Concord is a good shooter divorced from the reality of its genre

Concord has been dealt a terrible hand.

It’s hard enough to convince players in 2024 to try an entirely new live service game when the cost of entry is simply the time it takes to download the game, but trying to get someone to pay $40 before they know if they even like the game or not seems like an impossibility.

Not only that, but Concord‘s community sentiment has been deeply toxic from the minute it was properly unveiled. The game has (unfairly) become a poster child for Sony‘s perceived pivot away from prestige single-player titles to live service trends, something the most vocal members of the PlayStation audience appears to despise.

Concord is a good shooter built on a release strategy and price point that would have been far more at home in 2017, and feels dated today. The game – which is a multiplayer-only, live-service hero shooter – does provide fun, but even at its best, we never felt strongly enough about it that we’d tell someone with three or four other live-service games on the go to drop what they’re doing, pay $40 and jump on.

At launch, the game has 16 characters and 6 modes. The modes are split up into three playlists, and it’s currently not possible to queue for all of the modes at once, or a particular favourite. These are takes on classics like Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed, Domination, and other shooter staples.

The matches themselves are very short, with a game of Takedown (TDM) only requiring a team to rack up 30 kills, meaning you’re given very little time to experiment with the game’s large roster in a real, in-game situation (though there are some training modes).

Concord’s gunplay is punchy, and feels akin to Destiny‘s The Crucible. There are few overlapping mechanics across the 16 characters, meaning that each fight presents a unique challenge.

The game’s rather poor at flagging what your team, or opponent’s abilities actually do, however. This means that there have been firefights where we’ve died out of nowhere, with little explanation, or forewarning. This understanding is something that would come with time, but we’re unsure how many will actually commit the time to become familiar with the whole roster.

There’s a decent number of maps, and while the modes are certainly inspired, or taken whole-cloth from other shooters, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The maps themselves aren’t very memorably designed, outside of standouts like Star Chamber, which feel like a classic Halo map. Other feel far too large for the number of players in each game, and often lead to people running around for a while looking for a fight.

While the gaming discourse on social media has arguably never been of less value or more disingenuous, time and time again the label of “dead game” is a pox that few games can shake.  Concord has barely been out in its full release for 24 hours and that particular anchor feels like it’s been attached to its neck for months.

Poor beta numbers, the asking price, and the vibe of its debut trailer have contributed to a game that the most vocal fans were seemingly desperate to fail, despite many who played the game pre-release saying that the gameplay itself is fun.

The cast of characters doesn’t help this. While they’re colourful, varied, and feature a wider spectrum of body types than you’ll typically find in modern games, they feel focus-tested to the point of blandness.

Contrary to what the loudest reactionists on X will tell you, this isn’t because the game’s cast is inclusive, and it’s certainly not because of some ridiculous reason like the game listing each character’s pronouns. The characters are just very forgettable.

There is no Tracer here, there is no Widowmaker. We look at the cast of Concord and can’t imagine even one of them being taken to heart by a community, much less people cosplaying as them, and begging to hear more about them.

“There is no Tracer here, there is no Widowmaker. We look at the cast of Concord and can’t imagine even one of them being taken to heart by a community, much less people cosplaying as them, and begging to hear more about them.”

Who are these people? Why aren’t there very easily accessible bios for each of them from the main menu? Sure, you do get some backstory in the Galactic Guide (which we’ll get to), but at the time of writing, unlocking more information for a specific character appears to be attached to playing as them. Why would we do that if we have no idea who they are?

Live service games always struggle with this, and while Concord does make a good effort at making the story of the game far more relevant than most games in its genre, it’s doing it with a cast that is almost universally banal.

Each week during Concord’s seasons, players will log on to find a new cutscene, which purports to give a better insight into the crew. While these cutscenes are extremely visually impressive and would be right at home in a typical Sony single-player experience, right now, out of context of a whole series of cutscenes to watch, it feels awkward.

Someone who has followed absolutely none of the game’s pre-release coverage will currently encounter a cutscene that introduces none of the characters, nor does it explain what the stakes of the world are, or why you’re all shooting each other.

The other end of Concord’s narrative is found in the Galactic Guide. This sprawling map, which would be right at home in Mass Effect, is a log of all of the events that have taken place in the canon, and will be updated as the seasons progress. We love this conceptually, and it’s executed admirably, but it’s a bit of a strange fit, and feels like it’s placed in the game in such a way that if players want to ignore it, they absolutely can.

While this could be a concession to casuals who won’t bother even learning the names of the characters, much less read pages of dialogue about space politics, it feels like some incentive to get players into the Galactic Guide would go a long way to get people to actually care about Concord’s world.

This is where the character bios are buried, once you unlock them. We’d have loved to have seen some kind of incentive like a skin, or another customisable element be given out as a reward for reading the scores of well-written backstory, but currently, it’s a ‘nice to have’ rather than anything essential.

If Concord was a Titanfall 2-level shooter, you could just about convince people to part with their money and take a gamble on this new IP. It would still be a struggle, and there’s a huge section of the gaming audience that is entrenched in the expectation that they simply do not pay money for games like this, but it would have a chance. While Concord is good though, it’s never amazing.

“If Concord was a Titanfall 2-level shooter, you could just about convince people to part with their money and take a gamble on this new IP.”

Its approach and focus on narrative is a welcome change in the genre, even if the game itself doesn’t feel massively confident in making you explore those things, and while the lack of a paid season pass – although it will eventually launch a cosmetic shop – is great, we feel that the game would have had a far better than had it launched free, or part of PlayStation Plus, and adopted that model.

Whether or not you think that’s a chilling indictment of the state of the genre or not, it’s absolutely the reality of it. While there’s something admirable about saying “you pay for this once” or even a developer saying that they think its game is good enough that people should pay to get in the door, it’s an unwinnable battle while Fortnite, Call of Duty, Apex Legends et al offer better games, with more to do, for free.