"...even the Vacuum Cleaner Freegunner, 1-Off, has great visuals with his suck and blow weapon..."
PC | PS5
***UPDATE***
September 3, 2024:
Firewalk Studios is taking Concord offline on September 6, 2024 and refunding everyone. https://blog.playstation.com/2024/09/03/an-important-update-on-concord/
HOW I PLAYED: I played over 100 matches across all 3 of Concords game modes and I played on PS5 with about 10% of my time being spent on the PS Portal, Connected via Wi-Fi to my ASUS Modem Router with 100/40mbps Internet connection.
STORY - 6/15
INTRO
The game opens with a cutscene that gives the player a quick introduction to some of the characters, called "Freegunners", in Concord. These characters are not inspiring, memorable and the cutscene is trying too hard to be guardians of the galaxy. Concord is a 5v5 PVP only Hero Arena Shooter.
CUTSCENES
These opening cutscenes are planned to be released weekly to be additive to the narrative. These detract from the gameplay when you open the game each time as it reloads the cinematic before getting to the menu. This feels tacked on and doesn't mesh with the game. Maybe the cutscenes needed to be put in its own menu for those who want to watch them?
WORLD BUILDING
There is a Galactic Guide, shown above, that gives walls of text for those who want to immerse themselves into the lore and what motivates these Freegunners. This feeds into nothing else and feels like a really hard way to just read through a menu of information as if you are looking to find specific information you will need to hunt it down. But at least, unlike the cutscenes when opening the game, you can avoid this area completely.
GRAPHICS - 12/15
CHARACTER MODELS
Concord is a AAA game running on Unreal Engine 5 and, as such, character models are of very high fidelity. However, there is a general consensus that the Freegunner designs are generic, forgettable, bland and uninspired.
ENVIRONMENTS
These are very well detailed and each map has its own look and feel.
SPECIAL FX
The game held nothing back when it comes to the visual effects but also did not overdo it to hinder the gameplay. Haymar's firebomb is glorious when it hits the ground and even the Vacuum Cleaner Freegunner, 1-Off, has great visuals with his suck and blow weapon.
PERFORMANCE - 10/15
FRAME RATE
Solid, locked 60fps. For an Unreal Engine 5 game that is quite the feat on a console!
STABILITY
I have had 4 crashes to the home screen. One was after the first patch and two were in a single day, after a second patch. There has also been two bugs that I have reported to the developer. Both were minimal issues. But the crashes are not okay. One I would forgive, not two in a day. Crashes in games like this are worse than a single player game because it hurts the rest of your team and makes it look like you bailed on the them.
NETWORK STABILITY
Stability seems to good. But loading the social menu takes about 20 seconds. This was/is the same as what happened with Helldivers 2. Cross Region matchmaking is on due to extremely low player numbers so every match I had the "bad network" icon on in the corner, shown in photo above. (Note: I am playing in Australia - Oceania Region)
AUDIO - 7/10
ADJUSTABLE OPTIONS
Options here are serviceable but nothing too exciting to customise.
SOUND DESIGN
The audio is great and after you play for a while you learn what sounds each characters make and overall the audio is well done.
REPLAYABILITY - 11/20
MATCHMAKING
Online only multiplayer games really need a solid player base for ease of matchmaking. Concord has very long wait times for a brand new game. Depending on time of day and day of the week I averaged as low as 1 min to 5 mins to get into a match on the different modes. At 5 minutes you will be spending almost as much time out of a match as in a match of Overrun or Brawl, as those modes are limited to 10 mins game time. There is no way to sugarcoat the low player count. To make matters worse, the game has no "queue all at once" option.
INCENTIVES
Being a paid game, Concord is not requesting money from you to buy additional content. There is a levelling system for you and each of your 16 Freegunners. They each unlock skins, poses, etc when they level up. At first, this is great. But all but one of each Freegunners skins are just different colours of the same skins (disregarding the Preorder and Digital Deluxe bonuses). This makes the ability to customise your Freegunner quite limited.
NEW CONTENT
Being a brand new game I will treat the amount of total content as the decider for this section. There are 3 main modes. Brawl - where you just kill opponents, Overrun - where you hold points, and Rivalry - Where you have a single life per round and complete a team task. Then there is a single player challenge mode where you use a preset Freegunner to complete an obstacle course. These are nice, but they don't do anything, so they felt tacked on and not fleshed out. As though they were decided on last minute. To defend this theory, there are no trophies or unlocks associated with them.
PROGRESSION
Concords Freegunners have 50 levels to grind for each and plenty of customisation of your Business Card as you hit certain milestones. There is a good flow to unlockables and it felt as though I would unlock one thing per match, on average. To help you level up there are Daily, Weekly and Seasonal Challenges for additional XP.
GAMEPLAY - 18/25
CONTROLS
Controls feel great in Concord. The only button that felt weird was the "mark location" button. It was on the centre bar on the controller. So if I wanted to mark an opponent for my teammates I would have to pull my left or right thumb off of one of the sticks. Not ideal, but the game does let you fully customise the controls, shown below.
MECHANICS
There are a lot of mechanics in Concord and in the Rivalry mode whatever a Freegunner places down during a match will persist throughout the whole match. This is a nice touch that will pay off in Ranked matches and will allow the top players to get an edge on their opponents; if Concord makes it that far.
There is a also a system in Concord that is meant to act like a "catch up" mechanic, in that you carry a passive ability from your current Freegunner over to the next character you pick after you die. But in my over 100 matches I felt like this was not being utilised and a large portion of players would stick to a single Freegunner. So this "catch up" mechanic will likely just make the strong players stronger and widen the skill gap, as with a hero game like this there is generally a few characters each player wants to play and this system is trying to encourage players to swap more to different roles to get passive benefits. This system seems like it would of been a great idea on paper, but I find this mechanic does not work as intended in practice. However, I cannot confirm without the data.
UI/UE
The UI is clean, visually clear and the menu is easy to navigate. During matches, things on screen are outlined to minimise confusion.
SEASONAL MECHANICS
Freegunners have "Variants" that can be unlocked. Variants are identical to normal Freegunners but have a different passive ability, shown below. These being "whole new" Freegunners on the select screen feels pointless and I do not know why this could not just have been a checkbox to select the Freegunners passive; once unlocked. The way to unlock these Variants is in Job Board under Variants and it takes 5 jobs to unlock one. With only one Variant being up to unlock at a time, shown above.
BALANCING
There is no Ranked game mode yet, which is usually the case with games like this. Generally, to make sure the game is functioning well and people have time to settle into the swing of the game before getting too sweaty. With the low player count having a fourth mode to queue into would of made matchmaking worse. In my playtime I did notice some Freegunners were picked more than others but no Freegunner had an extremely low pick rate.
TOTAL - 63/100
FAIR
Concord fails to do anything better than what is out there already and just "existing" in this genre is not enough to succeed in 2024. If you prefer a paid PVP experience over F2P Models, then Concord is offering a game with unlockables that is not asking for you to open your wallet.
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