I played Anthem all weekend. TL:DR It’s Borderlands2 with different Iron Man suits for classes. I know there will be a bunch of different comparisons to Destiny, Warframe, and The Division but for me, the BL2 comparison is the closest comparison. Why? Because Anthem and BL2 are both a blast to play and have some significant QoL problems.
The Good:
Playing with a friend and kicking butt in missions, strongholds, or free play is a blast. My coworker and I played Marvel Heroes together, I got him into WoW Legion for a time, lately we tried Dauntless. This game has us hooked.
The classes feel very unique and their powers all have different ways to work together with other classes. The shooting mechanics are not as important, shooting is more like autoattacking in MMOs. Your powers are the most important part of your loadout. He’s running a Colossus and I’m running a Storm. They pair well together and its great having each other’s backs.
Flying feels great, raining death on bad guys feels great. As a Storm I have 3 elements to play with and a healthy combination of Primers and Detonators. Primers set an element on a bad guy and Detonators explode that element to varying degrees. Each class has different additional effects when they Detonate. Ice Primers are OP right now - freezing 5 bad guys and picking them off is too effective. It’s a great cooperative mechanic.
The game is beautiful. I can’t get over flying through waterfalls or muzzle flash reflecting off of wet walls. I would love to see this game in VR.
The Bad:
It needs some QoL love and care. There’s no way to mark your map for your friends to join you on an event. They have to hit the map and find you and hope they’re going mostly the right way.
There’s no chat and no private voice and for this reason we found Discord to be a must. The ingame voip only works once you’re in a mission together so there’s no way to communicate what mission to pick, why I declined your group invite this very second (I was finishing a mission!!), etc. I want my brother in law to play this but he’s deaf so this game is a hard pass for him currently. Compared to Apex Legends, this game is light-years behind with in-game comm.
The loading times even on a SSD are bad. Sometimes the game drops you and the only fix is to close Origin and log in again. The angled menus are a terrible idea. This is a MMO-lite looter shooter RPG and there is NO stat page. It’s 100% feely-craft at this time. While flying is great, swimming is terrible so easy to lose bearings and very hard to steer.
The Mixed:
You don’t know what you looted until after you finish out the missions. You could run freeplay for an hour or two and have no idea what phat lootz you got until you head back to town, only the rarity is signaled to you when you pick up loot. So the woohoo shiny feeling is muted. They did this for a reason though, your teammates won’t be holding you back drooling over the shinies. Similarly, you can only change your gear back in town at the forge.
To advance the story and to unlock cool cosmetics you have to talk to NPCs, a lot. The Bioware part of the game is back in the town and it feels disjointed. I love old Bioware as much as the next guy but it doesn’t feel right to me in this type of game. The story is good though.
