Concord
Released: August 24th, 2024
Developer: Firewalk Studios
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed)
I fucking hate Concord.
Admittedly, it’s not entirely Concord’s fault. I like online shooters, but not ones where everybody’s a damage sponge much less the absolute tanks found here. That’s simply a matter of taste, however.
I’ll also readily admit I’m bad at the game, astoundingly bad, to a downright surreal degree. I consider myself a solid player of online shooters - far from exemplary, but I’ve always held my own and will occasionally be the best in a match. No idea why it’s a radically different case here, but I’ve never failed to gel with a first-person shooter the way I’ve failed with this.
I can’t give a game a negative review simply for being crap at it. No matter how many people have baselessly accused me of that before, I find the idea extremely gauche. Many times have I praised games I’m not good at, because I still have fun with them, but the same cannot be said of Concord.
It isn’t fun. At all. It is, in fact, a complete void of entertainment.
Playing it has been quite genuinely miserable. At one point I was going to throw in the towel and not review Concord at all, it just didn’t seem worth forcing myself to keep going. It felt necessary, however, after seeing quite a few people expressing similar sentiments to mine.
I had to stop playing after a while though - if I continued to do so, resentment would have truly colored my opinion. I’d rather have gone to the dentist than play the last few rounds I needed to gather screenshots.
Eliminating matters of taste and skill, there is plenty of legitimate fault to find with Sony’s untimely attempt at jumping on the Hero Shooter gravy train though, as evidenced by how little fanfare this thing has gotten, and how it looks set to be forgotten in a few months' time... like most other "live service" bandwagon riders.
Firstly, Concord is fundamentally unsatisfying to play. Not a single character’s attacks feel like they have any impact whatsoever, movement is slow no matter who you pick, and abilities are either awkward, boring, or damn near useless.
Each character is mechanically… eccentric. While their attacks and skills are similar to others found in the genre, they’re all slightly weird, and never better for it. A number of characters are borderline unintuitive to use and balancing is such an issue that on launch day I could taste how quickly certain oned were almost completely abandoned.
Compared to literally every other shooter I’ve played, Concord’s roster is packed with choices I’d rather not choose. There are no fun support characters, with the healer especially doing very little but replicate the regen pads that are already on the map that do a terrible job of restoring HP.
Your support characters are doing something wrong when I, as servile a player as I am, have written them off. Not quite as wrong as the tank who’s portable shield blocks allied projectiles behind her, rendering her a complete fucking liability. Nothing like watching your bombs bounce back at you because the player in front was “protecting” the team.
Indeed, this game is so antithetical to how I like playing that I’ve drifted toward using the girl with the rocket launcher and the enby who shoots fiery goop everywhere because the splash damage is somewhat reliable. I sometimes used Bazz, who throws knives, is comparatively fast, and has a reliable melee attack, none of which is original but at least it works. Aside from those three, I don’t like anyone else, either because of how shit they are to play or how shit they are as characters.
A remarkable thing about Concord is how completely unappealing their designs are, though unlike the weird anti-DEI outrage merchants, it’s not because I don’t want to fuck them. The designs are trying way too hard to look unique while still ending up completely derivative. They resemble paradoxical bootleg versions of things that don’t even exist.
None of them have any personality either. The phrases they use when selected say nothing about who they are or how they behave. Almost all of them have the same boisterous, peppy delivery of generic lines. They’re so ill-defined, vaguely portrayed, and thoroughly disposable.
Character-led shooters with memorable rosters succeed because of how instantly recognizable the cast is. You could spot Tracer or the Pyro simply by seeing their silhouette - they have distinguished but cleanly uncomplicated shapes and features. Even people who haven’t played the games they belong to know who they are
Nobody will remember the “Freegunners” of Concord. Not Bazz, not Kyps, not Vale, not Daw. I had to look those names up because I can’t even remember the ones I’ve been regularly playing as. Also, Battleborn had a way better bipedal mushroom than Lark. Who gives a fuck about Lark?
Concord’s convoluted visual style is like someone asked a focus group what looks “cool” before dumping every suggestion into a blender. It’s often hard to guess how a character might play from looking at them, which is an issue you will not find in a game with thoughtfully crafted visuals.
It’s just an unappealing roster, which is at least fitting when you consider how mundane the art style is overall. Completely unremarkable.
If you can stand to play the game for any length of time, you won’t find anything you couldn’t play in a better implemented fashion elsewhere. There are plenty of games with guns and cooldown abilities, of which this is simply another. Its desperate attempts to differentiate itself by making the familiar feel slightly quirky has the side effect of making the familiar feel slightly shit.
The default deathmatch mode is prone to seeing one team race ahead in score to such a degree that after three minutes the other team might as well stop playing. You have to unlock the elimination mode, a mode that seems better suited to this thing. I say it “seems” better because nobody is playing it enough for me to find matches.
Whatever the game type, you’ll be using weak guns and messy skills in combat scenarios that are little more than dreary wars of HP attrition.
What it all boils down to is a boring game. Matches are samey, maps are devoid of interesting features, and any of the more exotic weapons fail to excite in any way. Even when doing relatively well in a match, I was crushingly bored and wanted to play something else.
While it’s certainly nice to have a game like this without any Battle Pass garbage, there’s nothing interesting to unlock. The cosmetic options are utter garbage, being mostly basic and ugly recolors with one unique skin per character unlocked after tons of grinding. The bare minimum has been done to give players an obligatory sense of progress.
I’m not one to criticize something as meaningless as profile cards, but their dullness speaks volumes. They don’t even have pictures or patterns, they’re just beige rectangles with sidebars you can change the color of. Do such things have to be tied to microtransactions for developers to bother making them nice? It’s honestly quite pathetic.
Concord isn’t a badly made game for all its lack of explicit appeal. Fundamentally, there’s a competent shooter even if it is unbalanced, and I’ve encountered no technical difficulties or trouble getting into matches save for the modes nobody’s playing. When the best you can say about a game is that it works, however, you might as well be playing Redfall.
I uninstalled it before publishing this review. Couldn’t wait to see the back of it.
To say there’s a lot to hate about Concord implies it has a lot of anything. While not strictly skeletal in content, it nonetheless offers little of note in a market that’s already saturated with similar games all vying to dominate the finite time of their players. Sony’s delivered the perfect picture of a game nobody was asking for, an impeccable example of the nonessential product.
Even if I didn’t hate it, I sure as hell wouldn’t find enough to love.
4.5/10
