It’s hard to have any nuanced discussion about Concord without talk quickly becoming volatile. It’s either unreasonable ‘concerns’ such as characters having pronouns (as any living being does), a constant barrage of reminders from both concerned well-meaning people and naysayers about the dwindling player count or general live-service video game fatigue. None of the focus is on the important question: Is Concord a good hero-shooter video game? Does it feel good to play?

I’m here to tell you that, as someone who has been largely out of the competitive multiplayer shooter game for around a decade, I’ve found Concord to be an excellent shooter. It’s the most I’ve cared about a multiplayer game since, no joke, Team Fortress 2 back in 2007. I’m on the Concord defence train, baby.

A trip through the stars

Concord is set in an original sci-fi universe, created by developers Firewalk Studios. Controlling a crew known as the Freegunners, you’re engaging in 5v5 battles, cycling control of various heroes to get the upper edge in game modes like a classic Team Deathmatch, Dogtag collecting, Domination and King of the Hill to name a few. As this is posited as its own unique and original universe, everything has its name; game modes are called something vaguely similar to the one they’re replicating, and characters are original with stunning and unique visual flairs but familiar abilities. There’s lore out the wazoo found in the Galactic Guide, a library resource of universe terms and stories, represented as a giant galactic map where you can see character’s origins and lore on some of the planets you’ll be visiting through the lens of an in-game match of bullets and munition.

Long before release, Concord was criticised for being unoriginal in the live-action hero-shooter space and while I don’t disagree, I personally found a lot to love in its unique charm. I don’t consider Freegunners egregiously designed any better or worse than the heroes you’d find in any of its comparisons. In fact, I was cold on a good majority of the roster until I got to spend my own time with them, see how they play and take up space in the world and read a little of their backstory. It-Z is up there for me. She’s a dastardly purple-haired green alien gremlin of chaos, speedy and eager to raise some hell. Soka is also a personal favourite, a fully suited-up astronaut with a rocket launcher and a carabiner (a big identifier for lesbians in the LGBTQIA+ community) attached at the hip, who will chant her own name when she pulls off a kill. Haymar is a caped intergalactic mage with an explosive crossbow and fireballs to be lobbed down as hellfire as she floats above the battlefield. Notice I’m talking about the women a lot? I just have a lot of feelings for the Concord women, okay?

Concord’s character design did a lot for me as someone who’s been largely out of the hero shooter game before this. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but good design is there. What also helps is the cast is balanced well with characters that, are predictably weird and wonderful freaks and those that are pretty as hell—quintessential hero shooter character design. What also helps is these lore entries. Though your eyes may initially glaze over the walls of text you’re presented with, practically feeling Firewalk Studios begging you to care about its Freegunners, it’s worth sticking out because what can be found in there is special. Secretly, its flowery language, combined with rich storytelling, feels prose-like. Sitting at my desk with a cup of tea between matches, I found myself poring over details of Concord’s universe.

Take the entry for Freegunner Bazz written above, a character I quite liked in the beta. In this entry, we learn how Bazz was born male and transitioned to female. We learn how as a child she was born in a society where men were set up to be rulers. Eager to please her elders and also become a leader herself, she still follows their ruling. However, when she finally presents herself as a young woman, she’s rejected by those who are her caregivers. Those who are supposed to love her unconditionally. So Bazz chose to follow her own truth, taking to the stars and finding herself. ‘So Bazz chose to leave,’ ends her lore entry. Open-ended, her story isn’t over.

As someone who’s a trans woman herself, who not long ago moved interstate to get away from family and be welcomed with love by a new community and partner and family, I’m glad characters like Bazz were kept in-game. They’re essentially a warm hand on my shoulder. They’re a high-budget game taking the time to represent and care and respect people like me, not doing it cheaply either.

Concord is an incredibly polished shooter that is frankly stunning to look at. Without hyperbole, the most graphically impressive multiplayer shooter I’ve ever played. If you take the time to look at the vistas outside of your immediate foreground, you’re in for stunning sights and a sense of the game’s striking colour palette. Sorting Hub, my favourite map has harsh industrial interiors with shipping containers where blue shiny steel looks like a million bucks. Take a step to the edge of the map and look out, and you see a great big yellow spire in the near distance against a blue sky, a hub for trade where you can see space crafts coming in and out. Star Chamber is ethereal, featuring lots of purple crystals juxtaposed with aging white temple walls. The most high-concept pair of maps is Shock Risk and Water Hazard, set on the stormy planet of Leviathan. The former is a facility surrounded by sea harvesting harsh red lightning from the sky with its central pylon while Water Hazard is a large fishing platform that has a monolithic, harvested alien eel strung up, leaking purple to oppose the cloudy, acidic green night sky.

Every little thing in Concord makes the game feel premium. It’s incredibly cool to see Sony pumping as much money into making their multiplayer games as high-fidelity as their trademark single-player titles. Combat animations such as weapon reloads for revolvers or particle explosions from projectiles are all bursting with life. Simple sound cues when matches start and end, HUD design and the like are so satisfyingly smooth and pleasing to the eyes and ears. Topping it all off is an earworm of a soundtrack from none other than Daniel Pemberton, the composer of the Spiderverse movies. Whether it’s the contemplative, soft ethereal music that backs you looking through logs of lore in the Galactic Guide, or the heat of the action in battle, Pemberton takes you on a journey with their score.

Kicking butt and taking names

Concord may most resemble other notable hero shooters on the surface like Overwatch thanks to its emphasis on abilities, but this would be doing the game a disservice to simply compare it to just that. Firewalk Studios is made up of a bunch of ex-Destiny developers from Bungie and it shows not only through the thought-out and rich lore but also the gunplay and simply how good it feels to play. Playing on a mouse and keyboard on a PC feels incredibly responsive and snappy, with gun recoil, reload time and sight aiming functioning exactly how I’d expect for each individual weapon.

“Every little thing in Concord makes the game feel like a million bucks”

With over 16 heroes with different abilities, balance is a hard thing to get right. Thankfully, I think Concord absolutely nails it. Everyone feels equally viable in more or less every situation. The aforementioned Bazz, an intel-gathering Freegunner who can see enemies through walls when crouched, is an excellent starter for a match to get your bearings. Combine this with her attack style being a knife expert who can chuck throwing knives, make targets vulnerable and close gaps with a devastating launch stab ability and she’s suddenly a dangerous agent. It-Z is a small hitbox, remaining fast on her feet and can teleport around while also having the one-two combo of an ability of a throwable that both disables enemy weapons when striking them, but also boosts her own when this orb is retrieved. Suddenly, the squishiest and one of the lower health enemies has that little bit more of a fighting chance against the tankier foes.

The most interesting and refreshing addition is the fact that healing characters are actually requested to do more. For instance, Jibali has an area of effect heal ability rather than a slipstream point and click heal at teammates. This means healers are actually required to be versatile, shooting and putting the work in rather than the last-ditch effort of a desperate kill like say, Medic from Team Fortress 2.

It’s exciting being this vested in a multiplayer game’s meta for the first time in nearly a decade. The more I play Concord the more I learn what clicks for every Freegunner. I’m conscious of everyone’s strengths and weaknesses and already theorising who will be buffed or nerfed. There are six ‘roles’ or class types that all provide different playstyles to level out the playing field. These are Ranger, Warden, Haunt, Breacher, Anchor and Tactician. It’s incentivised to swap between different roles as you get a bonus permanent match-long passive buffs (faster reload, longer weapon range etc) that stack from the ones prior each time you check out a new role. It’s a simple but quality means of helping you strategise; you can time when you vest in each role accordingly so suddenly a character that is very close-ranged focus now has that little bit of extra firepower range and so on.

This minutia and nitty gritty experimentation can only expand tenfold when you add Concord’s function of crew building and character variants. Variants are alternately skinned versions of the pre-existing Freegunners with different passive abilities. The most broken and cracked example I’ve found thus far is the first one for Lark, the alien spore creature that fires spore projectiles and places spore pods that, in the vicinity, buff your teammates’ damage resistance and speed and do the exact opposite to your enemies. Combine this with their first variant in Lark II, adding a passive that spawns in a new spore pod every single time you get a kill or assist. Suddenly, you can make tidy work of the battlefield, creating a steady stream of areas to boost around and danger zones in choke points to put the pressure on foes, multiplying damage tenfold.

“It’s exciting being this vested in a multiplayer game’s meta for the first time in nearly a decade.”

Here is where Crew Builder comes into play, a function that lets you essentially choose which of the possible sixteen Freegunners are made available to you upon booting up a match. This is helpful in regular non-competitive playlist matches but crucial in the competitive ‘Rivalry’ mode which are objective-based matches that you can’t respawn in. In Rivalry, you’re only allowed to play each character once per match, no matter the round count. You’re forced to mix it up. You might want to just have the base level of all characters for you. Or maybe you never cared that much for some of them anyway and you just really love the pistol-wielding Lennox and want as many chances to play as him. That’s where the variant comes in as a way that Firewalk Studios has allowed you to ‘game’ the system and play as your favourites even when you’re restricted. This took some getting used to and I still partly wish these variants were replaced with a means to just simply tack on a given perk in each match lobby. However, at least it’s a unique function in the genre and one that requires thought for the player.

No matter the map or who you play as, the world’s your oyster. Every character, the way they move and how their abilities work and mesh well with the level design provided. There’s a lot more verticality on offer here than you’d otherwise find in its counterparts. That’s where it’s at its most unique. You could be playing as Roka on a higher-up platform, having just wrapped up a one-on-one only to see a fight break out on a lower area below you. She’s primed for this with her devastating slam, quickly advancing on the action and doing some serious damage in the process. Choke points and flanking opportunities or paths for escape are aplenty if you know where to look. It-Z is so fast they can run laps around opponents, slowly picking them off provided they’ve got enough cover in an area with pillars, obstacles and the like. There’s an older character called Duchess who can box in enemies with her magical wall-sprouting ability, useful for picking off someone from the rest of their team. Like Overwatch. You get it.

The future

The air around Concord is incredibly weird. Never have I played a game where the community (and its naysayers) are from the get-go already writing its eulogies. It’s not an easy place for a game to be in that still has planned seasons for the future. While the player count certainly is concerning (I’ve only managed to find one competitive Rivalry match with a ten-minute wait time here in Australia), taking the game at face value for what it is is always fun. Will Concord be here in a year? I don’t know. Will I do my best to make the most of it while it’s here? Absolutely.

The elephant in the room has to be acknowledged: Concord’s biggest detractor is that it is far from original. Comparisons to Blizzard’s 2016 multiplayer hit are incredibly easy to make and apparent. Its gunplay, while stellar, I’d more liken to Destiny PVP mode The Crucible, with how floaty it is. That second offence is more forgivable given the very fact that some of that team’s DNA has made it over here. It’s a shame it’s not more original after what was reportedly an eight-year development cycle. But unoriginal games release all the time and at least this is the most polished and flashiest of the bunch.

I promise I don’t have rose-tinted glasses on for this game. The game seriously needs better leaderboard, challenge and stat tracking. It never explains how to unlock Lore entries for each character (you do so by reaching level 3 with a given Freegunnner) or how much lore you’ve still to get. As such, character entries are open-ended, with me never really sure if that’s all I’ll ever get to know about a character I’ve grown to love. Concord is also sorely missing an offline mode with bots where I can go in and train against other characters and really get a feel with each Freegunner. The obstacle courses or Time Trials where you’re shooting at static targets are far from ample for working out plays or how to best take down that one pesky Freegunner that you can never win a fight against.

Simply put, a lot of the remaining questions I have are in the things we don’t yet know. What will these weekly lore-heavy animatics that Firewalk Studios are teasing look like and how long will they go for? Can we access them in a theatre-mode library if we miss one? What will future content look like outside of vague promises of future maps and Freegunners? I don’t know. What I do know is I’m trepidatious about it, but I will at least see out what Concord has cooking. That’s more than I can say for any other multiplayer shooter these days.

8

Great

Positive:

The prettiest multiplayer shooter I've ever played
Floaty gunplay and combat is a unique feeling for the genre
What feels like endless amounts of experimentation with abilities and class
Meaningful lore that feels prose-like in its storytelling
Sound design, HUD and score all at the top of their game

Negative:

Far from the most original game in recent memory
In need of smaller additions like an offline mode and better leaderboards and stat tracking

Concord is a great shooter that will pleasantly surprise those willing to tune out the outside noise. Within is fantastic minute-to-minute gunplay and action, complimented by a diverse cast with diverse abilities that can mix up a game at a moment’s notice. Though it’s perhaps the least revolutionary game we’ve seen in a long time and still in need of small functions like leaderboards and a clearer vision for its future, what’s here today is some of the best multiplayer gaming I’ve experienced in forever. I’ve found so many weirdo heroes I’ve grown a rich affinity for, whether it’s via their deep-prosed lore or their chaos-causing gameplay. Concord’s fate isn’t quite written in the stars yet; it’s far better than a majority are giving it credit for. I pray you join me and other Freegunners on this voyage. We need you.

Concord Review – Defence Squad

Reviewed August 26, 2024 on PC