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Over the weekend, I was able to spend some time with the Anthem Demo. The developers were very up front about the demo being an incomplete build, and that there would be some bugs. They say the demo in our hands is representative of the development progress from about 6 weeks ago, and they have continued to work and improve on the product for the final release.
The demo drops you into the story, an hour or two in probably. Each player starts as a level 10 in a Ranger Javelin, what they call their mech suits, or Iron Man type suits. If you want to grind the demo, your max level is 15. There are three playable story missions, a dungeon raid, called a Stronghold, and two entry points to the world for Free Play. I ran through the story missions once and went through the Stronghold two or three times and reached Level 12. Different levels unlock additional slots for equipment in your Javelin, in addition to the opportunity to choose another class of Javelin at Level 11 or 12. Each class comes with their own strengths and weaknesses. The “tank” has strong armor, but no shields, but the “scout” has strong shields, but weak armor. There is also a “mage” class to join the “soldier” class you start with. I tried the “mage”, or Storm Class, as my second Javelin and immediately jumped into the Stronghold Raid with some friends. There was a pretty steep learning curve, but we managed to get through it, only have to replay one section 10 times or so. Most of us were wanting to switch back to our original Javelins after about the 6th time.
The game play is pretty fun. Being able to fight on the ground with a myriad of weapon options, three different special abilities, (eventually) four different classes, and flight capability all serves to keep the game play interesting. There are multiple enemy types, ranging from different factions of humans, to the fauna of the alien planet. The controls are vaguely familiar, but just different enough to prove frustrating, and there is one control input that I’m not sure how you use it without setting the controller down, or crossing your thumbs over the midline. To be fair, you might be able to remap the buttons; I did not dig deep into the menus to see. The only controls I changed were the look inversion settings…all four of them. The game encourages you to play with up to four other players, to the point of you have to play with four to do the Stronghold raid. I was playing with two of my buddies and we kept getting assigned a fourth. This is where having the different classes will shine I think; when you can have three or four different classes, covering each other’s weaknesses with each other’s strengths.
I greatly appreciate Bioware offering a free to play demo of the game before release. It provided enough sense of game play to decide whether it was worth the purchase or not. To be fair, while there did appear to be server issues, and issues with loading into the game world, Bioware was very upfront about this not being a final build. Here’s to hoping that they do fix these issues, if they haven’t already.
In all, I enjoyed the demo and I will be looking to buy this game more than I had planned on before I had the opportunity to play it. If you ever wanted to feel like Iron Man or War Machine on an alien planet, I think this is your chance.
