Concord Impressions: Not bad at all - but there are big challenges ahead

Concord is really, really beautiful. The animation quality is top-notch, the music is bombastic and even basic elements like scene composition, choreography and UI design are firing on all cylinders from the start. As an audio/visual exercise, Firewalk has really come out of the starting blocks.

I would even say that judged purely on those core elements of a hero shooter gameplay loop, Firewalk has also managed to hit the mark in more than one sense. Character models are weighted without being obtuse, every shot is fired with significant recoil and weight behind it and the included maps also seem relatively versatile.

In other words, Concord isn't technically bad, nor are there any deep-rooted gameplay issues to address based on about five hours of beta testing over the weekend. But make no mistake; Concord has problems - big problems. Really big problems.

First of all, the interface may be colourful, but it's not exactly inventive, as colours, contrasts and the entire visual soul is borrowed from Guardians of the Galaxy, which has become a template for a sea of more or less ambitious copycats. The tone has exactly the same problem. I was served my first of what promises to be weekly new cutscenes designed to strengthen the relationship between you and the range of characters you can play as on the battlefield. That in itself presents a massive narrative problem we'll get to, but these scenes ooze Guardians energy, and not necessarily in a good way. A screenwriter produced a video a number of years ago about so-called "bathos", the tendency to undermine heroic moments with forced deadpan comedy because the people who wrote the dialogue don't really believe that we as an audience will buy the premise if it takes itself too seriously. Guardians founded modern bathos, including Rocket Raccoon's now relatively iconic "we're all standing" line. Marvel would later go bathos-crazy, although audiences are now pretty sick of it, but Concord apparently only wanted to take a closer look at Guardians. The result is... old-fashioned, it's forced, and it's cringeworthy.

And then, of course, there's the rather natural problem that arises when the game takes such great pride in presenting this exact team, on this exact ship, and then throws you into battles where they fight each other to the death. It's a problem in principle in Overwatch too, but here in Concord it turns into supercharged narrative dissonance so quickly that it really conflicts with one another. This kind of storytelling, this narrative framework, it just doesn't fit well with the hero shooter genre, and this slightly unfamiliar, unfitting combination is hard to ignore, too.

The game spends a huge amount of resources and energy establishing a strong relationship between 1-0FF and Haymar, but then the announcer says we're going up against a "rival crew" (by the way, this whole Freegunner fantasy is super weird, are you freaking out about being mercenaries?) and the rival crew pits these characters against each other without even acknowledging it. If narrative is a focus, then these tensions need to be addressed one way or another - otherwise narrative focus in this specific way is not favourable to the game.

At the time of writing, I experienced quite a few small technical glitches that were surprisingly gameplay breaking, such as Lennox not being able to reload his one gun, but getting stuck in the animation itself, or Lark's little plants that boost various stats simply not spawning. Despite this, the game seemed relatively polished, ran silky smooth at 60fps, and managed to impress on the whole.

However, it must be said that this is also a problem when a paid game goes up against free-to-play giants in the genre like Overwatch 2 and soon Marvel Rivals. Concord does manage to form a distinct visual identity, but it borrows so liberally from Marvel's Guardians universe that it seems to be intentional, and there isn't really an element of the overall gameplay loop that seems to be unique to Concord. I'm no expert, but 1-0FF's Air Barrier is your typical barrier, Star Child's Rage Rush is a typical rush and IT-Z's Cosmic Slip lets you throw an energy ball and then teleport to it. The result is a chaotic and exciting battlefield, but the difference is that Concord costs £35.

Can this be a success? Yes, of course it can. Could it be that with increased exposure, a much deeper strategic layer is revealed? Hell yes, and already Concord seems surprisingly twitchy, and a step in the wrong direction is quickly penalised with a relatively low TTK. Could it be that other media and content creators have a completely different take on this beta than I do? That's also a possibility. But as it stands right now, Concord seems to be in the midst of a pretty serious identity crisis, where it has become its sources of inspiration instead of using them as a springboard to form a unique identity. Instead, this is the definitive derivative, something that stands on the shoulders of something else. Whether this will eventually make the game last longer, only time will tell. But I'm not so sure this will be a success on par with Helldivers II, or anything even close.