Every javelin is fun to play, though, and their abilities erupt with all the flash and force of a nuclear bomb, making for some spectacular moments of pure carnage. I'm particularly fond of the Storm, who channels the elements into explosive area-of-effect spells that can obliterate entire packs of enemies. Each javelin is like a typical RPG class, with three types of abilities you can augment as you loot more gear. It's a good thing that Anthem's combat is mostly enjoyable, at least at lower difficulties. I've silenced dozens more since then and it's always just an excuse to summon some mundane enemies to kill-as if I haven't done enough of that already. The first Shaper relic I silenced summoned ice dogs. Characters back in Fort Tarsis regaled me with crazy tales about Shaper relics inverting gravity or teleporting people into alternate dimensions-all cool stuff that I'd love to experience. Missions that task me with shutting down the highly volatile Shaper relics are especially disappointing. I've had roughly a dozen missions fail to work correctly, forcing my party to abandon ship and start over from the beginning because an objective wouldn't update or an enemy wouldn't spawn.
Though BioWare's day one patch promises to fix some of these issues, I'll believe it when I see it. Though Anthem's world feels large at first, by the end of the campaign I had fought in the same handful of arenas and caves plenty of times.Īnd that's when Anthem's missions aren't glitching out or breaking entirely. Nearly every mission follows the exact same structure: fly a few minutes to a location, complete the objective, and repeat that process two more times until the mission is over. It doesn't matter if I'm silencing a Shaper relic that could destroy the world or looking for a lost scientist, I know that at some point I'm going to have to defend a specific point for 30 seconds or use the radar on my HUD to find hidden objects and then bring them somewhere. Whether I'm doing a story mission, a randomized contract, or one of Anthem's Strongholds (20-minute dungeons that work like Strikes in Destiny 2), there are maybe half a dozen mission objectives that Anthem cycles between again and again and again. The jungles of Bastion are ridiculously pretty and soaring through them with my squad before each mission is sublime, but the missions themselves are boring and repetitive. Things are only marginally better once I hop in my javelin and head into the open world. What's worse, Anthem is structured so that you often go through several loading screens in succession, like at the end of missions. A day one patch has reportedly fixed load times on "older drives," but on my Crucial MX200 SSD loading into the open world can still take 50 seconds. The biggest issue is that Anthem has incredibly long load times.
Jarred digs into the full Anthem performance breakdown if you want more information. Those dips were disappointing, but the combat is so explosive I never really noticed them too much. With an RTX 2070, i7-8700, 16GB RAM, and 512GB SSD, I was able to enjoy Anthem on high settings at 1440p with okay performance that ranged between 50fps and 70fps depending on the complexity of the scene.