Concord: Sony’s online shooter is ready for takeoff, but faces obstacles in a crowded gaming market| Games

IIt’s no exaggeration to say that the video game industry is currently undergoing a period of alarming turmoil: studios are closing, development budgets are exploding, and lucrative genres are becoming saturated with a host of entirely interchangeable big-budget contenders.

Into this uneasy market comes Sony’s new 5v5 “hero” shooter, Concord, a subgenre of multiplayer online blasters in which players control characters with elaborate special abilities rather than generic special forces soldiers or space marines. Set in a war-torn galaxy ruled by a dictatorial government called the Guild, the game puts players in control of a variety of freelance gunners, mercenaries who roam the space lanes in search of work and throw one-liners at each other in the game’s highly polished cutscenes. In-game, though, they do fight.

All the standard characters from hero shooters are there: regular soldiers, floating witches, teleporting weirdos, sassy tanks, etc., but they don’t have the instant appeal of Overwatch’s denizens D.Va and Mei. But they bring a lot of variety to the combat zone. Lark is a weird mushroom alien who plants spores to slow enemies and heal allies. Kipps is a stealthy assassin who can reveal enemy locations to his team. A chunky robotic one-off throws exploding trash cans. I like the innate flexibility of these skills and how they can be combined between characters. The submachine gun-toting Duchess can throw up a defensive barrier, which is useful as cover, but can also be used to block objective points for the enemy team or lure enemy soldiers into an ambush. Davers can bombard an area with a napalm-like substance called Burnite, which can be ignited by other players’ incendiary bombs, doubling its effect.

The 12 launch maps are mostly super-colourful takes on the sci-fi industrial spaces we’ve come to expect from Quake: Spine Works and Sorting Hub are labyrinthine complexes, all interconnected steel corridors, shipping containers and box-like warehouse choke points; Water Hazard is an abandoned oil rig with the remains of a giant sea monster lying on top like a nightmarish, Lovecraftian sushi plate; and my favourite is Train Trouble, a post-apocalyptic railroad graveyard where Mad Max meets Tatooine.

The crux of the matter is the excitement and tension of every moment of team-based combat, and Concord really does fly at times. There’s a bit of Destiny floatiness to movement that works brilliantly on this very vertical map, with players making full use of their double jump to make combat truly three-dimensional. The guns feel great; from shotguns to laser pistols, every weapon is solid and easy to read, and the audio and visual feedback perfectly communicates each weapon’s unique capabilities. There are sublime moments when the whole team comes together and all their abilities combine in unexpected ways to create an explosive, euphoric shooter experience that rivals the best moments in Overwatch.

But the big question at this point is whether the game is enough to draw players away from Activision’s games, or Valorant, or Apex Legends, or any of the others. It’s beautifully made, but most of it is painfully familiar, not just in character types and anime-esque visual aesthetics, but in structure as well. The game modes are all the standard types: team deathmatch, one where you have to capture three objective zones, one where there’s only one zone but it’s always moving, one where you have to pick up tokens from fallen enemies to score a kill, etc. This is what we’ve been playing since Doom. Meanwhile, the dialogue and humor are the same post-Whedon, cynical aloof approach that Marvel and Netflix YA dramas have been forcing on us for a decade. Oh, I miss the dark, anarchic satire and anarchic teammate-slaughtering mayhem of Helldiver 2.

The most interesting thing about Concord is the “meta” of the game, that is, the strategic part outside the main action. The game introduces some deck-building elements, where players must organize their own crew of characters. Each character has slight differences in their normal abilities. These characters all have their own buffs, called crew bonuses, which slightly boost the health, armor, or firepower of your team every time you play in a match. These buffs accumulate throughout the battle. So, if you’re playing in an organized team, you can work together to build a strong statistical advantage, just like having a good hand in Hearthstone. It’s an interesting idea, but in the chaos of a public server, where only a small percentage of participants play as part of an organized team, it’s unclear whether it will work.

Perhaps the bravest thing about Concorde is that it’s a premium-priced product rather than a “live service” free-to-play — meaning all subsequent content will be free rather than the run-of-the-mill season pass model — and it’s also unashamedly and vociferously pro-diversity, which will likely anger players who are increasingly jaded by modern online games. Should Frankly, it pisses me off because this small group of misanthropic, gatekeeping blabbermouths are ruining the fun for everyone else.

Ultimately, Concord needs time, space, and a healthy community to gain an advantage over its older, wiser competitors. Right now, players are getting a feel for the place, but the game is choppy and unfocused, yet at times surprisingly fun. Its attitude, detail, and elaborate backstory (explorable in a visual encyclopedia undoubtedly inspired by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) give it the feeling of being something the development team really cares about, and if it’s not taken off life support by publisher funding anytime soon, it has a chance of finding an audience that feels the same way.