concord is the least aesthetic, least artful, least interesting and least appealing game of the year, it's not the least of all time, it's not *rage 2* but it's still a bland looking game with some of the worst character designs you will ever see, it's a game with some of the worst writing I have ever heard and it's one of the most cynical games I have ever seen, but it's also a super fun hero shooter that, while it does almost nothing new, is still a great time and reminds me a lot of some older games I enjoyed a lot, mainly brink, a game that also had a very bad graphical style, with bad designs and a nonsense story but that was also a blast to play, it's not the best game in the genre, but I can honestly say it's a lot better than people had assumed it would be. i think people will see a game like this, that's on the more generic and cynical side and assume it'll be a trainwreck but thats so very rarely the case now, we've hit a point in how standardised and homogynous systems and control schemes are that games, at least big ones like this, never come out bad now from a standpoint of things like gameplay or even visuals, sure a game can look generic, be buggy, have server issues or play a little jank, but the standards are so high that the worst you'll get is "samey and generic" and not "unplayable" like people would have you believe, does this make for less interesting experiances since games are a little homogynous in the AAA sphere, yeah, i think it makes them overall worse experiances, but calling them bad and acting like they'll be this unplayable trainwreck is just not true, they aren't experimental enough in design and mechanics for that to ever be the case.

the gist of concord is it's a hero shooter with a "cinematic story" which means you get a new cutscene in the main menu every week and a loredump on these characters and worlds they have pre-established as being a big deal, it feels weird, you have all these names and things it feels like it expects you to know and drops them out of context, it wants to be a big sprawling cinematic universe type deal but it hasn't earned any of it, it's strange and it's also just not good enough to earn any of the gravitas it puts on anything, it's quippy marvel style diaglogue at its most bland, i'm not even wholley against this style of writing, i liked forspoken a lot and i think any kind of writing can be good if its done well, but here it just feels cynical, the square enix GOTG game seems to do what this game wanted to do but better in all the ways that matter, but comparing an online FPS to a single player adventure probably isn't fair of me, it sucks either way and is the one way the gamers might, rarely, have a point on this one, it's at least slop-adjacent. the game doesn't look much more interesting than that, sure it's good looking on a technical level but the levels are a little bland so far, ruins, a desert bazaar and a facility, there's nothing really cool here in the ways many of the maps in similar games like overwatch or battleborn were and the character designs also carry this sentiment.

they mostly look pretty bad, everyones already joined in on dunking on it and i do think there's more good ones than people make out? the pink robot kyps looks cool, the mushroomy alien guy lark is very cool, duchess the older asian woman with a type-100 machine gun is great and i think a lot of her hate specifically is just good old misogyny and agism, it-z looks right out of a cooler scifi show like farscape and heymar has a cool space witchy vibe and they look great also, but everyone else? they range from generic and bland like teo, vale and roka, who would just be grunt enemies in a better game and some designs are just bafflingly bad, like emari and her illfitting cosplay looking armour or characters like jabali, bazz and daw just looking really bad in ways i can't quite put my finger on, it's vibeless for the most part even in the characters whos designs i do like and it should say something to their memorability that for the whole week since i played i've been calling teo ted because i honestly forgot his name. the modes are about as you would expect, two variations of team deathmatch, one objective based with pickups after death like kill confirmed from COD and you also have a one life mode akin to valorant, this mode sucks, don't even bother, it's horrifically unbalanced and zero fun.

they play better than they look at least, the characters follow pretty standard archatypes for a hero shooter but they do at least do *something* to differenciate themselves, plus every character has a dodge roll and some very generous autoaim that does make it feel actually distinct mechanically from the likes of an overwatch, at least a little. the above boring teo (why are characters called teo always so boring, ssum players will know what i'm talking about) is a standard soldier 76 type with his gun and vibe but he has a granade and a smoke granade he uses his thermal scope to see enemies through, which is actually a neat twist, the smoke thingy. lennox is a cassidy type character with his roll to reload and a knife as a replacement for the granade, but his twist is in his self heal so he's like a more self reliant DPS type, it's small things like that, the sombra expy for example with it-z has the gun and the teleport but she has an ability that's a sombra hack as a projectile or how the zarya expy has a unit heal and shield as her cooldowns, it does enough to make things feel different. those cooldowns are also pretty interesting, they vary in how they work and you don't have any ultimates, some may work with time and others you'll need to kill an enemy and pick up an object they leave behind to replenish, it's a cool way of balancing things and it makes it so you don't see too much ability spam, though there are still some big balance issues with characters like bazz and haymar being way too powerful. while i did play everyone heymar was my main the whole beta, her wall of fire is super useful and her one-shot fire catapult is a really fun weapon to use, super high damage and easy to hit with the autoaim but it punishes you really bad if you miss, plus she can fly and has a flashbang special, that's cool. that's kind of it, no PVE and the real objective mode was locked off, you didn't get much but you got enough to make a judgement on it, and my judgement is that it's fine, fun enough when you find a main, it's not good enough to take me away from ultra rumble and not bad enough to really offend anyone, it'll find an audiance i assume because it's more than good enough if you aren't the kind of terminally online weirdo that gets mad because it has a few black people in it.

I had also the weekend before this played a different multiplayer FPS, my roommate had bought a star wars game on a weekend sale for super cheap with all the DLC and was taking over the TV for the weekend to play it, I did play otome games on my switch for a while but seeing how pretty the game was had me curious to give it a try and i'm a little glad I did, it was very interesting if very lacking in content and difficult to find games in certain modes and maps, which makes you question why you bought a version of this game with all the dlc. I played the game mostly like it was an offline game, there wasn't much to do, just some training missions that were super cinematic and fun, some bot matches on the basegame maps, notably no DLC maps which made those seem like a waste of money with how dead the game is, some survival modes which were very fun and a mission mode that had you playing a variant deathmatch similar to kill confirmed in a COD game, with normal varients and one based on using the games hero characters. the modes did vary in quality, the survival mode was fun if very basic, there was no shop, all your weapons were just there available dlc included and you can swap when you die, the rounds aren't very dynamic and the maps are all static with no gimmicks, sometimes you'll have a vehicle to deal with but that's really about it, it's fine, the maps are okay if a little boring but they are pretty at least, it's an okay mode that shows off the basic gameplay okay.

the mission mode is both better and worse, it has some mechanics the survival mode didn't like the hero's which have overpowered movesets based on cooldowns and a third person view, but the maps here are much worse and sometimes outright bad like with the hanger map, it's just a deathmatch where you collect stuff, again it's fine. the skirmish and the tutorials are probably your best modes, the tutorials are super cinematic with some slight story (but that's all you get for that) and teach you the mechanics for the vehicles in really novel ways like having a speeder bike chase or having you rampage through a base in one of the big tanky vechicles, it's super pretty and it's a fun way to start the game. the skirmish mode is also really good, it gives you the selection i mentioned earlier but it's just full games with fairly dumb AI, you can get heroes and power ups and it shows off the appeal of the multiplayer super well, i'd call this a perfect mode even if it had all the DLC maps accessable, but for what it is it's a lot of fun, a solid bot mode that could very easily be improved.

the gameplay is a little more unique compared to a lot of what I've played, it's a COD style shooter but mixed in with hero shooter cooldowns, overpowered hero characters akin to like, idk, ultimates, vehicles like the mainline battlefield games and powerups like an arena shooter, it's a weird mix of games but it all mostly works, though the vehicles are very difficult to control, i assume to balance them to stop them being broken. it's also first person as a default unlike the previous games that were third person by default and the first person view works well enough but i do feel like playing in third person just gives you a bigger advantage. though i only experienced this through the heroes since they are default third person and i could never figure out how to make the normal grunts third person but there are videos of it online so i assume it could be done but i could never figure out how to change this. the cooldown abilities work almost as little classes as well, some loadouts are more combat based like multiple grenade varients or a defence based loadout with more armour but my favourite was the jetpack that let you jump across chunks of the map, wasn't as useful maybe but it was fun! the variety in how the different playstyles with the grunts and the ships and the land vehicles give the game a real sense of scale in some maps and modes, it can really feel like a war sometimes in ways a COD match never could, it feels chaotic and you do feel like a really small part of a group effort, it's a cool vibe and feeling i think.

it's also a very good looking game, not even just for its time, while i don't care for the IP and I've never seen any of the movies, the maps were really beautiful, some amazing snow levels and dense forests and a really cool looking city map set in the sky, it's on the geniuinely cooler end of photorealistic and despite being from 2015, the game looks genuinely next gen, you could have told me it was a ps5 game and i'd have believed you, it looks that good and the fact the planets look so unrealistic at times with the monsters and the cool plant life, it makes it feel like you are looking at another world for reals, there's even a VR mode that i tried that simulates a flight in one of the ships (which seemingly got its own spinoff into a full game later) character models can look pretty iffy though, it's clear their strengths laid in the environments. sound is also pretty good, the weapons and stuff all sounded really cool and the music during matches could be really fun, very final fantasy sometimes, but many of the lesser more "generic orchestral" songs just blended in together, these might be the movie ones? i was told at least one song i disliked was from it so i'm assuming the lesser tracks were the movie ones, but the original score for the game is solid (and by the composer for walking dead survival instinct of all games), very JRPG at times. i also found out after starting that this was made by DICE, who while they make the battlefield games primarily and I've never played much of those, they did also make the mirrors edge games and the first one of those is one of my favourite games, so it was nice for me to dig into their other styles of games, they make good stuff! i'd reccomend it overall, it's solid for a few hours and it's one of the cheapest games on the console, running you anywhere between £3 for the physical and £5 for the game with all the DLC on psn, idk if it's good for its IP but i had a good enough time not even being a fan of the movies, but i love botmode games a lot, so take this reccomendation with an asterisk.