Colourfully sterile.
By Jonathan Garrett
15/07/24
Previewed on PlayStation 5.
Access via PS+ beta.

Concord has received a fair amount of apathy since its announcement, but based on our time with it, that disinterest isn’t entirely warranted. Although it’s wading in to a fairly crowded space as a hero shooter, there’s enough going on here in terms of tight mechanics and visual polish to warrant even a cursory investigation. The addition of Beta early access for PlayStation Plus subscribers, which was originally supposed to be a pre-order bonus, does raise some concerns around potentially soft pre sales leading to them needing to open things up.

But the budget price and lack of frwee to play tropes certainly help differentiate it from its contemporaries. I was thrilled to not have to wrap my brain around another set of in game currencies or battle pass tiers. After being introduced to some narrative context with a well directed cutscene, the Beta offered the full roster of characters and a traditional Team Deathmatch experience.

Rounds are kept tight and the ability to swap out characters per respawn encourages experimentation. It runs beautifully with Unreal Engine 5 handling some extremely detailed environments and character models. The overall presentation has been carefully designed with a sort of “retro future” aesthetic that affords them a more colourful sci-fi palette.

However, it doesn’t take long for some old fashioned design or frankly bizarre choices to creep their way to the fore. There’s some quality of life bits lacking here; a re-queue function between rounds, while some screens are far too crowded with info. Then there’s the intro sequences to each match, which play variants of the same shots every time. You’ll see a shuttle arriving through the atmosphere, followed by a list of player names, before being treated to a similar list but with each players chosen characters posing, before finally actually loading into a round. Every time you respawn you’re also subjected to the same single line of character dialogue when you re-select them.

Then there’s some more fundamental missteps. Close range weapons need tweaking for damage; the Skullbreaker Shotgun utilised by the heavier Star-Child seems to be woefully inconsistent. In fact, the shooting itself feels loose and imprecise at the best of times, and when you’ve got enemies dodge rolling, double (sometimes triple!) jumping, and flanking you at every turn, you shouldn’t feel as though your fighting against your own reticule. Even the levels themselves feel static; there’s no meaningful physics or object interactivity, making the whole experience far too sterile.

The range of health bars makes judging shots next to impossible, as everyone seems to have a different maximum. You’re also forced to recharge most abilities by getting additional eliminations, which in some ways feels as though players that survive longer are penalised for tactical longevity. There’s the makings of a great shooter here; it’s visually polished with distinctive characters, but there’s a lot of tightening up needed for this to excel.

The voice acting is jolly… but not when the dialogue repeats itself.

TARPS?

At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.