Yes, you read that right: Anthem might be the biggest mess in video games right now. Its story feels unfinished, its systems are obtuse and under-explained, and it only mostly works when you put it on. Spending money on this game, as opposed to most other games, is probably not the wisest decision you can make. But I too am a huge mess, and perhaps that’s why I’ve played as much of this game as I have. (A lot.)
Video games are lovable when they’re messy. It’s often the most human thing about them, especially when many of them are finely-tuned hamster wheels built to tickle our lizard brains endlessly until the sequel drops. Anthem fits that bill nicely.
Even describing the game is impossible to do neatly. Anthem is best understood as an action-adventure game in which you pilot a suit of Iron Man-like armor called a Javelin and take on jobs that mostly involve you blowing up some monsters. (Your character is known as a “Freelancer,” which annoys me, an actual freelancer, to no end.) That’s the base layer. Next: there’s a story here, one about “the Anthem of Creation,” a powerful energy that does—hey, did you ever see Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse? There’s a part where Jake Johnson Spidey talks about there always being a “goober”—that thing you gotta get/button you have to hit in order to avert disaster. You know. A goober. In Anthem, you’re after a goober. And a few dozen other, smaller goobers in order to get to the actual, for serious goober.
Anthem‘s story presumes a level of interest and investment that is, frankly, kind of entitled. Not the I’m-calling-the-manager type of entitled, more like the let-me-tell-you-what-my-cat-did type. More obnoxious than annoying, and, more instructively, poorly presented.
To understand why Anthem‘s story is lacking, you have to understand how it’s structured. While you can play it solo, Anthem is designed as an online multiplayer game, one that puts you into four-person squads with buddies or strangers to go on missions with. The rewards for those missions largely exist in the loot you’ll find—weapons and components to outfit your Javelin armor with to better suit your style of play. There are four different kinds of armor: Ranger (all-around jack of all trades), Interceptor (quick and dirty), Storm (you’re, like, a wizard?), and Colossus (Colossus). With said components, you can tweak your Javelin to become—depending on what you have unlocked—a Storm that rains Ice storms down on your foes, or an Interceptor that dances across the field leaving acid everywhere. And, like in most games of this sort, you start at a wimpy level 1, with level 1 gear, with the goal of obtaining better and better gear. Carrot, meet stick.
In games like Anthem (the closest comparison is Destiny 2, or The Division) there is always more gear to find than there is story to send you out for. So the ultimate goal in games like these is to provide you with a brief story that acclimates you to how the game works, so you can quickly figure out the core loop of picking your favorite kind of character and running missions with them ad infinitum, getting better and better gear.
Anthem, however, is made by Bioware—a studio with a history of telling involved, well-liked stories in games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins. Anthem, then, positions itself as the intersection of these two things: the open-ended, story-light, shoot-and-loot style of game that’s popular now, and the satisfying, story-rich, character-focused games Bioware traffics in. It fumbles both.
