Concord, a hero shooter from developer Firewalk Studios, recently had two betas so that anyone interested in trying the game out ahead of its August 23, 2024 release date could do so. Aside from one map and a game mode, both betas were the same, with all 16 characters from the roster open for anyone to play as from the moment they launched it.
I’ve seen more than a few content creators and fans out there saying that the world doesn’t need another hero shooter and that Concord isn’t up to the task of competing with behemoths like Overwatch 2 and Valorant because the concurrent player numbers on Steam weren’t that high. Having played a few hours of the game’s betas myself, I’m not saying that it can or can’t make a dent in the market. But the game feels like it has more personality than every other hero shooter out there because of one key and very fleshed-out component: The characters.
As soon as you initially launch Concord, it puts characters front and center. The game’s story is told through weekly cutscenes that play before you jump into matchmaking and playing, meaning you’ll never miss them. These show how the ragtag group of characters shown in the opening cutscene are doing in their journey to become the greatest Freegunner crew in the galaxy.
Every scene only features a handful of characters, but they feel like the connective tissue between larger plot points that are, ultimately, the matches you play. The scenes everyone in the beta saw were the crew first gaining their Freegunner status. The second expands the universe with a discussion about how the first crew ever became Freegunners and how they made the map, which all crews now use, available for free.
In isolation, this doesn’t mean much. Together, these scenes help us learn what this universe is about and give context for every match you play. Getting this information right off the bat without needing to search through menus and read through in-game documents makes it so much more approachable, and the story will grow in this way each week, meaning it’s going to feel like you’re working through a narrative as long as you log in and play at least once per week. Of course, you can go back and access all this information through documents if you’d like.
Concord‘s characters continue to add more personality to the game over time as you play more and more matches. In most game modes, you can pick and change your character with every respawn. This allows you to see them, their abilities, and their cheesy intro lines multiple times in every match. While this gets pretty boring if you’re playing a specific character each time, these lines are just the tip of the iceberg.
Every character is unique and really stands out from the crowd through the way they speak, their abilities, and what they wear. Teo might be your average soldier, but his eagerness to jump into battle, rifle effectiveness, and speed tell the tale of a hothead who wants a little more glory from life than guarding stores or working in the military.
1-Off, the giant yellow robot, is obsessed with keeping things neat and tidy. Even his weapon and abilities stick close to this theme. He can hoover enemies up or blast them away, sucking in fire to flavor his weapon if you time things right. He’s a normally gentle soul, though, and you can feel that through his happy-go-lucky attitude and the way he’s really just in a match to have a good time. Ultimately, he’s good to go as long as everything’s kept clean.
Concord is also one of the few hero shooters that assigns pronouns to its characters. This might seem small and trivial to you, but small elements like this really do matter and help players identify with each hero on a deeper level. It’s hard to know what gender a mushroom creature and a cleaning robot identify with, and having that on-screen means you can feel a lot closer to these shells that you wear as you jump into various game modes over the course of what might end up being hundreds of hours.
Even in matches, though, every character just feels like an individual as you play as them. Kyps, a pink secret agent android with a silenced pistol, is a fast-paced character with simple abilities. She can deploy surveillance drones to detect enemies across the map, but her real strength is sneaking up and defeating them from the shadows.
Lark is my favorite mushroom alien character who uses spore-based abilities to buff allies and debuff enemies. They can drop mushrooms that create areas that will enhance all allied abilities and speed while also buffing any enemies that move through them. Another mushroom becomes a respawn point they can teleport to in a pinch. Even their weapon, the Razorpod Launcher, is unique in that it fires off spores that will home in on enemies for devastating damage.
A character’s archetype, Anchor, Ranger, Breacher, Haunt, Warden, and Tactician are like guidelines that give you a rough idea of how to play them. But in reality, these characters are all very different from one another, and you won’t make the most of them until you’ve learned and mastered their abilities and hidden strengths by exploring them for a few matches.
Finally, it’s not just the way these characters look and what’s written about them in-game; it’s how they act that sets Concord out as a hero shooter with more personality than most. In matches, you’ll hear them fire off a comment when they do pretty much everything. Reloading, healing, using their abilities, it all comes with a line of dialogue.
The variations on these all say roughly the same thing, but it’s the way they’re said that deepens your connection with the characters. Some, like Teo, are just barking, but that’s because he wants to be short and to the point with everything he says in battle. He doesn’t have time for frivolity in his sentences when he could be shooting other Freegunners and winning the match.
Emari, on the other hand, is a hulking giant with a unique shield ability. She talks about recharging her batteries when it comes to healing and even chuckles about it. These small details are exactly what hero shooters need to help differentiate their characters.
Without them, Teo is the soldier, and Emari is the tank with a shield. I think that it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of treating characters like they can only be played in a specific way in hero shooters. With this added personality and the way that each character just has to be played to their own strengths and not only to fit a role, I can see Concord adopting a sizeable fan base who has been looking for a shooter with a little more flair than the industry is used to.
Published: Jul 27, 2024 10:51 am