Concord PC Review … sometimes, these things happen
Summary: Concord is a game that has tons of potential, that sadly doesn't capitalise on any of it. A by the numbers hero shooter, that while occasionally fun, failed to make any inroads into an already packed genre.
3.3
DOA
After playing the Concord beta last month, I felt that despite some negative elements of the game I would have liked to see addressed, I was cautiously optimistic about the full game’s release at the end of August.
Now that the full game has been released and I’ve had some time with it, I can safely say that not much has changed. It’s tempting just to copy and paste my thoughts on the beta and call it a day, but I’d like to think I’m more professional than that.
For those that don’t know, Concord is a 5v5 hero shooter in the vein of Overwatch, developed by Firewalk Studios and published by Sony for PlayStation 5 and PC. After splitting my time with the beta roughly 70-30 in favour of the PS5 during the beta, I decided to play on PC for the full release of the game.
The full game features 16 unique heroes, each of which is visually distinct from one another as well as mechanically. Mostly. There’s a little overlap in functionality on some abilities, but that’s perhaps to be expected.
Each one falls vaguely into one of the hero shooter archetypes, tanks, damage dealers, healers, etc, with only one of each being allowed on the field at a given time, per team. Unlike say, Overwatch, though, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of hero synergy, in that any combination of five seems to work out as long as everyone knows how to play their chosen avatar.
I noted in my thoughts on the beta that this character synergy seemed to be important to be effective. Whether it was a lack of experience with the game at that point, or maybe some numbers in the backend were tweaked between then and now to make it less important, it’s now far easier to get by being a roaming Rambo.
This is perhaps one of the biggest downfalls of Concord’s gameplay.
Team Deathmatch and what amounts to Kill Confirmed make up two of the core modes, neither of which requires any teamplay whatsoever. The more co-operative centric modes – Area Control and Signal Chase (effectively domination and hardpoint) put a larger emphasis on teamwork, with the final playlist of Cargo Run and Clash Point – no respawn, objective-based gameplay that is reminiscent of Counter-Strike on occasion, being the height of it.
General gameplay seems to be largely unchanged from the beta. Movement speed is still relatively slow and cumbersome, though some of the sluggishness appears to have been alleviated. Either that or I had grown accustomed to it. The maps in the beta were mostly, boxy, uninspired, and seemingly designed for verticality that didn’t exist. Thankfully, the full release, while still not offering up a huge number of stages to play on, has improved things somewhat. There are a few well-designed maps that play towards the strengths of the game’s classes, rather than being generic arenas that could host almost any multiplayer game.
The general fidelity of maps and characters is also still very high. Concord is a good-looking game. It performs admirably too. Running well on everything I threw it at thanks to a decent set of options to tweak and scale well across the hardware.
As for the audio… it’s… fine?! Yeah, it’s fine. What little voice acting there is ranges from awful to acceptable, but besides that, and the audio sounding a little flat and lifeless at times, no major complaints.
Final Thoughts
Despite being the beta leaving me lukewarm and little changing between then and the full release, I actually came around to Concord. I can’t put my finger on why, either. The more I played it, the more fun I started to have with it.
Ultimately though, a game like Concord is going to live and die by its player base, and unfortunately, it has not had a good launch, with a concurrent peak on Steam of only 700 or so players. That number has only dwindled in the days since launch, too.
Update
As of 03/09/2024, Concord is no longer available for sale. Sony and Firewalk Studios are in the process of rolling out a refund to all players, across all platforms, with the game being removed from refunded players’ accounts and as such, no longer accessible.
The game will be staying live until September 6th, when the servers will close, and it will become completely unavailable with no mention of if or when they’ll return, stating only that they are ‘better-exploring options, including those that will better reach our players.’
It’s unfortunate, not only for the admittedly miniscule player base that seemed to be actively enjoying the game, but for the developers who poured eight years of hard work into a game only to have it shuttered within two weeks of release. I wouldn’t be surprised if it returned in some form in six months from now as a free to play game packed to the rafters with microtransactions in an attempt to recoup some of the financial losses of its development. Whether a return takes this form, or even happens at all, remains to be seen.
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