You might get a sense of Concord if you take a copy of Overwatch from a dusty GameStop shelf and place it beneath Peter Quill’s stinky armpit from Guardians of the Galaxy. This sci-fi competitor from Sony plays it fairly safe when it comes to competitive hero shooters. It features instantly endearing characters rendered in breathtakingly gorgeous cutscenes and ability-based PvP combat that never addresses why those characters are fighting one another when they are allies in those same cutscenes. But, Concord is still enjoyable to play even if it doesn’t provide much in the way of novelty. I’ve played this sweating shooter for more than 40 hours, and it does a fantastic job at class-based gunplay. Its incredibly strong base undoubtedly helps it go a long way, but it still has a ways to go in its live-service development because there aren’t many unique features and only a few bland game modes.
Together with your group, you will create a five-person team of superpowered heroes, each with specific skills, weaknesses, and strengths. You will then use this team in several predictable game styles to take on the enemy team. These include the typical deathmatch game, Trophy Hunt, a “Kill Confirmed” mode, and Clash Point, a zone control mode, to mention a few. Not a single one of them even remotely resembles something new. However, if you have outstanding gunplay and fantastic characters with intriguing abilities to support it, being unduly familiar isn’t always a negative thing—and Concord has both down pat.
The result is that every weapon feels incredibly responsive and finely tuned, and no two characters’ weapons feel at all similar. Concord wisely keeps its weapon selection very limited, giving each character only one or two options by default and no way to customize that. The sly and cunning Vale primarily uses a long-range sniper rifle to eliminate foes from a distance, while the arena-controlling elderly lady, Duchess, is armed with a powerful submachine gun. While some of these larger-than-life fighters, like Bazz and her knife-throwing and melee-focused strategies, or cleaning robot 1-Off and his vacuum-based weaponry that pushes and pulls both foes and bullets about the area, did not instantly click with me.
But with enough time spent with each of them, I was able to grow to respect and even feel a connection to this extraordinarily diverse and well-balanced cast of people. Once you’ve mastered their techniques, all 16 alternatives feel incredibly wonderful to employ. It’s also a lot of fun to combine them with the other four characters on your squad to perform a certain role, such as damage-absorbing tank, DPS king, or philanthropic support character.
Fantastic, varied, and with very long cooldowns are the abilities.
In a similar vein, depending on the character you’re playing, the powers that go along with their weapons are amazing, varied, and have long cooldowns. While the raging ogre Star Child may close distances fast with his charging assault and shatter the earth to deal significant damage around him, the floating, fireball-chucking Haymar can blind opponents for a while and make them pay for staying in one place too long.
While certain characters lack uniqueness—such as Teo, the most generic soldier in the universe with smoke and cluster grenades for powers—these uninteresting choices are scarce and provide a convenient starting place for inexperienced players. I can’t say that I’ve felt that way about most hero shooters I’ve played with, but learning each character, using their abilities to counter your opponents’ team composition, and balancing the mayhem on the battlefield with excellent gunplay was just as much fun in my first match as it was in my thirty.
You’ll need to acclimate yourself to the roster as well since Concord’s Rivalry competition playlist is one of the few unique variations on the genre. You can pick any character you want in Rivalry, provided that no one else on your side has already chosen it. This is in contrast to casual playlists where you can pick any character you want, provided you win a round while using that character. Winning one will force you to step outside of your comfort zone and use at least four different characters because matches are best of seven rounds.
This is a clever method of making players learn more than one or two moves, but it also promotes team communication in between rounds to make sure you have adequate coverage to execute whatever strategy you’re trying to pull off as your options become more limited.
One of the few new ideas Concord offers in Rivalry is character restriction.
Concord’s character varieties have another intriguing twist that lends credence to that decision: characters that are somewhat modified copies of the current cast, each having a special ability and a changed look that can be obtained by fulfilling certain tasks throughout games. Lennox, the gunslinger, for instance, can usually reload his weapon by evading, but the variation you may unlock for him forfeits that skill in favor of having more ammunition for all of his weapons. Even though each variation mostly offers small adjustments, they all offer worthwhile pursuits that expand fighting possibilities. Possibly more significantly, variants allow you to play the same characters in successive rounds of Rivalry by counting as separate characters on your crew. This allows you to somewhat manipulate the numbers.
Verdict
Although Concord isn’t the most inventive or feature-rich hero shooter available, it has a lot going for it in the months and years to come thanks to its amazing competitive gameplay, 16 intriguing characters to get to know, and 12 well-created maps. The fact that I found myself losing dozens of hours to its PvP charms despite its nearly nonexistent story and the dire need for a signature game mode is a tribute to its first-person shooter skills. At this point, it’s good enough for me to suggest testing out, but perhaps the live-service plan will do its thing and give this promising shooter the love it needs to become something truly remarkable.
