Disclaimer* This is a critique on some of the game design aspects of Anthem. This is not a review, I’ll be ignoring most of the major technical issues and ovious(or more egregious) issues covered by others.

Since we’re going to focus on some of the problems with Anthem, let’s start with one of the best aspects of the game, Movement. We’ll also be able to use this feature as a watermark for quality.

Anyone who has seen Anthem’s movement already knows it’s appeal, but FEELING it is another thing. The propulsion sounds are so loud it’s deafening, you can feel the weight of your javelin on take-off and even more-so on landing. It’s much harder to gain altitude than lose it. Dodging side-to-side makes your feel like a fucking fighter jet.

Perhaps more impressively and definitely understated and little-understood are flight’s mechanics. There depth of it from javelin to javelin and how it changes their playstyle. It’s fun to figure out, what’s faster, flying or dodging? If jumping resets my dodge count, should i jump twice to get the most dodges? What if I cancel my jump into a dodge then cancel that dodge into a melee attack and cancel that? Learning this quickly exposes another great aspect of movement, physics. Dodgding, jumping, melee aren’t canned animation that move you in a fixed way, it physically propels your javelin forward and that momentum can be leveraged and manipulated to use the flexibility of this system to move you in ways faster than just flying.

This game mandates that you travel a lot and the movement system almost makes you look forward to that travel and ignore the face that in most cases you blindly flighting in the direction of an ever changing waypoint on your hud.

Luckily, some of the charm from movement spills over into the abilities. You can feel the Colossus air slam, even without a controller with vibrating controller. The Ranger’s spark beam is done better than iron man in infinity war. When you combine the movement system with the Interceptor’s  ability it can show the actualized full potential of Anthem. They all feel great, and some of them even have great mechanics. You can slam the ground,go into a melee, cancel the melee’s backswing with a dodge and toss a quick grenade.

This doesn’t apply to all abilities, some have unique problems, like interceptor’s ult which is painfully simplistic and limiting. Others suffer from a problem that exists throughout multiple systems in the game, Unresponsiveness.

The shield, for example, doesn’t always show when you need it to. It takes a half second longer than it should to come up, sometimes dodging right before an attack is just doesn’t come out in time. Interceptor abilities have a little too much startup and breaks the intense flow of combat. Even switching weapons takes forever.  Suddenly the ability to cancel animations doesn’t apply when you can’t bring up your shield due to the .3 second animation to put your weapon down.

This problem rears its head in things outside of abilities, certain actions just don’t give you any feedback. Press fire while holding an unscoped sniper rifle? Nothing happens. Press fire when you weapon is empty? Nothing happens.

It’s a problem of communication and it’s one of the biggest problems that game has, it fails to relay information, especially with weapons.

Take a look at this screenshot. I have a X and a X equipped, how can i tell which one im currently holding? Does the weapon icon help? The reticle? The model itself? What’s the exact progress on my current reload? This failure to reliably relay important information isn’t limited to Weapons.

There’s no distinct sound when your shield breaks, or when your abilities have finished their cool down or if there’s a homing projectile about to hit you from behind. Couple these problems with the game graphical clusterfuck(which btw, you can’t downgrade) and it leads to one of the most common reactions found in Anthem. <Clip of me dying and saying “what the fuck just hit me?!”>

Missing these cues is particularly bad in Anthem because the way combat works means you’re constantly being attacked from any angle. A problem that other looter shooters (destiny, especially division) because they’re created in a very linear way where enemies typically spawn straight ahead. The flight system in anthem ensures not only will you be attacked from behind, but also above and below. So when some enemies poof into existence with no notification at all (no sound, no rift) and the existing a/v cues are less prominent than other games(expand on this a bit more).

Anthem doesn’t just suffer in missing these features, but it fails to implement any ideas of it’s own. Anthem doesn’t innovate in any way. This lack of innovation comes out in many aspect of the game

• Weapons
  • Emphasis on spread instead of recoil
  • No innovation, compare to UT99
  • Guns have cooldown instead of reloads?
  • Lack the feel that abilities/movement have.
• Mission
  • Completely uninspired, deserves it own video.
• Enemies
  • No innovation
  • Dumb ai (Doesn’t allow me to counter-player outsmart) .There’s a variety of enemy types and some of them even have special mechanics but there’s no difference in AI. They don’t react to what I’m doing and I can’t react to their moves. Their actions are repetitive and predictable.
• Story
  • Actors are over-acting with their body. Feels like a play being enacted in front of you. They awkwardly don’t move far from their starting pose.

Uncanney valley.

Customization/Gear

• Segments customization into modular/digestible chunks.
  • Each chunk is tied to a specific piece of armor (no passive perk selection)
  • This has to be done in a game where you can swap characters whenever you want. This is a modern move, old way was WoW or Division, new way is this and division 2.
  • No attribute distribution

Unfortunately a lot of the good parts are completely undermined by progression

• Consumables suck, they undermine your build
• Progression
  • No path to acquisition
  • I can do an entire mission on the hardest difficulty, if i don’t get a piece that is better than what i have, it’s pointless.
  • Useless item drops leads to inventory space problems and the deaded inventory management. Forces you to delete things that you might want in the future.
  • it’s a looter shooter and looting isn’t fun, doesn’t tease masterwork gear so i have nothing to look forward to
  • Potentially one of the most interesting aspects of the game. I say ‘potentially interesting’ because I’ve yet to truly have the opportunity to try to customize my build:
    • You’re kind of forced to use the highest level gear all the way to 30. The the same things applies to endgame and is eve worse because you HAVE to use whatever legendaries happen to drop.

Sacrificing UX for X

• Tarsis
  • has mouse smoothing and blur.
  • Why do I have to wait for the fucking javelin to turn around?
  • Why walk(slowly) from point to point.
• Friendlies have collision. You shoot colossus ult and a friendly walks in front of you. Running into teammates stops you from running.
• Radar sucks.Intentionally obfuscates position. I know what they were trying to do (don’t want people staring at HUD elements), but they failed in both way.