‘Concord’ Review (PS5)
There has been a lot of negative press surrounding Concord, resulting in it being pulled from online stores and players being given full refunds. So, it is interesting to see where this all went wrong.
The short-lived title was the latest IP from developer Firewalk Studios, a recent purchase of Sony’s, and they are adding to their growing portfolio of titles. Concord is a 5v5, live-service hero-shooter which had always been pegged to fail by the gaming community. And that’s not without reason. Concord comes into an already saturated market of live-service shooters who, quite honestly, do it better, like Overwatch, Fortnite, and Destiny 2.
The overall design of the game is pretty basic. Players take their pick from 16 characters; each has their weapons and abilities, and you can play whichever character you want, provided that no other player is using them first. The level design is pretty much what you might expect from these games. There is Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed, and Zone Control… there is nothing novel or unique at all about it.
What is fun about Concord are the abilities, which feel diverse and unique allowing players to change the state of play and get the upper hand over their opponents. As such, there is some level of replayability, given that players have the opportunity to learn all 16 characters’ unique traits and test them out in the chaos of the battlefield.
That all said, Concord failed because of its ridiculous decision to charge players £30 to play a game that is not as good as its free-to-play counterparts. It did have an over-inflated budget in terms of its production, but there seemed to be very little in the way of marketing despite having a financial powerhouse like Sony behind it. It felt as if there was not a lot of confidence in the title.
The future of Concord is uncertain, but it would seem a complete waste of time and money if Sony didn’t try to do something about it. We may see it come back as a free-to-play game with premium content being marketed. However, making players pay for such content won’t endear them to any player base.
The only winners of this fiasco appear to be the scalpers selling physical copies of Concord at exorbitant prices on various online retailer sites, seeing as only 25,000 physical copies were put to market. It will be interesting to see what the developers and publishers do to salvage this.
