Review: BioWare’s Barely Competent Anthem Is at War with Itself

The game’s bland mélange of competence feels like the deliberate, calculated, focus-tested murder of ideas.

Anthem
Photo: Electronic Arts

To say that Anthem is war-torn would be an understatement. The scrappy survivors holed up in Fort Tarsis, the game’s ostensible hub area, are fighting for their lives, while at the same time players are caught in the crosshairs of an ugly and tragic war that results from dueling interests. On one side, we have BioWare, whose storytelling chops shame those of most developers. And on the other, we have Electronic Arts, a publishing leviathan that seems hellbent on feeding the immense talent under its roof into a grinder that creates perpetual live-service revenue. BioWare is known for immersing players in detail-rich worlds, but you wouldn’t know that from playing Anthem.

There’s a story here, but it’s so convoluted that basic dialogue between characters creates literal footnotes in an in-game encyclopedia that you have to constantly refer to in order to make sense of it all. As much as that story can be boiled down, Anthem takes place on a planet called Bastion, which exists at the mercy of an unknowable energy source known as the Anthem of Creation. This energy source has malfunctioned ever since a military force called the Dominion triggered a cataclysmic super-storm in a device made specifically to interface with the Anthem. Ten years prior, a group of Freelancers—Bastion’s sworn protectors, equipped with powerful mech suits called javelins—tried to fly into the storm to shut down the device. When they failed, Freelancers were treated as second-class citizens, and forced to take random contracts out in the wild just to get by. Here, you play as one of those Freelancers.

That’s a considerably truncated version of the story Anthem throws at you, but even after you spend the time to read through all that history, it’s hard to ignore the lack of an eyebrow-perking hook for doing what you must do in the game. Anthem makes the first Destiny’s mistake of thinking that lore is the same as narrative; there’s so much of the former that doesn’t apply in any way to the latter. Anthem tosses haunting inspirational words into a Cuisinart along with a D&D rulebook, calling the resulting chutney a captivating reason to want players to spend every day in an open world. What passes for characters in the game are all wafer-thin archetypes—steely, tight-lipped bureaucrats, jingoistic hardasses who speak of the glory of war, overenthusiastic sidekicks wishing they could get out there with the big boys, barflies who were once adventurers like you but took a gunshot to the knee—all realized with a sort of Whedon-lite cadence of speech that can only wildly gesture at being more than a collection of quirks. BioWare, even at its most twee, is better than this.

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And yet, this is the aspect of the game that actually evinces a personality; it’s a pale, mournful shade of BioWare games past, but it’s a personality nonetheless. Look past the lush tropical beauty of Bastion once you leave Fort Tarsis, look past the simple but stingily doled-out joys of flying a mech suit like Iron Man, and you’re left with the most depressingly banal collection of gameplay loops and mechanics in a major AAA game in the last 10 years. It’s not even sheer incompetence at work in Anthem. The problems of BioWare’s much-maligned Mass Effect Andromeda could perhaps be blamed on that. But there’s at least purpose in that game, a beating heart, the sense of the developers at BioWare reaching beyond their means, trying to make No Man’s Sky when even No Man’s Sky was too ambitious for its own good. Anthem feels almost like a direct Misery-style hobbling to the factors that made Andromeda.

The game’s gunplay boils down to “shoot anything that moves with whichever gun feels good until you need to recharge shields”—an approach that hasn’t been cutting-edge since Halo 2. And the inventory and customization options are small and limited, despite the fact that shiny, glowy items and the resources to build them are everywhere. Even your arsenal—the curation of which has fast become a selling point of this type of game—boils down to a half-dozen weapons in each class that never discernibly change until the last third of the game.

Anthem’s way of ramping up the difficulty is by introducing more of the same enemy—of which there are only around a half-dozen types—but with longer health bars and no experimentation when it comes to placement or abilities. Even with flashy special maneuvers unique to each class of javelin, and element-based combinations to unleash, nothing you face in the game is so tricky or intelligent that just holding down the trigger can’t do the job.

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In fact, unleashing your special abilities while playing with a full team of four often leads to you missing a key piece of narrative or instructions for the next step of your mission, because the sound and fury of your special abilities is often louder than the voice acting, and so obscenely bright that you can’t read the subtitles. The circle of life in Anthem is “fly, kill, collect, repeat,” and there are no compelling narrative or mechanical reasons to take part in it. Your weaponry may be varied, but even your most basic pistol is just as effective at taking out every single enemy type as a shotgun or an assault rifle, giving you no reason to experiment once you’ve tried out every possible gun in the early hours. And while there are materials to collect, there’s so little to actually craft for much of the game, and nothing of note to buy with them, that after a while it feels like you’re just amassing stuff for the sake of doing so.

No one single aspect of Anthem is bad, per se, but it’s not bad in the same way that a dinner composed solely of Edible Bread and Drinkable Water isn’t bad. The game’s bland mélange of competence feels like the deliberate, calculated, focus-tested murder of ideas. From the weapons, perks, items, and crafting supplies, to the enemy types, to the structure of each mission and what you’re asked to do, every single facet of Anthem feels made for broad accessibility for the obsessive-compulsive. None of this is normal for BioWare; this isn’t even their first super-expensive MMO, and even that game, 2011’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, had a killer collection of unique stories to tell. It is, however, the new normal for their publisher, across a whole slew of their games. The war in Anthem is a war of sensibilities, of ethos, of ambition. And there’s no doubt that BioWare is losing it.

This game was reviewed using a download code provided by fortyseven communications.

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Score: 
 Developer: BioWare  Publisher: Electronic Arts  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: February 22, 2019  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Alcohol Reference, Language, Mild Blood, Use of Tobacco, Violence  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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