Grab a copy of Overwatch off some dusty GameStop shelf and rub it under the musky armpit of the Guardians of the Galaxy’s Peter Quill and you might have something close to the feeling of Concord. As competitive hero shooters go, this sci-fi contender from Sony plays it quite safe, complete with immediately charming characters rendered in gobsmackingly beautiful cutscenes and ability-based PvP combat that never addresses why those characters are fighting one another when they’re clearly allies in said cutscenes. But just because it doesn’t offer much in the way of innovation doesn’t mean Concord isn’t fun to play – I’ve sunk over 40 very enjoyable hours into this sweaty shooter, and it overwhelmingly nails its class-based gunplay. That rock solid foundation certainly carries it quite a long way, but with only a few by-the-numbers game modes and no killer features to shake up the genre, it still has a lot of growing to do during its live-service evolution.
You and your squad will form a five-person team of super-powered characters, each with their own unique strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities, and then bring them to bear against an opposing team in a variety of formulaic game modes. Those include a standard deathmatch mode, a “Kill Confirmed” mode called Trophy Hunt, and a zone control mode called Clash Point, to name a few – none of which possess even the slightest hint of novelty. But being overly familiar isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’ve got best-in-class gunplay and awesome characters with compelling powers to back it up, and boy, Concord has got both of those down pat.
Concord sagely keeps its weapon selection very slim, with just one or two options given to each character by default and no way to customize that – but the upshot there is that every single weapon feels incredibly responsive and finely tuned, and no two characters have weapons that feel at all similar. The arena-controlling old lady, Duchess, wields a submachine gun that’s devastating at close range, while the sneaky and tactical Vale mostly relies on a long-range sniper rifle to take out enemies from afar. While not all these larger-than-life brawlers clicked with me immediately, like cleaning robot 1-Off and his vacuum-based weapons that push and pull both enemies and gunfire around the map, or Bazz and her knife-throwing and melee-focused ways. But given enough time with each of them, I was able to appreciate and even develop an affinity for this incredibly balanced and diverse roster of characters. All 16 options feel really good to use once you’ve figured out their tricks, and combining them with the four other characters on your team to serve a specific purpose, whether it be charitable support character, DPS king, or damage-absorbing tank, is a lot of fun to play around with.
Similarly, the abilities that complement their weapons are fantastic, diverse, and have very generous cooldowns, completely changing the way combat plays out depending on which character you’re playing as. The floating, fireball-chucking Haymar can blind opponents for a period of time and make them pay for standing in the same spot too long, while the rampaging ogre, Star Child, can close distances quickly with his charging attack and smash the ground to do heavy damage around him. Not all characters feel quite as original, like how Teo is the world’s most generic soldier and comes equipped with a smoke grenade and cluster grenade as his two powers, but those bland options are few and far between (plus they serve as an easy starting point for newcomers). Learning each character, using their abilities to counter the team comp of your opponents, and juggling the madness on the battlefield with top-notch gunplay was just as fun in my first match as it was in my 30th, and I certainly can’t say I’ve felt that way about most hero shooters I’ve spent time with.
You’ll have to get comfortable with the roster too, because one of the few novel twists Concord brings to the genre is the way its competitive playlist, called Rivalry, works. Unlike the casual playlists where you can choose whichever character you please (so long as someone else on your team hasn’t already selected it), in Rivalry you cleverly aren’t allowed to select the same character again if you win a round while using them. Since matches go to best of seven rounds, that means winning one will push you to get outside of your comfort zone and use a minimum of four different characters. Not only is this a neat way to force people to master more than just one or two options, it also encourages communication with your team between rounds to ensure you’ve got proper coverage to play out whatever strategy you’re trying to pull off as your options get slimmer.
That choice is supported by another interesting wrinkle in Concord’s character variants: Slightly different versions of existing characters that come with a unique perk and an altered appearance, which can be unlocked by completing specific objectives during matches. For example, the gunslinger Lennox can normally reload his weapon by dodging, while the variant you can unlock for him loses that ability, but gets more ammo for all his weapons instead. Though each variant offers mostly minor changes, they definitely provide a meaningful thing to chase that offers more options in combat. Perhaps more importantly, they also give you the opportunity to fudge the numbers a bit in Rivalry, since variants count as separate characters on your crew, and therefore, let you play as the same characters in multiple rounds.
With 16 likable characters front-and-center, you’d think story would be a major focus, but sadly, this is an area that’s woefully lacking. With just two cutscenes right now to flesh out small bits of lore, Concord’s strategy is to slowly drip feed players with short snippets of story over a long period of time, subsidized by the Galactic Guide, a map filled with nodes where you can read about the locations and characters. I’ve spent a fair bit of time scrolling through this sizable library of short descriptions, and though much of it is well-written, it’s a pretty poor substitute for in-game storytelling that I worry won’t come often enough to keep me invested. Great characters squandered by a complete lack of narrative is basically a hallmark of the hero shooter genre at this point, but it definitely doesn’t get any easier to swallow that especially bitter pill. If developer Firewalk sticks with building out the galaxy over time, it could end up being a major draw, but for now it’s extremely thin and also quite disconnected from the PvP action you spend all your time with, and a pretty big waste of a cast that has lots of potential.
Concord’s game modes are much less inspired than its characters as well. Of the six currently available, none of them possess more than a modicum of originality. For example, Signal Hunt is a king of the hill mode where you fight to control one spot on the map until it moves elsewhere, and Area Control is, well, a zone control mode where you fight over control of three static zones. While none of these milquetoast ideas are especially offensive, it certainly highlights a major issue with Concord: a lack of any signature game mode that sets this hero shooter apart from the other options out there. Love it or hate it, Overwatch’s spin on its iconic Escort mode made it a defining selling point (even if that idea was admittedly borrowed from Team Fortress 2 before it) – meanwhile, Concord has a handful of the world’s most generic modes I intrinsically understood and was preemptively bored by before I even played them. That’s a pretty big miss for a hero shooter that already badly lacks ways it sets itself apart.
The 12 well-designed maps shake out a lot better than the bland game modes though, and I largely enjoy running around Concord’s arenas, which feature lots zigs and zags, cover mechanics, complex pathing that requires spending time learning the map, and some routes that only more mobile characters can easily access due to the pretty intense heights the vast majority of the stages reach. On the waterlogged planet of Leviathan, you’ll fight inside of giant dead sea creatures in the Water Hazard map and battle through labyrinthine hallways in the Shock Risk map, while on the dying planet of Akkar you’ll blast enemies to bits as you dance around the skeletal remains of some long-forgotten kaiju. Really my only issue is that some of these areas are a tad larger than 5v5 combat calls for, and that means it can take quite a long time to get back in the action after each respawn. Aside from that though, I’ve had a great time figuring out the best paths and team strategies across each arena.
One thing that’s still missing in action that developer Firewalk has said is coming is a cosmetic store where, as per usual, you’ll be asked to spend real human currency on skins and assorted digital baubles. That’s pretty par for the course these days, but as always, the question is how much love it will show to people who would rather earn cosmetics by playing, since many live-service games lock the vast majority of their cosmetics behind a paywall and starve those unwilling to cough up the dough. Since this store seems like it won’t be added until the first season arrives, I don’t know how that will shake out just yet, but for now it’s been nice to just unlock cosmetics through playing matches without being annoyed by players dressed in obnoxious skins they shelled out major moolah for.
