These guys can be a huuuuuge pain to fight.ДЄctually playing Anthem is where the real trouble arises.

Hopefully the writers focus more on the grounded, affecting style of storytelling you get just a few short glimpses of at the end of the main campaign. Anthem does end with a mildly intriguing post-credits teaser that looks like it will take the game in a distinctly different direction from the story included in the shipping product, and since BioWare is promising 'ongoing narrative' content starting a handful of weeks after release, it won't take long to find out if it's any good. But the story only starts to scratch the surface there (and mostly does so around the edges of the main plot) by the time it's over, and all of these groups are just up against your standard generic evil empire trying to get its hands on the ancient tech before they do, anyway.

Though, there is some dramatic potential in the friction between the various good-guy factions, including the lighthearted mercenary freelancers, who your nameless character belongs to, the stuffy, militaristic sentinels, and Corvus, the secret spy agency. The vast bulk of the dialogue has an overly performative, irreverent tone to it that made it tough for me to get invested in what was going on. This is BioWare's first brand new from-the-ground-up setting in quite some time, but it's underpinned by the same 'ancient, vanished progenitor race and the magical technology they left behind' trope that's such well worn territory in video game stories, particularly in BioWare's own Mass Effect series, where it already appeared in two separate iterations. Anthem feels like it needs a lot more attention in a lot of areas. Most of the other elements that make up Anthem, from the storytelling to the loot to the basic gunplay, suffer from a range of problems or just aren't as good or polished as you'd like, and the game as a whole has an oddly rigid, disjointed structure that often makes playing it feel more tedious and frustrating than it should be. The game also has a robust character customizer, giving you a range of painting tools and letting you swap between materials like cloth, hard rubber, and various metals to create weird and unique looks for your power armor, without locking basic coloration behind a paywall or grind like some other loot games in recent memory. Soaring over a big open landscape in your robot suit (or javelin, as they're known here) nimbly covering ground in combat situations snapping into and out of flight mode in a split-second burst of fireworks: it all feels great, and it's nice that Anthem's most unique aspect also turns out to be its best. You can make some cool power armor if you put your mind to it.Д«ioWare nails the feeling of flight in its first attempt at a loot shooter, Anthem. Editor's note: This review was originally conducted in a podcast format, available as a video above or right here as an audio file.

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