Also On: PC
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Firewalk Studios
Medium: Digital
Players: 1-16
Online: Yes
ESRB: T
In the year 2024, I think “hero shooters” are a pretty tough market to try and corner. There’s a hefty amount of established competition, and even if you’re a big publisher able to pump some funds into a project, there’s no guarantee of success. Unfortunately, it looks like Concord, recently released on PlayStation 5 and PC, might be experiencing that first hand. Which is a shame, because I actually find Concord to be quite good! It’s a fun shooter with a unique roster of characters, great maps, and a whole host of weapons and skills to go along with that roster that all generally feel good to shoot and/or use. The game feels great to play, whether you’re aiming down sights, firing from the hip, or triple-jumping into the air in order to rain down rockets on your opponent’s head. It’d be nice to see Concord succeed, but whether it’s worth the initial investment now in the hopes that it does is not the most compelling reason to pick it up for a lot of people.
At launch, Concord features 16 different characters, which are further divided up into 6 different classes. While the names for the classes are sort of unique, like Haunt, or Ranger, they’re essentially the classes you’d find in other hero shooters that devolve into archetypes like Tank, DPS, Healer, and so on. It doesn’t take long to discover which characters fit your preferred playstyle, but Concord does a good job of incentivizing branching out a bit beyond your comfort zone. For each character class you use in a match, you’ll get an additional bonus on your next respawn that stacks throughout the match. So if you choose a Haunt character, you’ll gain a mobility bonus, and if you then choose a Ranger you’ll get a bonus to improve weapon recoil, and those two bonuses will then carry over to whoever you pick on your third respawn. It’s a neat system that keeps you from being overly penalized when you’re taken down a few times in a match, as you can essentially improve your next character just a bit on every respawn.
Since the launch of the game last week, Concord has managed to hold a pretty solid connection throughout. Granted, the servers might not be seeing a strain one would normally see at launch due to the lower population numbers across the board, but I’m glad that the game seems to be pretty stable in its current state. Playing on PS5, I’ve not experienced any crashes or been suddenly booted out of a match. The only real issue I’ve encountered is slow queue times, especially for one of the three playlists featured. Again, this is likely due to the low population, but it’s disappointing nonetheless.
Concord is not without other issues though, despite how much I’ve enjoyed playing the game. Namely, the progression in Concord is a little too slow-paced for me, and incentives for leveling up feel pretty boring at the moment. In Concord you have an overall player level along with individual character levels for the entire roster. Knocking out these levels is how you’ll unlock cosmetics, which can be applied to your player card and the characters themselves. But the pace of unlocking those items can be slow, and when you do finally unlock something new, the reward is often something underwhelming. Character skins appear to mostly consist of simple palette swaps, and the little accessories that you can unlock for characters are just that, little. Unlocking a new ring for Lennex is cool and all, but who the heck is going to be able to see it? Likewise, the icons and strips of color you can unlock for your player card are also just a little too bland to be exciting. I know devs have promised to support the game with additional unlockables down the road without resorting to a Battle Pass, but it’s another component that makes Concord a tough sell for newcomers, which isn’t doing it any favors at the moment.
I’m still marking Concord fairly high, as it’s a fun shooter with solid online play that I’ve really enjoyed playing, and look forward to continuing with throughout the year. I hope that the ship can be righted so the game has a chance to really come to life, and I’d like to see what the devs have planned for future modes, characters and so on, but at the same time it’s hard to suggest anyone drop $40 on a game that feels like it may be destined for heavy discounts, or even go free-to-play, in the near future. If you’re absolutely itching for a new hero shooter to check out, I definitely think you can have some fun with Concord, but if you’re still on the fence, you might be better off waiting just a bit longer to see how or if Concord can overcome its rocky launch.
