Critical Gaming Flops in 2019
Anthem
Anthem was planned to be the next AAA “games as a service” title similar to other multiplayer shooters such as Destiny or Warframe.
Back when it was revealed, EA promised that they would put the story before the gameplay, but what we got instead is a buggy and incomplete game with a plot that left a lot to be desired.
You play the role of a freelancer, who teams up with other mercenaries to stop an evil dominion who are trying to get their hands on powerful, ancient weapons. Sounds cool, right?
It didn’t really pan to be all that interesting though. The story feels secondary to the highly encouraged multiplayer gameplay which becomes repetitive after a few hours, and it’s extremely grindy throughout for not a whole lot of reward.
If it had a story that BioWare used to be known for, that could have gone a long way for a lot of fans, but sadly that wasn’t the case this time around.
The gameplay, which is supposed to be the redeeming feature, is better than the story for sure, but even that is still not perfect. For example, our reviewer noticed a lot of issues with the enemy AI:
“It’s just a shame that the enemy AI is rather un-engaging, often aloof, and occasionally buggy. Plenty of times I would be gunning down a large shielded enemy for a few seconds before they even turned in my direction and by that time I had them dead to rights.”
Anthem was supposed to feel like an Iron Man game that let you complete quests with other Iron Man-type people!
EA did not come through with the promise of a fleshed out universe with deeper attention to the lore and now, Anthem has a Metacritic score of 56 for the PS4 version and a not much better score of 60 for the PC version. The user reviews are even less kind.
