I was skeptical of Anthem. Bioware is now just a name, no longer the team that made Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, or even Mass Effect. I did my time with Destiny and Destiny 2, and I felt like there wasn't room for an action MMO in my life. However, I played the free demo weekend and it was actually fun to play. I wasn't sure about the story, but the game felt good enough. Two friends were buying it, I had nothing else to play, and so Anthem was purchased.

Anthem is a game that, mechanically, functions very well. It feels like a souped-up version of Mass Effect 3's combat. There are combos for mixing status effects (eg, use a rocket on a frozen guy and do extra damage), and a moderate assortment of guns, and some special abilities. It all feels really tight, the shooting the smashing and all. You have a choice of four different "javelins," each which play differently. The generally balanced and most Mass-Effect-like "Ranger," the speedy and flimsy "Interceptor," the elemental wizard "Storm," or the hulking tank "Colossus." Each adds a different way to play, which can stretch some of the scarce content if you so choose. The game plays well enough, but the true highlight is the jetpack, though.

Everyone has a means of flying that, in most circumstances, is available. Unlike flying mounts in many games where you can only use them out of combat, if you're fighting a bunch of enemies and are losing health, just jetpack away. It's not so broken as to be abused, the game is tuned around it well. Enemies have means of "overheating" you, which temporarily stops flying until you cool down (a few seconds or so). You can also hover around, blasting enemies from the sky which even grants a damage bonus for the "Storm" javelin.

The logistics of actually getting into a game and playing are far too annoying for 2019. The game's baffling UI feels as though it was designed by my mother, who has never played a video game and has never designed a UI. Weapons and items are not swappable in real time, but rather require you go back to town to create a "loadout" to go on a mission with. It's a good thing that weapons and items don't seem to matter at all. Enemies scale with you the whole game, so equipping new items does not seem to help taking them down. Of course, you'll need to cycle through some items over the course of the game until you find one that works for you (auto-cannons and flamethrowers did well for my colossus). I wish this wasn't the case, because getting loot drops is one of the great joys of MMO style games. Seeing a purple quality item drop and already knowing that it doesn't matter sucks the fun out of it.

Bioware was, at a time, one of the finest names in narrative video games. Now, however, they have been reduced to just another action game sweatshop. It's true that Anthem has some interesting concepts, but they're just that and no more. With the jetpacks and guns and power suits you'd think Anthem to be a sci-fi game. It is, in fact, high fantasy wrapped in a different container. There are legendary heroes and villains that feel much more like Dragon Age than Mass Effect. Also, more like a fantasy game than a sci-fi one, few things are properly explained. You don't question the existence of elves in fantasy, and we're not meant to question too much here, either. If only it worked that way.

Because of the sci-fi wrapper I can't help but question things, and Anthem isn't great at answering those questions. The world around you is told through picking up codices, which are hard to read in the field where you pick them up. Often, you'll see these while battling enemies and not have time to read them. Others can be found in town where you can freely read them, but they only illuminate so much. The game's main story (which has a incomprehensibly limp ending) is pretty self contained. It sheds no light on the world, the games races, or any further conflicts.

It also bothers me that the bad guys are all named vague things that sound evil. The Dominion, Scars, Outlaws...Why would any group call themselves "The Dominion"? It sounds so evil. Drew Karpyshyn, writer on Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic once told me "The best villains think they are the heroes." That always stuck with me. The game's world is 1960's comic book level deep. "Scars" are bad (for no reason, mind you), and "The Legion of Dawn" are good guys (for no reason, mind you).

Anthem's narrative structure does not function with its mission structure. Every single mission - and I need to stress here that I mean every single mission - involves you going to one spot, killing enemies, and then being told by someone over comms to go to another spot and kill enemies. Sometimes you need to hold a point, but it's meaningless because it just involves you killing enemies while not moving a whole lot. It feels very much like the missions of the original Destiny. Bioware should know better, they had more than one game to learn from.

There are only so many ways a character can tell you "we found another Scar camp!" or "That body isn't the dead Freelancer you're looking for, try this other spot!" Halfway through the game it sinks in that this is it. The entire game, front to back, is just "go here, shoot, go there shoot." In a way most action games are that, but they mask things in thicker veneers, or break it up with narrative (and I don't mean someone talking over comms while I shoot guys). The entire game becomes the most video gamey video game I've played in a while. It makes the characters sort of cringey, in a way. "God, they don't know they're in a mediocre video game, do they?" There is no gravity to anyone's decisions when it amounts to the exact same mission every single time.

Anthem looks and sounds beautiful, though. The world is lush and bright, and effects look cool and thick with detail. The story moments are animated with the most lifelike motion capture I may have ever seen. They are clearly making up for Mass Effect Andromeda, because the facial capture and physical acting are top notch. The score is solid, injecting a sort of Middle Eastern flair in some times that really sets it apart from other games. If only the story could keep up with the animations.

The only time I had any true fun with Anthem is during the Strongholds on the hard difficulty while in a party with friends. Strongholds are just another name for dungeons (or strikes from Destiny). These moments were tense, and truly required the use of the game's mechanics to progress. It was fun and harrowing. The game's normal difficulty isn't engaging enough to have any meaningful moments, so playing on hard is the only way to milk some life from the game. Like Diablo III, there are also a sliding scale of even more difficulties past hard.

Anthem has a lot of work to do before it's a good game. I don't expect much, though, because Bioware hasn't made a good game in almost a decade. There are better action MMOs to spend your time with, and much better stories to immerse yourself in. Anthem shoots well and looks fantastic, but it's not worth your money in its current state.

This game has so many great parts... The flight, the combat, the voice acting, the animations (including facial animations), the environments, and the beginnings of an intriguing story.

It's just a shame that these good parts aren't assembled in a particularly engaging way.

Missions are really just random combinations of ~3 of the following:

• kill the enemy wave
• collect some parts and bring them to a central location
• stand in a spot killing enemies until a guage fills up
• solve an extremely light puzzle with the solution painted on a wall next to it.

The only real exceptions are the insufferable "missions" midway through the game which require you to enter the Freeplay mode and grind a minimum number of combo kills, multi kills, opened treasure chests, completed world events, etc to progress.

Theoretically, you can play the main story missions with other people. But invariably, you begin each mission by staring at a "Matchmaking" animation which ultimately times out, leaving you to solo every mission.

I'm not much of a veteran of shooter-looter-shlooters... But I had a genuinely hard time finding the fun in the multiplayer aspect of the game. First off, it takes way too much time & grinding to get any meaningful cosmetic upgrades. And all you really do is just fly around, randomly encountering the "pieces" that make up the main story missions. Or you can enter dungeons with basically-unkillable final bosses (only because they have too much HP to drain in the allotted time when playing solo).

Final verdict: this was a decent (albeit shallow gameplay-wise) single player campaign. But everything about the looting and multiplayer falls flat.