Concord Review – The Ugly Duckling of Hero Shooters

Overwatch, Fortnite, Apex Legends, Marvel Rivals, Valve’s Deadlock…and Concord. Firewalk Studios debut project is a 5v5 hero shooter, an (almost) fully priced game in a genre dominated by F2P titles. Despite its pedigree of being published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, the game failed to garner attention. Its first trailer promised a story-driven game with quirky characters travelling the galaxy. Its second trailer revealed it’s another hero shooter, shedding any goodwill it garnered until then.

Its closed and open beta periods didn’t instil much confidence in the title, with slow gameplay and uninspired character designs bringing the game down. The following review is based on the current state of the game, as it launched on August 23rd. We had the opportunity to play Concord leading up to its launch, trying out all of its heroes, maps, and modes. Does the game do enough to stand on its own and build an audience despite the rocky start?

Read more about Concord in our coverage of its Open Beta.

TL;DR

Concord is a 5v5 shooter entering a saturated market with a €40 price tag. As a hero shooter, its heroes are not unique enough to attract the fans of the genre. It has no original modes or a captivating story to hook the players. A shift to an F2P model might just be what the game needs to stay online.

Story – Guardians of the Galaxy at Home

Concord’s story is half-finished. Firewalk Studios decided to drip-feed the story to players over several months, as the game evolves. For now, the story revolves around a group of Freegunners, bounty hunters travelling the Concord galaxy, doing…something. 

It’s unclear just what the ‘hook’ of this story is on launch, which is troubling. This is the moment when the game has the most attention and it needs to sell itself to players now, not 6 months down the line. By telling the story with a single cutscene per week, players just won’t care nor bother to log in every week to see a minute or two of casual chat between the characters.

Learning About the Concord Galaxy

On the other hand, Concord’s world has history and it’s told through the Galactic Guide. This is a separate screen you can access from the main menu to learn more about different planets and their history. It’s a neat feature that not many games have. There’s only one problem—it asks the player to read paragraphs and paragraphs of text to ‘learn more’. As a 5v5 hero shooter, the game won’t attract the same type of players who like to read endless journal entries and quest logs, such as those found in The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak, for example. 

Players who have the patience to revisit the Galactic Guide as they unlock new entries will have a better understanding of the Concord galaxy than others. However, a disproportionate number of players simply want to queue for the next match instead. For those players, it’s all about the gameplay.

Gameplay – Slow and Unoriginal

Concord’s gameplay is stale. The game imitates elements found in other hero shooters and doesn’t add anything new to distinguish itself. Movement feels sluggish and you’ll always feel like you’re moving underwater, just slightly slower than you should be moving. This makes each match slower than it should be because it takes longer to find other players on the map. 

The maps themselves also lack a clear direction, a sort of ‘tunnel’ that players can instinctively follow to complete objectives, find the enemy team, etc. We often take games like Overwatch or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for granted with their map design. However, they are the blueprint of how organic maps should be designed in online shooters.

The core shooting mechanics of Concord feel good and are responsive. Each hero has their unique weapon but their abilities are not distinct enough to stand apart from one another. The game also doesn’t have ultimate abilities, meaning that you have access to the same skills at the beginning of the match as you do at the end. This can make matches predictable and uninteresting because a ‘comeback’ is much more difficult without ultimate abilities. If a team starts winning early on, the winner is already decided.

Game Modes – Been There, Done That

In terms of modes, the game doesn’t have anything you haven’t seen before in other hero shooters. Standard deathmatch, zone capture, kill confirmed, and no respawn modes are all here. The developers promised ranked play will come to the game down the line, but with the no respawn modes already having longer matchmaking times, only time will tell.

Concord does feature training and challenge modes, something that was absent from its closed and open betas. New players can now more easily learn how to control different heroes and use their abilities in competitive matches. These training modes also have scoreboards, which add some incentive for you to do well in each round to achieve a higher score.

The Heroes of Concord

Concord’s heroes look like AI-generated artwork. While the game has a certain art style, its heroes look like they’re a combination of various other media and online shooters instead of original creations. Their alternative skins also don’t offer more variety. Instead, they are mostly just recoloured from the original skin. The team will surely add more variety to each hero’s skins but for now, it is what it is.

Whether on purpose or not, the team took inspiration from The Guardians of the Galaxy and its quirky characters to build its roster of 16 heroes. However, what makes the Guardians work also drags Concord down. Its characters don’t stand out in any way, either visually or through their dialogue. Their lines are cliché after cliché, and they are difficult to distinguish during combat. 

Great character design comes from the shapes of each character, not the details themselves which are often lost during frantic fights. If most characters blend as you fight them, you won’t know who’s on the enemy team and who’s on yours apart from their blue and red outline. Heroes are the selling point of every ‘hero’ shooter, and Concord fails to bring memorable characters to the table.

Visuals – Colorful & Bland at the Same Time

Concord runs on Unreal Engine 5 but that doesn’t show. The game has a cartoony art style that fortunately allows it to run at stable 60FPS at all times. Loading times are fast and the game is relatively bug-free on day one. We experienced no crashes or connection issues during our time with it on PlayStation 5. Concord’s main issue lies in its lack of a distinct art style. It doesn’t stand on its own as a brand-new IP with a bright future ahead of it. Instead, it looks like it blended what works in other games and simply chose to make that its identity. 

The result is that the game certainly is colourful and vibrant in terms of its maps, hero select screens, and the Galactic Guide. The hero selection screen is especially impressive because every character is highly detailed and well-animated. On the other hand, nothing here catches the eye and that’s a shame. This is one aspect that Concord won’t be able to fix with patches.

Audio – Quality Sound Design, Cringe-Worthy Voice Acting

As far as the game’s audio, it’s serviceable. Sound design is of high quality, especially if you’re playing with a headset. You’ll easily identify directional queues on where the enemies are and you won’t have an issue knowing when a fight is happening somewhere. 

But because the heroes themselves don’t have distinct abilities that make them stand apart from each other, everything blends during fights. This is especially apparent because there are no ultimate abilities in Concord. In similar games, heroes call out to others when they activate ultimate abilities to scare the enemy and encourage their team. Concord often feels like 10 people are fighting their own battles and just so happens to be divided into two groups of five.

The game’s voice acting doesn’t add to the atmosphere and instead detracts from the overall experience. The voice acting itself is of high quality but its direction is a bit unfortunate. The scripts for each hero are filled with stereotypical statements and clichés instead of sounding like distinct characters. This goes for both matches and cutscenes.

Roadmap & Promise of Future Content

Firewalk Studios shared Concord’s roadmap for the next several months in the lead-up to its release. Players can look forward to new maps, modes, heroes, unlockable items, and more—all free of charge. This decision on the part of the developer should feel good in theory, but in 2024, we are used to F2P hero shooters with no upfront cost. 

It’s the opposite of everything we’ve come to expect and it might turn out to be the game’s downfall. For a player base to appear, Concord has to be easily accessible. Asking players to purchase the game and then see whether they like it or not just won’t do in this genre, and it’s a shame.

Conclusion – Should you Play Concord?

Concord is a victim of unfortunate circumstances and business model decisions. If it launched five years ago, it would have faired much better in the 5v5 hero shooter market. As it stands, however, it doesn’t do anything new or exciting to justify its price tag. Sony’s bread and butter have always been single-player, story-driven games like God of War: Ragnarok—Concord just reinforces that fact.

And with so many free alternatives out there, players simply don’t have a reason to switch from something like Valorant, Overwatch, or Apex Legends to a game that launched with a very rocky start. We hope Concord can overcome its bumpy start and flourish with Sony backing it up. The game is now available on PlayStation 5 and PC on Steam.

Big thanks to PlayStation Greece for providing us with the review copy.