Anthem Critic Reviews

Anthem’s rich storytelling and engaging combat lays the foundation for Bioware’s newest adventure. While there are plenty of quality of life improvements to be made, Anthem’s ambitious approach to the looter-shooter genre is encouraging given the development team’s steadfast community engagement. With a roadmap stretching far into the horizon, we’ll be flying around the world of Anthem for a long time to come.

A rich narrative composition, multifaceted and enveloping, is the setting for a frenetic and amusing gameplay, which draws strength from a surprisingly effective movement system, able to offer a unique flavor both to combat and exploration.

Anthem is an imperfect and evolving game, but if you are looking for a rewarding experience in terms of gunplay, fighting and settings, you will hardly be disappointed.

Anthem is an ambitious project and it paid off for BioWare in some measure. The gameplay is spectacular, the story is good and has a challenging endgame. But annoyances sometimes spoil it and it's up to BioWare to fix those problems for the future.

We prefer to highlight the playable elements that make Anthem fun to play at times. Everything else that surrounds the Bioware game has yet to improve and add more content to mitigate the feeling of repetitiveness, because the history and the world of Bastion has huge potential that at the date of its release still seems untapped.

Anthem is a white canvas for BioWare. Its future is all about content and the quality of its story.

BioWare will need to build quickly on top of its shimmering jet-fueled foundation to hold people's interest, but folks looking for a new neighborhood to move into might want to give Anthem a try -- either now or after fixes and updates.

Anthem feels a bit award as a Bioware studio game because the narrative is clearly something that wasn't given priority, to the benefit of combat and exploration. The game still needs more content to live up to the promise made by a publisher as big as EA.

Currently, if you play with the mindset of just wanting experience the game and take your time with it, it’ll likely be a fun experience. However, if you tend to have the mindset of needing to be max level NOW and have all the best gear NOW it will probably not be fun.

Wearing armor and fighting like the Iron Man is really amazing, but this game at this time is also full of flaws. The story is dull. The gameplay is repetitive and boring. What's worse, there are too many bugs and network issues. Maybe it will be a great game when its DLCs come out.

Despite its myriad of issues, I still enjoyed the fun gameplay of Anthem and plan to revisit the game after it has developed a larger suite of content and events for me to experience.

Anthem has as much potential as room to improve. Gameplay is great, which means you'll have lots of fun flying and fighting, but right now there are too may flaws to overlook.

Anthem's technical shortcomings, dull combat and pretty but messy environments combine poorly with a narrative that uses pointless binary conversation choices, a thoroughly typical, snarky protagonist and worn out tropes to fuel it's characterization and plot. These elements come together to make Anthem a chore of a game that's highly unlikely to satisfy anyone but the most desperate groups of loot motivated gamers in it's current state.

Anthem could be a great game and sometimes it can be an enjoyable ride, but as a loot shooter it's a flawed experience, dragged down with many problems and leaving you with a sense of hunger.

The controls of Anthem are intuitive and engaging. Flying through the world of Bastion is a sight to behold, and coordinating with your team on higher difficulties like Grandmaster is rewarding. Despite some questionable design choices and shortcomings, Anthem has a strong foundation that has potential to be a genre leader, but isn’t quite there just yet.

Anthem is certainly not a perfect production, considering the bad AI, the disappointing netcode and the way the online works. However, it has few (and not negligible) qualities, like a well-defined narrative universe, an excellent gameplay able to take advantage of the diversity of the javelins, undisputed protagonists, and a top-quality artistic component. Despite the few endgame activities present at the launch, Anthem still manages to adequately stimulate the development of the character, thanks to a good distribution of rewards.

I feel that it’s repetitive and that the loot is out of balance, but I also see that it has a good core. Maybe it’s a remnant of the original game, or perhaps it’s enough to build on. What I can tell you for sure is that it not a proper $60 game that’s been in development for six years.

After a while, suspicion sets in: perhaps EA doesn’t believe in BioWare anymore, and had them release not only unpolished, but basically unfinished product to cut losses and avoid another total rework.

Anthem is a painfully average RPG from a developer that is capable of so much more.

Eternally repetitive missions, outrageously long loading times and a completely irrelevant story. That could not be everything. But after the credits, I was disappointed again: that was actually everything.