Anyone who loves mech suits or playing super soldier dress-up in sci-fi shooters like Halo will be enamored with the level of personalisation on offer here. Enemies felt a lot more focused, and I had to play far more tactically and use all of the Ranger’s arsenal and movement capabilities to avoid a quick death – a challenge that has piqued my interest to explore in further detail once the full game launches next month. As for the Ranger, it definitely plays like a straight third-person shooter ‘ generalist’ class, and I see many players passing it over in favour of the more exciting-looking Storm or agile Interceptor (not to mention better armour).Įasily the strongest part of the Anthem demo was the Javelin customisation on-hand – or at least teased. Controls were generally tight and responsive, though I wished enemies reacted more to the impact of bullets instead of getting damage numbers thrown around amidst the particle effects (which were awesome).Īdmittedly, it was easy to turn off my brain when playing with a group, but retrying parts of the mission solo, Anthem does present a decent challenge even on Normal difficulty. Even with the less agile Ranger, traversal felt smooth and flying amazing, but a little overpowered against the mostly ground-restricted foes we blasted. The mission I played with two others players in public matchmaking pitted me against members of the Dominion, who sounded a lot more dangerous than they actually were, with members going down easy under regular assault fire and some well-placed grenades. Playing most of the demo as the Ranger class, the core gameplay formula of Anthem takes the best of Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer mechanics (which is BioWare’s own DNA) and evokes natural comparisons to similar loops executed in competing shared-world experiences like Destiny and The Division. Unfortunately, an inconsistent frame-rate hampered my general experience in this space, but it was somewhat remedied once I got into my first expedition. Dialogue is snappy, albeit sometimes bordering on overly witty (going for a faux Firefly -esque tone) and NPCs like Matthias have engaging personalities and don’t just stand around all dead-eyed and static. I really wanted to see, but it did take a good couple of hours to actually enter Fort Tarsis, the central hub world of Anthem, where players explore the hand-crafted space via first-person perspective, in comparison to third-person during combat, and interact with NPCs to purchase new items, read up on the latest community news and immerse themselves in the capable shoes of a Freelancer before accepting missions – solo, or with up to three other people.įort Tarsis immediately evokes comparisons to similar hub settings like Destiny’s The Farm, but I found the characters and environments much more detailed, certainly more expressive and generally more interesting than other shared world shooters – which is a relief taking into account BioWare’s most recent world-building and graphical bungle that is Mass Effect Andromeda. This was a demo set in its own bubble, as BioWare and EA have continuously hammered home, with its own balancing and progression meant to show interested players what Anthem is all about. With patchy online connectivity and plenty of server errors plaguing players from jumping into BioWare’s new space epic, my first impression of the game, like many others, was not the best – even after finally getting a chance to jump into a javelin and start freely exploring the shared open-world. Processor (AMD): AMD Ryzen 3 1300X 3.The troubled VIP demo period of Anthem this past Australia Day weekend was a well documented – and unfortunate – bugfest.Processor (Intel): Intel Core i7-4790 3.6GHz.Internet connection: 512 kbps or faster stable internet connection.Hard drive space: At least 50GB of free space.Graphics card (AMD): Radeon 7970/R9280X.Progress from both or either of those do not carry over to the final game.Īnthem Demo Minimum and Recommended PC Requirements Nope! Well, if you played the VIP Demo, your progress from that weekend will carry over to the Open Demo. Yes, since this demo is an online game, you need an internet connection and your system's online membership to play the Anthem demo. Neither EA or Bioware specified what time at the end of the day on Sunday, February 3 the open demo ends.ĭo I need Xbox Live Gold / PlayStation Plus? The general open demo begins on Friday, February 1 and ends on Sunday, February 3.Īnthem Open Demo Start Date and Time: Start: Friday, February 1
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