Developer: Firewalk Studios
Publisher: SCE Worldwide Studios, Sony Interactive Entertainment
Platform: PC, PS5
Tested on: PC, PS5
Concord – Review
Over the years quite a few Hero Shooters have been released, but it’s only the likes of Overwatch 2, Valorant, and Paladins that truly stick around. Many developers try their hand at the genre, and they often end up creating cheap clones with uninteresting characters, eventually resulting in a dead-on-arrival project. Today we’ll be taking a look at Concord, a Sony Interactive-published Hero Shooter that has been generating a lot of negative attention all around the globe. Is it truly as bad as many gamers and fellow reviewers say? Not really. It’s just not amazing, either.
Story
Concord starts with an interesting-looking cutscene that could be taken right out of a Guardians of the Galaxy spinoff title. You’ll already get to see a few of the game’s characters, who then get accepted to become Freegunners. From here on out, however, the game does very little to tell you more about the characters or the universe, which is a shame. There is quite a bit of lore to read up on, but the way it’s presented is not inviting at all, and we reckon most players will gloss over the huge blocks of text anyway.
Graphics
Disregarding some of the ugliest character designs we have ever seen, the rest of the game looks quite good. The guns have cool designs, the weapon effects are decent, and everything actually looks extremely polished on PlayStation 5. We feel the superior experience will actually be on PS5 rather than on PC, in terms of graphics and overall smoothness. The few maps that are currently present look okay, but things feel a bit bland and static in terms of assets and the general backdrop. We would have perhaps loved a bit more visual variety and a few more interesting sceneries. Even so, Concord is not an ugly game at all when looking at the game from a technical point of view.
As just stated, this game has absolutely horrendous character designs. The developers clearly wanted to tick all the inclusivity and diversity boxes, and that’s perfectly fine. We applaud diversity and inclusivity when it’s done decently, as everyone deserves to be represented in games, movies, and the general media. We sadly feel like Firewalk Studios completely missed the mark, as they didn’t create a diverse and inclusive cast, they created a fairly unlikable cast. Inclusivity also means that you shouldn’t go out of your way to purposely exclude one specific race. It feels like a low blow that will actually create the opposite result. Even so, some characters look great, and there was still quite a bit of visual variety when it came to the character designs as a whole. We noticed that the developers were inspired by other titles, and not only in terms of visuals. We feel as if the cast ends up somewhere in between the ‘Guardians of the Mediocrity’ and ‘we have Overwatch at Home’.
Sound
The sound design isn’t too bad either. All characters have (limited) voice lines that you’ll hear during combat, and they never truly annoyed us during our matches. We did notice that some lines get repeated a bit too often, but it’s nothing that becomes truly grating. The weapons do provide great audio feedback. All weapons pack a proper punch, and it was actually a lot of fun hearing all the different sounds. The different sounds from the footsteps are also nice, and we were able to distinguish different characters when playing with earbuds or a headset. The soundtrack is also pretty alright, but it never really stood out to us.
Gameplay
Concord is a First-Person Shooter in the same vein as Overwatch. This means it’s a so-called Hero Shooter, in which you get to choose from a varied cast of heroes, each having different weapons and abilities. The offset is simple, as the game currently doesn’t offer that much in terms of different modes. There are small variations of Team Deathmatch in the game, as well as a domination-oriented mode and an objective-based mode. In all modes, however, it revolves around killing the enemy team, either to rake in the points for your team or to hold down certain points on the map. It’s a simple core idea, and it works for the most part. We would have simply loved a bit more variation in the game.
We found the gunplay to be extremely enjoyable, and both a controller setup and a mouse and keyboard setup worked just fine. The action is a lot of fun, and things can get very chaotic really fast, albeit in a good way. Sadly, the game does not have fixed spawn points after the start of the match. As a result, we found ourselves spawning almost right in the middle of enemy fire, resulting in another death. This can tally up the other team’s kills in the Brawl mode, and you’ll also have to deal with the 10-second respawn timer again. Nonetheless, what is present in the game in terms of mechanics is solid.
The game does not suffer from character variety, as every hero plays differently, which allows you to find one that suits your playstyle. We mainly had an issue with many character-specific skills being either unbalanced or just underwhelming. There is no defined healer class in the game, for example, and heroes with healing skills just provide so little healing that these abilities are turned into useless fluff. The same can be said about shields and protective barriers, as they also block allied projectiles, making them quite useless in the process. There is currently also quite a bit of an imbalance in classes, which you’ll immediately notice by seeing the same heroes being picked during every single match. The latter is also a bit of a shame, as the game actually tries to motivate you to pick other heroes when you respawn, as you will be rewarded with different passive bonuses then. This is somewhat poorly explained to players, and as a result, people will often stick with a single character. The same rules apply for deployable objects, as they remain on the map even after you have met your untimely demise.
Conclusion
Surprisingly, Concord offers very satisfying gunplay and very diverse characters. Sadly, the game gets bogged down due to a lack of content, some odd design choices, and simply a lack of overall polish in certain departments. If the game does get its time to shine in the coming months, this one could become a worthwhile Hero Shooter that could compete with Overwatch. As it stands now, the game’s price of entry feels a bit too high for what’s on offer. With more stages and a few tweaks in terms of balance, we could easily crank up the final score.
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