Ever since Overwatch basically imploded on itself, I’ve been looking for something to replace it. Concord looks to be exactly that game.
Let’s be clear, Concord isn’t an Overwatch clone. While characters might share similarities (i.e. a direct comparison to the aesthetics of Sombra, Widow, or Genji), that’s as far as it goes. Concord has a way of emphasizing team play, while allowing you to stand out on your own. The mechanics are very different from other hero-shooters like Overwatch in many ways, and this is what made me play the game the entire weekend.
The beta is a short glimpse of Concord’s fundamentals and showcases how it separates itself from other hero shooters. It’s fast paced, action in your face, and downright fun to play. The shooting mechanics rival some of the best shooters on the market, the movement feels incredibly fluid, and map designs allow combat to organically become hectic very quickly with extremely well crafted choke points. If anything the game is more akin to Destiny 2’s Crucible, but you know….good and well balanced.
What Concord currently does well in the beta far outweighs any negatives I can think of. But it is a beta so there are some things I’d like improved.
Some characters are in desperate need of some balancing. I’ve been paying attention to some early playtests and already noted this before even jumping in, but it doesn’t seem to be entirely fixed. Lennox, for example, is incredibly buffed to a point any player that is halfway decent with him will wreck teams solo. This is especially true if a PC player gets a hold of him.
Other characters seem rather weak for what they offer. A sniper shot should do more than half damage to enemies, which would allow her to be a finishing attack, and headshots should have a rightfully rewarded one-shot kill. A character who is shooting missiles, and has a rather lengthy reload time, either needs to zip around much easier or needs a buff to the missiles.
Speaking of PC players, the beta offers no way to cut off crossplay. Combined with the limited settings in the game, it really offset playerbases. Any time you were up against PC players, it was totally noticeable. So either this needs that handy “controller only” option, or needs to be separated.
Character designs, while not the weakest in the industry, are a little “too human” for me. There are a few characters with more creativity behind them, but most of the current roster boils down to a skin of a human-like character with animations and looks. I hope future content includes a little more in-depth design to make the characters pop more.
Between matches there is also some unnecessary hassle. With everything else about the UI so well crafted, I’m a bit disappointed that the game simply kicks you out of matchmaking when a game is complete. You need to close out the match, then go back into the menu and search for a new game, instead of it simply just heading into matchmaking itself.
Other minor gripes are simple technical issues I hope the team sorts out before launch. For example if the entire other team quits, you automatically win the game, but then the option to return to the home menu disappears, so you either need to reboot the game or wait for it to time out.
Everything else about the game seems to boil down to if you like the ideas implemented in a hero shooter, or not.
One big change is the game encourages you to play different characters throughout a single match. Most hero shooters make you pick your “main” which you gravitate toward in every match. Losing by a lot, or not having a good match? Switch to your main and ride it out. Concord, on the other hand, makes you shuffle through secondary characters before you eventually land on your “main” character because it creates an overall buff for the roster. The more characters you utilize and are successful with, the faster and more effective other characters become.
I noticed this feature has gone mostly unnoticed in a majority of games I played. It’s very common for people to gravitate to a main character, and run out the gate with it, so it’s obvious that is where people will go. On the flip side the game does a terrible job of encouraging this with a lack of flashing keycards suggesting to utilize the feature, and shorter matches never really let it take effect.
With the matches being incredibly short, and most matches being heavily lopsided towards the team that is sticking together, I rarely shuffled through more than 3 characters at max. And anyone that is heavily winning is still likely not going to switch characters just for a buff.
Which leads to the next aspect. You take on a squad of 5v5; so obviously blending teams with proper perks of the characters is important. There are so few “support” characters that you don’t have many options to begin with, and tank characters are rather few as well. I’d venture to say a majority of the roster is DPS, so switching characters constantly requires some form of team coordination to communicate when you’re switching; ensuring someone else fills the gap.
When playing with strangers,however, you’ll never get this level of communication. While you work your way through the roster, hopefully ending up on your main, it could be taken already and never become available. The nice thing is Concord offers “variants” of characters, so you can readily go into roster creation and add these variant rosters to your selection. Then selecting the variants counts as a new character for the buff.
With that said, I’m a bit disappointed Concord offers no real “ultimate” move to help swing the tide in your favor. Once a match is relatively out of hand, you’re basically forced to stick it out with no real way to recover. In Overwatch a well placed ultimate could easily swing the match back in your favor, and other games offer more of a buff to team based mechanics with select characters.
But again, it is a team hero based shooter and that is what the fun boils down to. If you get a team that works remotely well together (literally just staying within the vicinity of each other), then the game is a blast. If you get a team that is working together, and face another team that is also working together, it becomes a strategy based shooter where one team is hoping the other slips up, and it’s incredible to enjoy. Due to the fast paced nature, however, most people are just running in like Call of Duty and getting rocked.
The spawn system also doesn’t seem to do much justice either. Oftentimes I’m spawned so far away from my teammates, by the time I get to them they are wiped. Now I’m forced to run away or spawn again. The problem isn’t so much the distance, it’s the fact it’s so random you have no real way of knowing where to wait.
In Overwatch, you have central bases. So if you die and see your team getting wiped, you can run back to the base or wait there for them to spawn, then go back to the objective together. With Concord you don’t really know where anyone will spawn, so you could sit around waiting, then watch teammates pop up a good distance away still. So in a way the game kind of influences you to go at battles alone, which is a huge mistake.
Respawning is a bit annoying too. The characters all have one liners they shout out when you select them, and if you’re getting rocked to a point of respawning multiple times a match, you hear the zinger so many times that you wish the game was muted. If you’re not switching characters I’d prefer if the game just let it be and moved you to a team cam, instead of throwing the zinger in your face repeatedly.
However Concord has the absolute best user experience from a gaming perspective ever. Getting into the game, joining a squad, and booting up a match takes seconds and it is absolutely incredible. Creating parties is swift, and finding games is near instant. Who knows if this will last, but even Call of Duty has failed to get this right for years. Concord is literally two button presses, and bam, in a party and playing a match.
