The Untimely Demise of Concord: A Game That Was Fine, But Not Enough
It’s unfortunate but inevitable that reviewing Concord right now feels like writing its eulogy. Eight years in the making at a reported development cost of over $100 million, the first-person hero-shooter from Sony’s Firewalk Studios arrived on PlayStation 5 and PC on August 23. Two weeks later, Concord is dead. A live-service title, that was promising a roadmap of post-launch content updates over multiple seasons, didn’t even make it past summer. After the game’s calamitous launch, with an estimated 25,000 copies sold across PS5 and PC and an all-time peak player count of less than 700 on Steam, Sony seems to have decided to cut its losses and put the game out of its misery. Firewalk announced Wednesday that it would take Concord offline on September 6, cease all sales of the game and refund players who’d already purchased it.
But is Concord so bad a game that it should have to pack it up in two weeks, like the blink-and-miss theatrical run of a film that should have been direct-to-digital? Is it really so terrible that 33 people — thirty-three! — are playing it right now on Steam, just a day before the game is taken down? No, it certainly is not. In fact, it’s a serviceable first-person hero-shooter, very much in the vein of Overwatch, even though it doesn’t distinguish itself in any meaningful way. But the blame of its demise doesn’t lie at the feet of developers as much as it does with the people who mandated the financial strategy of its launch, who presided over its protracted, expensive development and who couldn’t foresee the writing on the wall for a $40 live-service shooter with no Battlepass system in a sea of entrenched free-to-play titles that do everything that Concord does, but better.
A Game Built on Borrowed Ideas
Concord is fine. And perhaps that’s the problem — it’s just fine. It is like Overwatch, except it’s eight years late. No real story or campaign, not like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League; just a PvP hero-shooter with every atom of its body — from its art style and its gameplay loop to the shooting and running and its corridors-and-courtyards style arenas — a slightly off-colour and uninspired imitation of things you’ve seen in games before. It is, however, far from being broken or unplayable. Heck, it can even be fun if you jump into matches with your friends. But the value on offer here is certainly not worth the asking price, especially not in 2024 when players have so many free-to-play options that bring much more to the table.
Concord begins with a long cutscene that serves as a feeble but customary attempt to provide some narrative framework to the game before you drop into online matches. The vibe is very much ‘we have Guardians of the Galaxy at home.’ We’re introduced to a bunch of aggressively colourful characters — Freegunners — looking for their next job in the galaxy. There’s some cringe banter and jokes that fall flat, but that’s fine. There’s only a limited number of personalities to assign to members of a crew of misfits and all of them have been exhausted in films and games that have come before. You have the goofy guy who can turn up as a leader; you have a cold but with a heart-of-gold type loner girl; the big oaf who has everyone’s back; the smart and serious one who will get it done, the bot that’s surprisingly human — unsurprisingly; you get the drift.
Character Design: A Missed Opportunity
The characters are derivative, but that’s not as important in a PvP looter-shooter that has no single-player campaign and a story to tell. It’s the character designs that are egregious. In first glance, many of them seem like the results of an AI image generator that has crunched the aesthetics of Guardians of the Galaxy, Starfield, Overwatch and a few other hero-based shooters into a single roster of run-of-the-mill heroes. Other designs feel purely lazy or too close to their inspirations. Lennox, for example, looks uncannily like Yondu from Guardians, but he behaves like Star Lord. Then there’s Star Child, who seems like Drax mixed with a few heavies from Overwatch. 1-0FF is a robot that looks like Bastion from Overwatch had a child with a trash can. And Teo reminds me of Rick Flag from Suicide Squad.
To be clear, these aren’t blatant copies with slight changes that knowingly wink at their inspirations — it’s not Palworld and Pokémon. But the character designs are just not that imaginative. Firewalk could have gone crazy and crafted a creative roster of heroes that look and feel novel. Instead, Concord’s characters don’t even stand out that much from one another. Here’s what I’m talking about: three out of total 16 characters in the roster are just people in standard NASA-style spacesuits with some variations. Roka wears a body-hugging spacesuit and a round helmet with an opaque visor, so that you can’t see her face. Daveers’ spacesuit has a little more detail, with tools and attachments, and their helmet is boxy with a transparent visor. And Emari, a tank class hero, wears a big, roomy spacesuit with a backpack and a visor-less helmet. Surely, Firewalk could have brought a little more distinct flair to the game’s heroes.
A Galactic Guide With No Destination
To its credit, Concord attempts to build a narrative around its PvP playground, much like Overwatch. The game drops cinematics intermittently to deliver a story for its Freegunners and provide a framework for their actions. As part of a crew, you travel around the galaxy, taking jobs and challenges and building a reputation for yourself. As your reputation — essentially a stand-in for your level — grows, you get access to more game modes and crew customisation options. Concord drops more lore through a Galactic Guide, a visual map of the galaxy your crew operates in. The guide features flavour text on every planet in the game, detailing the maps where you take part in PvP matches online. It’s a neat way to deliver context, but it feels a little detached to actual gameplay. The Galactic Guide feels like it belongs in a single-player game like Mass Effect. The narrative setup of travelling to different planets to take part in shooting matches doesn’t really work either — unlike Helldivers 2, where the galactic war against the bugs being fought across different planets is deeply tied to the PvE payoff.
The Gameplay: Where Concord Finds Its Footing
However, Concord does excel at the main thing: its PvP matches. The shooting gameplay is fun, engaging and offers plenty of unique options. The matches are kinetic and tactical, requiring you to really work as a team and play smart. Heroes in Concord usually come with primary and secondary weapons, two distinct abilities tied to the two bumpers on the controller, a movement skill, a passive ability and a combat trait. The abilities are either on a timer or recharged through specific in-game actions.
Distinct Abilities, Yet Missing a Punch
And a lot of the hero abilities are quite distinct and inventive, even if they remind you of skills seen in Overwatch and Valorant. For example, 1-00F’s abilities are based on the manipulation of air; the cleaning robot carries an industrial vacuum as his primary weapon, which doesn’t deal damage, but sucks up enemy traps, deployments and projectiles. He can also deploy an air barrier that deflects all projectiles with the tap of the L1 button on the DualSense controller. Haymar’s skills, on the other hand, are fire-based; she’s armed with a flameshot bow and can hurl a wall of fire at enemies. And Kyps is a stealthy operator who carries a silenced pistol and deploys persistent surveillance traps that reveal enemies when triggered. Her movement ability is a quick dodge that activates invisibility for a short duration.
Heroes in Concord are divided among six classes: Anchors are essentially tankier heroes who hold the fort down; Breachers take the initiative in battle and break into enemy defenses; Haunts are mobile and rely on surprising the enemy; Rangers are the standard do-it-all assault class; Tacticians deploy abilities that hand their teams an advantage in the battlefield; and Wardens are snipers that dictate choke points from long range. While there are a few in the roster who are staples of the hero-shooter genre, Concord mostly does a decent job of making every hero bring something unique to the battlefield.
Matchmaking Struggles: A Sign of Things to Come
Finding matches in Concord, however, was understandably difficult. There were barely any players in the game, even in the final hours before its demise. Less than a hundred people were playing it on Steam on its last day. Matchmaking was especially difficult in Overrun and Rivalry playlists, with most players simply flocking to the team deathmatch mode. And when you did get into a match in Rivalry, you’d find players jumping off cliffs and killing themselves to farm XP and grab the Platinum trophy before the game went offline. The whole situation is unfortunate and sad, even when it’s hilarious. Concord’s predicament only goes to underline the dysfunctional state of the video games industry and the unsustainable stresses of game development.
A Visual Blend
Concord comes with a slick graphical presentation, but the visual choices and the art style feel derivative — a blend of Overwatch-style cartoon aesthetics with the trademark PlayStation realism. A lot of colour, design and musical cues reminded me of Starfield and No Man’s Sky. The game looks good, and most maps are visually striking. Firewalk has tried to infuse each map with unique visual elements that help them stand out in their own right. But there’s a pervading sense of familiarity across the arenas. The maps don’t really surprise you and are full of familiar corridors, choke points and sight lines you’ve seen in online shooters before. This isn’t fair criticism — all online shooters are cut from the same cloth in some ways. But it doesn’t help Concord’s cause either, especially when the game was gasping for air in a crowded room. Performance on PS5, however, was solid and consistent, as you’d expect from an online shooter.
Concord’s Demise: A Case Study in Corporate Misjudgment
All of it put together, Concord isn’t compelling enough to make it shine strong enough in a galaxy of PvP shooters — especially at that $40 price. Despite the core gameplay being fun, it offers little that isn’t available for free elsewhere to hook users. But it also didn’t deserve its fate. It’s certainly nowhere near as bad that it needed to be euthanised after a two-week run. The responsibility for its disastrous launch lies not with the developers, but with the corporate decision makers who ignored all the warning signs and sent the game out to die. Concord had a disastrous open beta, with just over 2,000 players trying it out on Steam. To put that into context, Deadlock, Valve’s new hero-shooter, had over 90,000 users playing its invite-only closed beta on Steam! Barely anyone wanted to play Concord when it was free — why did Sony think it would get an audience when it came with a price?
And as Sony is learning right now, the ‘games as a service’ model is an unpredictable field. Players are embedded deep into their preferred online games and it’s hard to lure them to try something new. Helldivers 2, Sony’s massive live service hit that launched on PC and PS5 earlier this year, is the perfect example. Its PvE playground offered a wildly fun and ridiculously collaborative experience you could share with other players online — all of it delivered in a satiric Starship Troopers-style military propaganda package. The PlayStation parent’s latest live service attempt, however, blends with the competition, with no ace up its sleeve to attract players.
Concord is fun and serviceable and a far cry from broken, cash-grab titles like The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and The Day Before. But it’s asking for an upfront payment for an experience most people paid for, played and enjoyed eight years ago when Overwatch launched. Heck, even Overwatch 2 launched as a free-to-play title last year and still found itself standing on the stage in front of a tough crowd. It’s then baffling that Sony thought a hero-shooter in 2024 could be released with upfront pricing. Concord should have been free-to-play, launched on PS Plus — I hope it does make a comeback in that form at some point. Its release should have been pushed back after the dismal open beta. Instead, Sony let it walk out to its grave.
Final Verdict: A Missed Opportunity for a Fun, But Familiar Experience
Pros
- Fun, engaging PvP gameplay
- Distinct hero abilities
- Visual presentation
Cons
- $40 price tag
- Uninspired character designs
- Lack of ultimate ability
- Detached narrative
- Too similar to other games in the genre
Rating (out of 10): 6
Concord released on PS5 and PC (via Steam and Epic Games Store) at the price of Rs. 2,499. The game was taken offline from all storefronts today (September 6) and is no longer available to purchase.
