It must be heartbreaking for the folks working at Firewalk and PlayStation Studios, a labour of love that spanned at least six years (or was it eight?) making this new hero shooter based on a new IP.
From the reveal of Concord up to its launch, it just feels like the game can’t catch a break. There were definitely some good, fun, gaming to be had in this multiplayer game during the beta. I came away from the beta surprised that it’s a potentially good multiplayer shooter.
But now at launch, even I can’t find enough things to rave about Concord.
So many of its gameplay innovations are subtle subversions that only an Overwatch fan-turned-hater (i.e. me) would find brilliant. It has a rich worldbuilding for a galaxy that feels lame and uninspiring. It has a cast of characters that are positively diverse in physique, gender and appearance yet barely anyone strongly resonate with the them.
The team behind Concord is genuinely talented and competent. I’m afraid that the vision they have for this game just doesn’t seem to strike a chord with anyone.
Presentation
Concord has a nice mix of realism and space fantasy. The playable characters, the Freegunners, have performance capture and subtle facial expressions that are well done. Star Child taking a big breaths in his idle animation on the hero select screen is one good example. And who wouldn’t love Vale’s bright smile with her pearly whites all (figuratively) shimmering. The Concord galaxy does have colourful skies and impressive maps- to the point that a typical oil rig can still looks visually appealing.
But aesthetics-wise, I’m not sure I can put my finger on what style they’re going for. There’s a big of pulp sci-fi, a lot of tubular (as in tubes and pipes) motifs that can look alien. But it doesn’t stand out. It ends up feeling generic. At least the usage of colours in the maps are fantastic.
The user experience is fine, when it’s not bugged out that is. I have instances where the only top half of the UI displays during a match until I respawned. The Freegunners’ customisation screen can sometimes just be blank requiring me to exit and enter the menu again. Though I’m not a fan of the bubble pop sound to indicate you have highlighted a new item on the menu- it gave me jumpscares at first. The font selection, from the extra-thick, extra-wide ones used on the headers to the digital-screen-style for numbers and sub-headers are really striking.
The music in Concord is nice. It blends just a little bit of overused orchestra with the ethereal sounds of synths. The score soars as you jump into a match and getting ready before going silent. And when the match is almost done the music kicks in again, building up to the tense final moments before the game is called. While the music doesn’t have variety, it certainly catchy. That four-note stinger is forever associated with Concord.
The sound design is terrific. You can actually use the footstep noises to your advantage. Not only can you tell the position via 3D audio support, but you can tell who’s footstep it is. Some are hefty and loud, which tells you immediately of imminent danger. Some can be soft and quiet, which is also just as dangerous. The gun shot sounds you hear really makes it feel like you’re in a gun fight.
That’s all nice, but what’s with the characters? They’re just… uninspiring. From the way they look to the way the speak and quip, they just don’t resonate strongly as heroes should be from a hero shooter. Take a look at one of the most successful hero shooters out there, Team Fortress 2.
No, just hear me out.
Team Fortress 2 was a pre-hero shooter hero shooter, and what Overwatch did to cement itself as one, TF2 did well before it. TF2’s classes not only have distinct silhouettes and movements, they also have strong personalities and character with their quips and barks. These characters are then further explored in other media which later feeds back into the game. And TF2 never meant to have them be specifically named heroes! All of those came after. Overwatch has since perfected that formula- the gold standard of hero shooters today.
The problem with Concord is that as it stands right now at launch, is these characters just don’t exude enough character. Where’s the rizz?
There are some good ones. Roka’s having a blast when she’s blasting down rockets to the point that she’ll chant her name out out loud. And then there’s Bazz who… I have no idea what sort of person she other than she’s the sort of person that brings knives to a gunfight. Daw is nice enough to check in if anyone is injured after doing the pre-game drop-in animations while Kyps… has an Australian accent, I guess.
Haymar’s aloofness and animosity against her crew didn’t make me feel anything, but there’s a bunch of pre-made labels where it has one for every character in the format of “X and friends”, only for Haymar’s to be “Haymar’s and ‘friends'”.
That’s what got me interested in this character. Not the character themselves. But from a flavour text, which purpose is to enhance and already good meal but it’s the one doing the heavy lifting of turning this stale dish into something that at least taste something.
Think about it. It’s literally a pair of quotation marks that made me at care a bit about her existence. Not the elaborate cinematics. Not the voice acting. Not the character’s visuals. Quotation marks on an insignificant label text.
Some of the more, let’s just say opinionated, people on the internet are thinking that a specific agenda is being pushed and that’s why the characters don’t look appealing. I disagree. I think that the characters don’t look appealing regardless.
Something has gone terribly wrong if you’re making a hero shooter where barely anyone is attracted to the roster of heroes. They don’t need to be necessarily attractive or satisfy a beauty standard, but at the very least they should be visually inspiring.
Somehow, Concord isn’t adhering to Rule 34, which isn’t something I personally care or wanted to even mention in a review, but let’s be real, Rule 34 is the barometer if a game (and it’s characters) is hot or not. Even Team Fortress 2 have entries on there! And yet there’s none for Concord. Zilch. Nada.
On a technical level, Concord presents itself well as any big-budget AAA game does. High fidelity assets for its character models and environments. Stable and smooth performance over what my eyes perceive as 60 FPS (not everyone can see higher framerates your mileage may vary and more through tests are needed to confirm if it is indeed 60 FPS).
Artistically, it’s not appealing enough to the masses. And that’s a tough hill to climb should Concord continues to be supported.
Gameplay
Concord’s flavour of hero shooter is nuanced and subtle. You don’t see it just from seeing the game being played, the game design choices the team has made are not flashy in that way. Yet it feels so refined. Maybe too refined. But still, this is definitely Concord’s biggest strength.
A game of Concord is a 5V5 match across various modes. At launch, this includes the following:
- Takedown – team deathmatch
- Bounty hunt – team deathmatch, but scores count by picking up dropped bounty cards and a team can deny opponents scoring by picking up cards dropped by teammates
- Area Control – control two of three zones to score points, fastest to earn enough points wins
- Signal search – control points change in intervals, fight for control of any active control points to earn points, fastest to earn enough points win
- Cargo Run – no respawns, round-based, capture the cargo, send it to extraction zone
- Clash point – no respawns, round-based, capture the one zone or wipe the rival team
Matches in Concord are quick-fire affairs, so you don’t have to suffer too long if one team has snowballed into imminent victory.
Concord allows players to pick between a roster of Freegunners- currently 16 available at launch. They are, interestingly, divided into roles where their effectiveness is based on map position. This isn’t the Tank-Support-DPS holy trinity of roles. Rather there’s a tinge of MOBA somewhere there.
For instance, Breachers work best as the one initiating a team fight. Daveers’ grenade launcher and their ability to put inflammable goo is at their best used to disrupt an opponent team when they are all clumped together.
Meanwhile, Haunts thrive when things go chaotic and they can pick out a few opponents when they are in disarray. It-Z can summon a clone to trick opponents and pair that with her mobility and rapid bursts of the SMG and she can become enough of a nuisance to stop the other team from regrouping.
Curiously there’s no specific support class. There’s a few healers, but the game is designed around heroes being able to heal to full health from health pick-ups as well as short time-to-kills.
The kit of each hero is also peculiar. There’s no ultimate attack that builds up charge over time (to further encourage you to swap heroes- more on that later). You just have two active abilities which by default is bound to the bumpers of the controller.
These abilities are simple and straightforward. Jabali gets to throw orbs that can heal or apply a damage debuff. Duchess can put out a physical wall or do an AOE attack that takes time trigger.
While I get that these abilities work well as a hero kit operating on their own, there is surprisingly a lack of synergy and wombo-combos between these hero kits. I would thought that with Roka being able to dive-blast down from the air to do an AOE attack there’s another hero that can set this up with an ability that clumps enemies together. But no, there isn’t. Jabali’s orb and Duchess’s wall doesn’t interact with other hero abilities as well. In this regard Concord is less MOBA-coded. The self-sustaining kits heroes have is designed for them to be just as strong on their own and not rely on specific team comps.
At its best, Concord dishes out rapid-pace team fights. Enough team members rally alongside the Anchor hero (the tank class if you will), Haunts roam around the backlines do jungler things. Tacticians lay down their deployable at strategic locations that will be beneficial when a team fight does break out. And this all goes down in a matter of seconds. I haven’t gotten a long team fight lasting minutes so far from what I’ve played. It certainly has beaten the Destiny 2 Crucible allegations.
At its worst, Concord will allow the better coordinated team to just snowball. In the casual game modes within the Brawl playlist, you randomly respawn to some corner of the map, sometimes far away from other teammate making regrouping tedious, or even impossible should an inexperience player is in the team.
So many matches where I just see players roam the map solo instead of waiting for the rest of the team to respawn only to be picked on, continuing the negative feedback loop. The game doesn’t nudge or hint at what you should be doing- which I respect- but the game design doesn’t reinforce that some habits like going around the map while half the team is wiped and yet to respawn is a bad idea.
Sure, you can run a team comp without an Anchor and have every team member roam around like a menace. But that’s only a good strategy when everyone is an accomplished player that can hold on to their own aside from the occasional team-ups that leads into a team fight. So for novice players, they’ll never experience this in a fun way. Let teammates respawn closer to each other!
And there’s another problem that Concord has with its lack of hand-holding. It basically didn’t sell on its other unique (and subtle) gameplay thing- Crew Bonuses.
In most hero-shooters, once you’re in a match you’re basically locked into a role or a set of characters you should be playing. Otherwise, the team comp will become imbalanced and will be no match for the opponent’s team. Concord took a look at this and say nah, let players hero switch. Not just that, let’s reward that.
Play as any of the Haunts and the next hero switch you do you’ll get a mobility boost, for example. And it’s a significant one. It turns the walking armour plate of Emari, an Anchor hero, from a sluggish stroll into a decent running speed. So there’s incentives to not one-tricking- even picking a hero you’re not good at, die, and switch to the real hero you’re good just for the bonus, is a legitimate strategy. Concord promotes players who Flex.
In some ways, it also makes one-tricking ever more impressive. I’ve seen players with only one crew bonus active (so they only heroes of the same role) and still be the MVP of the team with their share of eliminations.
But this system is so subtle that, if you’d don’t look for it, you don’t know it existed. Like, only a real competitive try-hard player (or a dedicated content creator) would notice the change of a weapon recoil as part of a crew bonus.
And there’s another subtle gameplay trick Concord has, which is crew building. Concord won’t run into a problem where the character screen gets ever more crowded should it adds more heroes down the line. Rather, that hero select screen is customisable.
So you have 12 slots which you can customise, and there are specific rules on how you slot in the heroes. Plus there are four slots, the Backup, which will populate a random hand of four heroes per match. At the very least, the crew builder makes it easy to call dibs on your favourite character- put them on the first slot and insta-lock them each match. But it holds more value on the more sweatier game modes where respawns are limited.
As I said early, all of these design choices Concord has made are subtle tweaks that only people experienced players in the genre will pick up. And it’s certainly not a back-of-the-box selling point. And for a game that is not free-to-play, this game needed those back-of-the-box selling points, even if they don’t sell games in boxes as often anymore these days.
It’s very easy to dismiss Concord’s gameplay at face value and not see the intricacies of its game design. A hero shooter where you are encouraged to swap heroes throughout the ebb and flow of a match, where each hero can make a significant difference if they have good aim and game sense, but also just enough elements where teamwork can still make the dream work like any hero shooter does.
At least some issues from the beta has been hastily addressed, including back-filling teams if a player leaves mid-match. But I have seen instances where a player just AFK and no penalty has been given to the offending player. That sucks.
The long and short of it, Concord’s gameplay is sound. It’s just too nuanced for the average person who haven’t been hooked on the worldbuilding to sink their teeth into.
Content
Concord’s content offering at launch is rather worrying. As much as I rave about the gameplay I fear that it doesn’t have a strong enough grip to keep people playing.
I applause the decision to not monetise the game with FOMO-inducing battle passes. Yet I am also appalled by the lack of meaningful and aspirational character customisation or unlocks on offer.
Overwatch circa 2016 is not the benchmark of how many cosmetics a hero shooter should have.
Each hero in Concord have multiple recoloured skins to unlock (yawn) and just one, you read that right, one, Legendary skin that dramatically change their appearance. Accessories and weapon charms are barely noticeable in-game so they are basically worthless.
And no, completing dailies, weeklies and unlocking variants (the same hero with a different passive ability) doesn’t count as a good carrot-on-a-stick to keep playing.
Every week there will be a new cinematic short that plays upon launching the game. Unfortunately throughout this review period I have to watch the same, exact short way too often. You can skip it, but the fact that it still loads up to begin with baffles me. Have it play automatically on the first time a player launch the game that week, and after that have it available in an archive for rewatching.
Concord’s other ace in the sleeve is its extensive worldbuilding. The writing team has penned down a whole lot of codex entries that makes up the lore of the Concord galaxy, and it’s presented in a surprising way: a map. Over time, you’ll see more of the Galactic Guide being populated with planets, space stations and space lanes. And if you read them, you’ll find that every hero has a backstory, why “universal flavour” is a flavour text you can put on your player card, why Freegunners are a thing, and why that one repeating cutscene in the launch week happened.
While I appreciate the extensive worldbuilding, I just don’t find the universe of Concord that compelling. The short gist is that in a galaxy controlled by the oppressive Guild, the Freegunners use their newfound freedom to do scoundrel things to find a living.
The world as is presented right now is too carefree and jovial- hence the Guardians Of The Galaxy comparisons. “Renegades but we’re the good guys actually” is boring, uninspired and dull. Which is a shame because the Galactic Guide presents a lot of lore on how the economy and logistics of the galaxy works. There’s a bunch of lore about the salt trade and universal flavour which I do find interesting as someone who loves worldbuilding as an artform, but it doesn’t invest me on the characters and the immediate game I’m playing.
Concord promises at least two seasons of content coming in the future. But does Concord has a future after that remains to be seen.
Personal Enjoyment
I had little expecations about Concord leading up to the reveal, and to my surprise I was a disappointed that the game is actually a hero shooter. But then when I played the beta I was blown away, it’s pretty fun!
But now playing the game at launch, I just realised I’ve already played this game before. And I’ve played enough of it already.
Putting the rizz-less characters aside, my gripe about Concord is that it’s combat sandbox doesn’t produce enough unexpected scenarios. And this is down to the lack of synergies of its hero kits.
Play enough Concord and the gameloop is more of a typical first-person shooter, most matches play out the same way. It doesn’t help that the player pool is shallow to the point that I start recognising and remembering the names of randos as we keep playing with or against each other every night.
That all being said, there is fun to be had. At least the initial 20 hours I’ve put into this game in general was well spent. But with no carrot-on-a-stick and no intention of getting good at this game to play at higher levels of sweatiness, I don’t think I’ll spend more time with Concord after this.
Verdict
Concord is made for a specific audience that has yet to exist. Its core gameplay loop is solid with intricate tweaks and nuances that fans of the hero shooter genre will appreciate. The matches are fast, and it’s not out to get people to fork out more money than they already have after paying for this game.
But with little incentives to keep playing the very samey matches, Concord’s multiplayer offering is just not compelling enough for the masses.
Should the world comes around and think that the Concord universe is pretty cool and we should appreciate these Freegunners, maybe this game can build up from its slow launch. But it sure is an uphill battle.
Played on PS5. Review code provided by the publisher.
Concord
Concord is made for a specific audience that has yet to exist.
- Presentation 7.5
- Gameplay 8
- Content 6
- Personal Enjoyment 7