring, lackluster and repetitive game with a terrible loot and progression system. Even the inability to gain armor pieces is a real shocker. Your suit becomes nothing but an aesthetic with no real purpose. The story takes the biggest back seat of all. The plot points simply move you from point A to point B with no real drive to see how it plays out. Not to mention the terrible/ deplorable load screens which take so long you'll want to pull your hair out! This game simply needed more time in development and a clearer idea of what it's supposed to be. Bioware is not the company it was, and Anthem is the shining symbol of that change.

Did Anthem cause COVID?

An Investigation



After my previous "review" (If you can call these eternal nightmares I am cursed with by that title) of Dragon Age: Inquisition, it got thinking more heavily about the Bioware games that followed it, namely Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem. The Twin Trash Fires of Bioware's catalogue; two games whose reputations are awful enough to almost entirely eclipse the controversy that surrounded Mass Effect 3 on launch. But in my research of these two games, I discovered something more... sinister. A deeper layer to one of these releases, a thread to follow that led me to a conspiracy whose purpose was so harrowing, so life-altering, that I truly will never be the same having unearthed it.

Did Anthem cause COVID?

Okay, that sounds pretty crazy, right? Surely, no matter how bad a game may be, it couldn't possibly be the the point of genesis for a worldwide pandemic, could it? I mean, how can that even make sense? How in the world could a digital entertainment product originate a biological respiratory disease? Surely It can't, right? It's Impossible?! PLEASE TELL ME THAT IT'S NOT TRUE!

Oh, you naive fool.

But first, allow me to explain. If you have somehow found this review without
knowing just what the hell an "Anthem" is, allow me a moment to elucidate you. Anthem is a third-person looter-shooter ("shlooter", you might say, if happen to be some sort of gremlin) released in 2019 by Bioware, a company whose catalogue of interactive fiction was (and still is) made up almost entirely of Role Playing Games. This is the subtype of electronically-aided lucid dreaming they are known for. Not shlooters. Not to say that a company cannot pivot from one genre to another and be successful, but even Bioware's most ardent admirers would admit that, from a real-time action-gaming standpoint, Bioware was... never really the strongest developer. Their strengths lied in world-building and narrative design, and their gameplay tended to be more tactically-focused and often a hybrid turn-based/realtime system. The choice to make Anthem was not a good one. It wasn't even a particularly sensible one, frankly, and the reviews reflected this.

There are many "professional" review scales. You know, those things that "professional game reviewers" (Witch Doctors) use to see if a game is, like, lighter than a father on a set of scales or something, and then they assign it a score based on the result and which type of scales were used. There are many famous game reviewing scales, such as the "Gi" scales, the "Gs" scales, and, likely the most famous, the "Ign". There are countless more, but you get the idea. For example, when weighed on the Ign scales, Anthem received a 6.5/10. Sounds ok, right? More than halfway up the pole, after all! WRONG. According to the rules of the Ign scales, a 6.5 is, quote, "An experience analogous to that of moderately aggravated genital herpes".

Neat! Isn't science amazing? So yeah, anyway, game BAD, moving on the the conspiracy.

You see, as I was browsing the web (what the kids call the internet), I came across the official Anthem page on EA's site. "Ah, how funny," I thought to myself, "what a sad relic of of a failed video game! I wonder what will be on the page?" The answer was, as you can probably imagine, not much, but the News section of the site caught my eye. The latest News post was an entry inviting you to "Celebrate One Year of Anthem". Finding this innocuous headline rather humorous, I deigned to click on the article, which is where I discovered my first whiff of trouble. You see, the article claims that you can receive special in-game items to celebrate Anthems first anniversary. How? Simple! One only needs to log into the game any time between February 25th to March 24th, 2020. That caught my attention. Didn't something important happen in March of 2020? Something potentially life-altering?

I am loathe to admit, at first could not recall why that date seemed so troubling to me. I decided to sleep on it, and went to bed for the night.

I slept for five days straight.

Fortunately for me, on the sixth day, one of the fourteen wizards who were tasked to keep me, specifically, in an eternal state of comatose un-life died of heatstroke, and I awoke from my stygian slumber with the date of March 2020 still firmly lodged in my horrifically eldritch, ever-expanding cranium. Of what import was this dastardly date? Was it a time of joy? Of suffering? Of unending banality, like the kind of thing when you have to defecate but realize you forgot you phone when you sit down in the bathroom and then realize that there are no magazines in the bathroom either and that all of the shampoo bottles you could maybe, potentially read to keep your mind occupied enough that you don't think about yourself or your life for even a fraction of a fraction of a second are out of reach from your porcelain perch? Was it like that, perhaps? Then, the cold shock of memory alighted betwixt my ears.

Oh yeah, the plague!

Of course, how could I have forgotten! March 2020 was the month that the disease that had slaughtered millions in the streets AND the sheets had made its way to my homeland. Mass shutdowns, masks, constant sanitizing of various appendages, you name it, we had it signed, sealed, and delivered in March 2020. COVID-19. The Corona. Virus. That thing. Remember that thing? Yeah, that thing.

Which just so HAPPENED to coincide with the end date of the one year anniversary event of maligned "video game" Anthem, which, for all intents and purposes, served as the end date for the game itself? I didn't like that. Not one bit. No siree. It HAD to be connected.

So I did more research.

(Made it the fuck up)

And, as of right now, I have three running theories as to how Anthem and COVID are connected. One is significantly more unlikely than the others.

The first theory is that Anthem was good, actually, and served as a bulwark against the worldwide disease. Once Anthem died, our defenses were eradicated and plague swept the globe. Told you this one was unlikely. ignore it.

The second theory is that Anthem, when living, was a game riddled with disease. All manner of horrible corruptions of biology existed within it and, when finally slain, Anthem's corpse released a multitude of horrors upon our world, the worst being COVID. Like a veritable digital Pandora's Box, the death of Anthem will be a specter that haunts humanity forevermore.

The third and final is the theory that I find most plausible. This theory posits that there can only be one plague upon humanity on earth at a single time. Anthem, in all its mediocrity, served that role, and when it died it allowed a new plague to step into the spotlight. I mean, they are basically the same thing. A 6/10 game (being generous) or a virus that killed millions and proved to be a major flashpoint in the fracturing of western society, same difference, right? One or the other, it is still a crippling horror on the lives of billions.

So after all of my theorizing, you may be wondering if any of it is legit. Well, after years of experiencing thousands of crackpot theories never coming to fruition through avenues such as social media and despite this, like nearly all of the more fringe conspiracy theories, lacking any sensible, logical evidence of causation AT ALL, I can say, without a shadow of a doubt...

Yes, the allegations are true.

Anthem caused the Corona virus.

"Bu-bu-but correlation does not equal causation!" I hear you whine like a simpering buffoon, like the cretinous little worm you are. I should snuff you out for even daring to speak to me. You fool. You utter fool. The clown asylum called, they're missing one of their stupidest patients. I will indulge your argument, just this once: Though that may seem like the case in your little pea-brain, I have an unassailable counterpoint:

Shut up, nerd.

Riding a mech around a large open world, flying from place to play, exploring a destroyed civilization and collecting resources for iirc a "last bastion" type settlement. The concept alone sounded amazing.

But what did I get? Bored as fuck. Overly complicated combat, just basic ass 3rd person shooter gameplay. All this potential and that's all they could do? Maybe they overshot on the scope, maybe they just ran out of budget? And the worst of all...

I had to grind just so my Javelin didn't look dirty as fuck. This is like watching the most beautiful cake you've ever seen, most pristine slice, perfect portion and the first bite draws you in, only to watch the waiter stumble and fall and it lands top side down on the ground. Low hanging fruit of a game to say is "sadly underwhelming" but I wanted to comment anyways.

I really wished this game was good. It looked cool, seemed like it had an enjoyable gameplay loop. I played it on release and it just had nothing going for it. Uninteresting story, boring enemy combat, and even lamer customization bogged this game down so heavily. I played it all the way to completion and still I felt so unfulfilled. Something a lot of people forget is that they announced later in like 2020 that they were going to massively overhaul Anthem and make it something worth playing… and then they canceled it, utterly dooming this game to failure. I really wish it was good, I really do.

I decided to check out Anthem to see how it functions as a singleplayer game. Unfortunately, it’s one of those games that still treats you as “online”, even if you’re playing on your own: this includes the removal of incredibly important gaming features such as the “pause” function, no suspend/resume features as well as sending you back to the menu if you are idle for too long (bringing in my grocery delivery during a safe spot during the final boss was a nightmare). Games like this really need to look at The Avengers – which manages to have these semi-MMO like features and co-op, but is still entirely functional offline, even letting you pause and suspend the game.

With that said, the core gameplay of Anthem is really good fun. Flying around with the jetpack is satisfying, and the combat is hugely enjoyable, especially stringing together different attacks and activating your jetpack to rush an enemy to smash it with a massive hammer.

However, there really isn’t a lot of variety in the missions. For the vast majority of the time you fly to an area, kill or enemies, fly to an area, kill more. Occasionally there will be a simple puzzle in your path where you have to push buttons in the right order, but that’s really it. It’s fun, but there could have been more – there isn’t even a chase scene, making the flight itself feel underutilised.

I found the characters in the game to be very likeable, and the background lore is surprisingly compelling. I want to know more about these people and the world they live in. They drop some hints towards the background of some of the factions you fight, but you never find out the full details.

Playing it as a single-player game, it works for the most part (annoyingly, you have to set your missions to private every time you boot the game). However, there’s one section of the game where this is impossible: to gain entrance to some tombs to discover challenges, you need to complete challenges in the open world.

The open world must be played in multiplayer. Luckily, you never actually have to interact with the other players, so it makes it an odd choice. You do have to find a creative solution to one challenge: reviving other players. Thankfully, there are some NPCs near the starting area and letting these get injured and reviving them count.

The most troublesome challenge was involving completing “world events” – sections of the map that spawn lots of enemies for you to kill. I had no issue completing these on my own, but they’re just so broken. Some failed to register me as taking part (so it wouldn’t count me taking part) and any that took place in the underground sections of the map flat out broke – my character would move around similar to if you were being laggy and my health constantly drained. This happened every time I attempted it, and only there, so it must be the game and not my connection.

Anthem really is a shame. There’s some incredibly fun mechanics and a very interesting lore hidden behind some dull multiplayer looter shooter mechanics. Even in its current state, I think with a few changes and some offline support, it could be a decent singleplayer game. If it had been planned that way from the start, it could have been something great.

Um jogo que teria tudo pra ser Ótimo, porém falha completamente em toda a sua narrativa, história e enredo.

Possuíndo uma campanha curta e completamente repetitiva, personagens sem nenhum carisma, e um universo confuso e sem vida.

A única coisa que salva o jogo é sua PERFEITA jogabilidade, algo me diz que investiram todo o tempo que deveriam para desenvolver a jogabilidade do Game e esqueceram de todo o resto...

Fiz a Platina e todo o 100% do Game por simplesmente amar a jogabilidade, que acabou me prendendo muito.