Anthem – Legion of Dawn – Is it Worth $60?

Having played several hours of Anthem – Legion of Dawn edition, I would like to share what I think about the game – as a player who really looks deep into the fundamental points of what a game is built on. As I analyze each of a game’s fundamental core factors, I will share my findings and conclude with whether the game is worth a buy.  Specifically, I am going to take a look at the speed of the game, the objectives of the game, and the difficulty of the game. Read closely, because in this review you will find out if Anthem is actually worth a buy.

In terms of the speed of the game, I am not referring to how much time I spend on a game before finishing it. Players like myself care more about how fast we can move into and out of different screens and also how quickly we can begin again after being forced out of a game. Before the game’s actual release date, I was able to play the demo because I have Origin Access Premium for my laptop. I quickly discovered there was a flaw: a player would have a so-called “infinite loading screen” where a player would sit on the loading screen and have to force close the game and go back into the game before being able to play again.  It turns out, this could also damage the platform you were playing on. Force-closing something is not something you should do unless it is an absolute emergency, and with this glitch happening often, it was not good for the player. Luckily, the designers fixed it in the first patch after the game was released. In its place, lots of long loading screens appeared often and took away from the immersion of the game.

Sometimes you would get a loading screen while you would just be walking around in the free roam part of the game. These long loading screens were also a problem when loading into a quest. Anthem is a multiplayer game where you play online with other people while accomplishing objectives. With these loading screens, the players on a team would load in at different times. For the people who loaded in later than their teammates, they have to go through an additional loading screen because they were too far away from the other players.  Consequently, the delayed players would miss out on some of the gameplay. Naturally, this would be a problem for teammates looking to explore together.

The next factor of the game to talk about are the objectives. In Anthem, the end goal (spoiler-free) is to restore the former world back to glory, so the objective for this end goal would be completing tasks for civilians to make the community better.  For instance, one objective that you can get is: Defend a checkpoint from x amount of enemies for x amount of time. This objective is pretty cool, but it gets old fast because there are only so many enemies you can defeat before it gets boring and almost like a chore. Another objective is similar: Deliver “echos” a fragment of time that unlocks a magically guarded door. Sometimes a player would have to collect over 30 or 40 echos, and that’s not fun at all because you have to journey so far into enemy territory to get echos, and you could potentially die and lose all the progress you just made. Normally in a game, two flawed objectives could be overlooked, but in Anthem, the rest of the objectives you do are just variants of the two objectives previously talked about.  

Now in the game’s defense, a player would occasionally get something interesting, but to get to something interesting you would have to go through a ton of these flawed objectives. Unfortunately, the game almost seems like a chore when you get to higher difficulty settings and have to collect so many echos and defeat so many enemies. This leads to my next point – the difficulty of the game.

Now for the difficulty of the game, I’m not talking about the storyline being difficult but the factors of the game that increase the difficulty setting. For those hardcore players out there who want a real bloodbath like to max out the difficulty.  In Anthem, the developers made the foolish decision to connect the higher the difficulty with the more damage and health an enemy has. This is not something that gamers look for in difficulty settings. What it should be is that the health and damage of the enemy goes up some but not 30 times the base amount that it has on Grandmaster 3 (the max difficulty setting). Difficulty should also determine how fast the player can be detected by the intelligence of the enemy instead of just being a grunt, the amount of loot a player can find and the level of the loot a player can find. These are all factors of higher difficulty settings. When Bioware developers go the easy way out and make the highest difficulty have enemies with 30 times the health and damage output as the base enemy,  it makes the game seem like a chore.

When it comes down to the base factors of Anthem, I believe that the game is not worth the buy at this stage of the game.  When we consider how fun the concepts of the game are, it sounds like a great game. However, since the game has been in development for over 6 years, it is not worth the $60. After a few updates, possibly, but with the reviews and the fanbase of the game dying, it is on the verge of a recall.

If you were to pick up anything from this review, I would tell you not to buy the game at this stage -Wait for it to be updated. Right now, it is not worth your money or time.