Concord

What truly holds Concord back is its lack of identity. A story or campaign would have been a great way to showcase the world, its characters and lore, yet all of that is stuffed into the Galactic Guide that few players will probably ever read. The Freegunners and game modes are fun and mostly balanced, though feel derivative when stacked up against the already established competition.

Concord is a very fun sci-fi hero shooter that shows real promise, but lacks both innovation and content at launch.

There's no getting around how baffling Concord is. It's a $40 hero shooter whose only real selling point is that it has lore. The abysmal launch and already dismal player count make Concord impossible to recommend to even the most diehard hero shooter players.

Personally, I am glad to have played Concord and I will continue playing it as much as possible, and will be sad if the day comes when its player count dwindles to the point where it no longer makes sense to support it. Hopefully, Concord defies the odds and becomes one of Sony's long-lasting live service experiments.

The question now, given Concord’s allegedly poor uptake among players, is whether we’ll get to see that. I for one hope we do. Concord may be a flawed game, but it is far from a hopeless one. And while the game currently misses the brief on the ‘hero’ part of its genre, it is worth remembering that heroes are ultimately defined by their actions, rather than their costumes.

Whether that be through trial periods, new modes not before seen in the genre, or even a boost from Secret Level when it airs months from now, but as a middle-of-the-road hero shooter, it can’t rely on any one of these things alone. Concord is good, but it’s not in a good place, and there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to not only keep it afloat, but to get the motor running.

Concord is a hero shooter with satisfying gunplay and some good ideas, but it doesn't do enough to stand out from the competition.

Although Concord is solid and polished on a basic level, it's faced with an uphill battle that it already seems to be losing. A shotgun blast approach that attempts to hit the basic notes of every hero shooter prerogative makes it harder for it to do one thing in a truly fresh way, and the casual modes would be more exciting with bigger abilities and maps with more interesting pressure points.