Concord Review

PlayStation has been interested in creating a live service game for quite some time now. It was apparent when the now-canceled The Last of Us Part 2 multiplayer segment was announced that PlayStation Studios wanted in on the fun—especially since their recent acquisition of Bungie. Their in-house studio, Firewalk Studios, has made Concord a result of this interest. While the visuals and movement of the game show some promise, with a heavy heart, I must say that it is a big swing and a miss with this 5v5 hero shooter.

In case you haven't heard, Concord is a new 5v5 hero shooter that plays a lot like Overwatch but has Destiny's movement mechanics, which makes sense because a lot of it was built by the former Destiny PVP team. It's also an extremely fun retro space theme, but the game has some big flaws that make it fall short compared to its competitors, Overwatch 2, Paladins, Apex Legends, Halo Infinite, and Valorant. The first glaring issue I see when I compare Concord with its competitors is that this game costs $40 at launch, whereas the rest of the competition is free to play.

This definitely impacts how many people would play Concord, and it's not like the game makes a good case for itself with what it has to offer. It seems that the folks over at PlayStation did not get the hint when they put a price on Concord. You can also clearly see this result, as Concord has yet to cross the 1000 active player count on Steam after release.

But what is so wrong with the gameplay? Let's get into that. Concord is nothing you haven't seen before if that makes sense. It is definitely a hero shooter because your abilities are just as important as the actual gunplay in the game. The heroes are called Free Gunners, and in the game's lore, they operate essentially as space mercenaries, which explains the constantly shifting teams and alliances.

Each Freegunner has their own amount of health, movement style, dodge style, weapon, or sometimes two weapons, and one or two unique abilities and a passive that usually all synergize with one another. Some of them are extremely DPS-oriented and have low health or ability to sustain themselves, such as It-Z, a Tracer-like character.

You can pick any of these characters as long as no one else has picked them, and interestingly, there is no limit to which classes you can pick here. You are even encouraged to change your class often to get certain bonuses, but the bonuses themselves are not significant enough to warrant changing them without regard to team synergies and meta; it's more of a nice to have when it's there.

The heroes have this retro 80s or 90s space theme that can be charming, although they look mostly drab or uninspired because half of them are in Buzz Lightyear suits. They don't necessarily stand out to me, which leads me to care more about the hero's role and abilities.

I have an issue with this: with games like these, you would at least want to resonate with the character you choose to play or main. Maybe it is the aesthetic, their voice lines when you play, or their lore that stands out as appealing to you; anything that makes you want to insert yourself into the character. Concord does not have anything of that sort in most of their Freegunners.

As for what game modes you can use these heroes in, six game modes are split between three playlists. There's the brawl playlist with a takedown, this game's version of Team Deathmatch, and the trophy hunt, which is just kill-confirmed. Then there's the overrun playlist, which has area control modes, signal chase, like hardpoint, and area control, which is domination. And then you have the last playlist, rivalry, with cargo run and clash point.

The Rivalry playlist sounds most similar to Overwatch, but there is no respawning here. I wish I could share my thoughts on this mode, but no matter how many times I tried, I could not get a match. I would get kicked out of matchmaking each time, so there is nothing I can add about this.

The other modes are your run-of-the-mill arena shooter modes. You have seen them in other multiplayer games several times, but once you are in the game, something feels different. You get health pickups at fixed locations, for example, but that actually ends up being detrimental to the gameplay, as Concord is just too slow when you get to the meat of it.

The game offers both healing pickups and certain abilities that can heal you. The issue is that the heavy and medium Freegunners are too tanky. You can find yourself dumping multiple magazines at enemies only for them to heal through some abilities or some pickup.

Plus, the movement is way too slow in Concord. It resembles the style in Destiny, and that makes sense, considering part of the team responsible for that game is behind this one. Since this is a space-themed game, all the maps have low gravity, and the heroes themselves are also slow. With this sort of gravity, you can often find yourself trying to pull off a sick move in the air, only to make yourself an easy target as you fall helplessly from the sky in slow motion. Plus, the movement for the heaviest Freegunners is so slow that you feel like a turret when you are playing one.

The result of this is that the gameplay turns out to be sort of not engaging in Concord. The gunfights take too long, and the movement is way too slow, which makes it a slog to get around the maps. This game is a map-based shooter, meaning you would have an advantage if you knew them. However, I doubt that it would make a huge difference, considering you have so much time to make decisions here. I wish the movement speed for the medium heroes was a bit faster, and the gravity feels like it needs to be increased to help with the game's pace.

The final bit I have on this section before moving into the maps is the gunplay itself. The gunplay is good, mostly inspired by Destiny, maybe a little Halo. The game really rewards headshots and rewards tactical ability usage. You get your ability back through kills, not time, so it rewards that aggressive playstyle, but there's a little bit of a problem because this game is missing reload canceling, something I consider a staple of FPS games.

I could deal with the giant health bars if I could sprint and cancel my reload. I could get back into the fight faster and maybe increase the skill gap, but that's not something I can do right now. It might be something they add later.

Visually, the maps take the retro sci-fi style the characters have and turn it up to eleven—and they look great. They work excellently within the aesthetics of this game. Whoever is on the art team for Concord deserves a bonus because they have done some great work with the map design. They're simple, easy to see, learn, and navigate, but smaller than Overwatch maps, so you get into the action much faster. For some people, that's good, but personally, I do like having a little bit of space.

Concord does not have much content yet, and it feels like its systems are very basic. It is not clear whether more free gunners, game modes, or maps will be added, and if the answer is no, it does not spell good news for this game.

Concord is a decent 5v5 hero shooter but does not offer enough to stand out from the mature competition. This game really needed some sort of hype, X-factor, for it to even catch the eyes of gamers. The aesthetic is impressive, but the character designs are nothing to write home about. The gunplay has some potential, but the move speed is too slow, and you simply have too much HP. I don't have high hopes for this game's longevity.

Perhaps changing Concord's monetization scheme to a free-to-play model would help with the player count intermittently, but there needs to be a whole lot more changes to keep those players' attention for more than a few days. As it stands, Concord feels like a game that is dead on arrival, and it is hard to recommend to gamers when other titles exist. I don't know what Sony was thinking when they greenlit this game.