Concord Review

All about Agreementat some level, it works or works well in isolation. Roka heat-seeking missile launcher tracks targets with satisfactory accuracy *beep beep beep*. Starchild’s double jump/power punch combo is great when you can hit multiple targets. However, Concord’s occasional moments of satisfaction are marred by a competitive shooting experience that is too often ponderous, tedious, and devoid of any intriguing tactics beyond huddling together as a team and standing on a target.

The gunplay is serviceable, with recoil and weapon handling that conveys much more of Destiny 2’s PvP mode, The Crucible, than Overwatch or Valorant, though without any of the bulky feedback that gives the game a sense of weight or tangibility. The fluid movement through maps with three paths and varying lines of sight, the on-cooldown abilities where you throw bullets that do something and then come back, and the gruelingly long time-to-kill that encourages your entire team to group up and focus on single targets — you’ve seen it all before, and it’s better, and for $40 cheaper. It’s fine in a market where good isn’t enough, and hasn’t been enough for years.

This is one part of Concord that is particularly confusing. Destiny’s Crucible was just one mode, interwoven with a PvE/PvP progression system designed to make sure hardcore players never ran out of things to do. It wasn’t all that great, either, and its Destiny 2 counterpart has long been overshadowed by more popular, more meaningful campaigns and raids. In isolation, Crucible would be a pathetic experience—and that’s really all Concord has going for it.

The excessive kill time in Concord requires precision with the heroes’ weapons and toolkits, which are often not up to the task, making gunfights exhausting. Even the weapons in Concord’s arsenal geared towards direct DPS, like Lennox’s dual revolvers (ref.: green cowboy alien) or Teo’s assault rifle (ref.: armored soldier) are challenging to exploit, unable to eat through health bars quickly enough to make fights less tedious.

Combined with Concord’s painfully ponderous movement speed, I found myself rarely getting kills unless I decided to stick with my team to become a giant, wandering death star of heroes. Concord certainly encourages teamwork and cooperation, but the impoverished weapons and lumbering heroes make the deathmatch and objective control modes feel samey, lacking the compelling push-and-pull feel found in other hero shooters. Most Concord matches boil down to two giant groups of Battleborn trudging across extensive, empty maps, slowly destroying each other.

It doesn’t assist that Concord’s maps are tedious and challenging to play: they’re a collection of alien ruins, research facilities, and cargo bays designed for even play, with no particular personality.

Isolating a healer or tank doesn’t have the same importance in Concord as it does in Overwatch. The lack of ultimates is painfully felt in this regard, and Concord matches lack the call-and-response energetic that Overwatch and Valorant players will be familiar with—there’s nothing in Concord’s battlespace that demands as much attention as Genji deploying his Dragonblade ultimate in your disorganized backfield, or Cassidy “high noon” from a clear vantage point. Concord is simply about killing other guys and standing in circles, and any abilities that ponderous down that already calming process feel like a waste of time for everyone.

The Concord characters, nicknamed the “Freegunners,” are largely forgotten, lacking the distinctive flavor of their contemporaries. Their names and stories washed over me, almost instantly forgotten—a sterilized, run-of-the-mill family, so derivative that I longed for Glanton’s cartoonishly grim space crew to ride onto the scene and blow the unchanging smiles off everyone’s faces. The prospect of spending more time with this cast seems like emotional labor, and I can’t imagine watching the weekly cutscenes in which I’ll no doubt be threatened with even more tedious one-liners and sarcastic comebacks.

Picture 1 With 5

Freegunners’ toolkits are a bit more involved than their personalities, but only slightly. Many of the weapons and abilities feel too cumbersome or too challenging to exploit effectively in combat. One Freegunner, DaVeers, has a support-oriented kit built around a pitifully feeble incendiary grenade launcher, and you can rarely do much with it before being bludgeoned to death. Duchess trades offensive power for an area denial toolkit that involves throwing concrete walls to block paths, forcing opponents to slowly jog around low-impact barriers before easily killing her builder. Even if she does launch properly and cut someone off from her team, the aforementioned time-to-kill issue doesn’t give her the opportunity to exploit it.

Not every Freegunner is a total dud—I liked the recon-focused Kyps and her relatively rapid movement speed, which opened up occasional opportunities to flank and harass the enemy. I had the most fun in Concord supplementing my team’s own traveling Death Star, being a constant thorn in the side of the enemy, placing traps, marking objectives, and racking up assists.

Picture 1 With 4

You could say Concord aspired to something more. Its world is extensive, with mercenaries fighting for scraps in the shadow of an impossibly powerful merchant guild, and I was surprised at how often I said “wow” after reading one of the lore entries. Take the guild’s headquarters, Spire: as a show of force for the galaxy, the merchant guild confiscated a moon, transported it through space, and dropped it on the capital of its imperial rival, burying them under a mountain of ash and rubble before driving a giant spear ship into the crater and declaring it the recent center of the universe. Passages like this embody the tension that underpins Concord, where 5v5 team deathmatch modes and objective-control skirmishes fail to live up to the promise of an undeniably sci-fi-inspired setting. However, it’s not just the gameplay that lets it down, as Concord’s writing borders on cringe-worthy, over-the-top jokes lifted from games like Firefly, Borderlands, and Guardians of the Galaxy.

The main problem right now is that players simply don’t want to stick it out for the entire match. One of these two mobs will invariably wipe out the other, and then one or two members of the losing mob will come to their senses and realize they’re playing Concord and could be doing something else with their time and drop out. This leads to the second round almost always being a complete wipeout for the other team. I’ve never played a game where the week before the game is won and lost because players seem to get depressed halfway through the match and drop out. Worst of all, even when everyone stays for the entire match, it still lingers in the shadows of Overwatch and Destiny 1.

There’s no getting around how enigmatic Concord is. It’s a $40 hero shooter whose only real selling point is its story. A dismal launch and already pathetic player count make Concord a no-go for even the most hardcore hero shooter gamers.