Concord review – Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. There’s a new shooter on the market. You don’t just play as faceless soldiers, though. It’s a competitive 5v5 hero shooter with a diverse roster of unique characters equipped with powerful abilities where teamwork is just as important as gunplay. Launch is just the first step, too, since the universe will continue to grow with new faces, new maps, and new monetization opportunities.

It’s easy to go after Firewalk Studios’ debut FPS Concord for chasing a trend that was already treading water a few years ago, but being a competitive hero shooter doesn’t preclude a game from becoming a beloved classic. Yes, spectacular failures dominate the news cycle, but people tend to ignore the ongoing success of genre titans like Rainbow Six Siege, Valorant, or Overwatch.

There’s clearly still gas in the tank for hero shooters, especially with anticipated titles like Marvel Rivals and Valve’s Deadlock on the horizon. It’s a genre that demands innovation to capture audiences’ attention, though, and Concord’s innovations are the source of both its successes and its failures.

All of this is to say that Concord is not a failure simply because it’s a hero shooter. It’s a failure because it’s mid. I usually don’t like to use such reductive terms when trying to describe why a game isn’t clicking, but after spending the last week grinding Concord, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s just no better way to describe the game.

Concord does have a few things going for it, though. The presentation is slick, some of the characters have excellent designs, and the weekly story vignettes are entertaining if a bit uneventful. The world is fascinating, and taking a quick peek at the galaxy map and skimming through lore entries shows that the development team really had some neat takes on sci-fi tropes. It’s very clear that there was a ton of thought and care put into designing Concord, which is why it’s such a shame that none of it really makes a lasting impression.

Hero shooters live and die by their characters, and that’s one of Concord’s greatest flaws. Outside of a few standouts (e.g. It-Z, Kyps), everyone on the roster is unbelievably bland. It’s strange that the developers decided to go with some of these color schemes — like Roka’s beige bodysuit or Emari’s hideous green armor — when they look so much better with a different skin equipped. Seriously, so many of Concord’s character design issues are solved simply by unlocking different color palettes. It’s not enough to save the roster from mediocrity, however, and even the game’s cover trio of Lennox, Haymar, and Star Child are aggressively boring.

The weekly vignettes are intended to flesh out the roster of Freegunners, but the ones that we’ve seen so far have done little to show off Concord’s world or explore the motivations of its characters. There are very interesting potential threads that could pop up later down the line — the mushroom creature Lark still has “undecided” pronouns, which could make for a fun vignette — but the opening scenes do very little to grab your attention.

Each character at least feels sufficiently unique in-game, but Concord’s moment-to-moment gameplay just isn’t exciting enough to warrant those hours-long play sessions filled with laughter and clutch moments that other team-based shooters generate effortlessly. Time to kill is way too long, matches are way too short, and maps are so forgettable that they just blend together into a blur as you speed by them in Concord’s rapid-fire game modes.

Nothing feels perfectly tuned because Concord tries to be everything at once. Firewalk Studios has incorporated a spectrum of game modes ranging from super casual to very hardcore (a concept lovingly dubbed the “Sweatstrum” in Concord’s tutorials). There are quick team deathmatch modes, slightly more team-oriented domination modes, and a no-respawn objective-based mode called Rivalry. In trying to design around all of these experiences, none of them receive the final bit of polish that they desperately need.

Take Concord’s key mechanic, for example. The Crew Builder is what sets Concord apart from other team-based hero shooters. You only have a limited number of spaces in your Concord Crew (the roster of characters that you can choose from during a match), and you can place the same character in multiple slots so you can choose them in multiple rounds in lockout modes like Rivalry. By playing a character from a certain role, you’ll get a permanent buff applied to all your characters for the remainder of the match. Picking a Ranger like Teo will grant you improved weapon recoil on all characters, while choosing a Tactician like Kyps will permanently boost your reload speed.

In a mode like Rivalry, these restrictions add a deep layer of strategy to team building. If you’re a diehard Lennox main, you can have him take up three Crew slots, but you won’t be able to accumulate as many buffs by playing other roles. It’s not like you always need them all, though. You may not need the reload speed buff or the faster dodge cooldown buff based on your playstyle, for example. This thought process is incredibly rewarding in hardcore modes, but in a casual mode like TDM, swapping to accumulate bonuses feels like a chore.

Regardless of which mode you play, however, you won’t be earning anything exciting. Concord’s progression systems are painfully boring. Leveling up each character gets you skins and trinkets to customize them with, but they’re basically all color swaps barring a few exceptions. The best stuff will undoubtedly be in the game’s battle passes and cash shop, neither of which are currently live. I’m sure it’ll be the same standard pricing that we’ve come to expect from these types of games, but it sucks that there’s just not a whole lot to earn by playing the game right now.

I really, really wanted to like Concord. There’s nothing to hate about it, but there’s also really nothing to love. Concord isn’t a great game, and that’s not because of pronouns or the woke mind virus or whatever those weirdos on social media are complaining about. Concord is just aggressively okay, and when you pair that with a $40 price tag, that’s simply not enough to survive in today’s gaming landscape.