Concord (2024)

Concord is dead.

No roadmap, no "we are listening to your feedback", it is just being unceremoniously killed off on September 6 with full refunds being issued.

Now they do say that they are going to step back and reevaluate but like... I think the whole game is fundamentally not interesting enough to fix. I do hope it's not all wasted development, I hope they can take some tools and assets from this game and reuse them for something new, but wowie zowie.

Is this the biggest AAA flop of all time? Like it legitimately may be in that conversation.

Update: game is now going offline, so the title of this review is now even more accurate...

This is not going to be a super in-depth review, I just have a few things to say about Concord, so I'm just going to ramble a few paragraphs below.

Concord never had it easy, and with the rumors of toxic ideals and workplace environment at Firewalk, it's not a surprise the game ended up how it did. It's fun, and I enjoy it playing it; despite of the woke/pronouns noise sorrounding it, despite of the bad performance on my otherwise decent machine; and despite some of its questionable design choices.

The "crew bonus"-system is interesting, as your played characters will give you a permanent bonus when you die and switch off of it. It promotes more varied gameplay experiences within the match, and provides a helping hand to the losing team, as they will be able to go through more characters and rack up more bonuses. It's interesting in concept, but at the same time, Concord wants to have short matches that last about 4 to 5 mintues, so unless you get off to a really bad start and die a few times within the first few minutes, you rarely get to really leverage the power you've built up, as the matches are usualy over before you get to take advantage of said bonuses. I wish they increase the average match duration by 3 to 4 minutes, because aside from my gripes with the system itself, sometimes the downtime between matches is equal to the duration of the actual matches themselves.

While I have a little handful of characters I have yet to try out, luckily I can say that the ones I have tried (which are the majority of the cast) are fun to play. They're pretty simple to pick up and play, while some have slight variances in mechanics from others that confuse at first, like some recharge their abilities based on cooldowns, others have to get takedowns and then pickup a charge from the enemy's corpse, and others have to go through a lengthy recharge animation to get another charge of their abilities.

I hope Concord can turn things around and find a healthy audience, because looking at the game itself in a vacuum, it deserves it, but I'm not so confident it will, because of the internal challenges Firewalk Studios have to overcome to be able to right the ship.

This is, in my opinion, the nadir of AAA gaming. A completely bland, soulless, Guardians of the Galaxy rip off. A paint by the numbers "live service" pile of sludge void of anything unique, different or interesting.

The question isn't will this fail, but how badly will this fail. Have these companies not gotten the hint yet that we DON'T want this crap? Did they not get it with Suicide Squad? Did they not get it with Skulls and Bones? Did they not get it with all the other too many to count numerous failures that have caused studios to shut down, talented designers to be laid off and gamers to think maybe it's time to pick up a new hobby?

If I was a PS5 owner and saw this as one of the "highlights" of my console, I'd be livid.