PlayStation’s upcoming PvP shooter Concord had its early access beta test over the weekend; I laced up my space boots, holstered my blaster, and warped to my couch for some pew pew action!
There’s a chunky cinematic right off the bat, with more of that Guardians of the Galaxy style humour that was present in May’s cinematic trailer. Being more of a single-player gamer, I appreciate the time being taken to establish some of the characters and their personalities. It made it a little less daunting choosing a character from the massive roster for the first time!
I’m digging the sci-fi universe, various alien races, and aesthetics; it definitely passes the initial vibe check.
What’s a Concord?
Developed by Firewalk Studios, Concord is an upcoming 5v5 PvP arena-shooter. Picking from a roster of heroes, each with their own unique weapons and abilities, you’re dropped into an arena to duke it out with the opposing team. Depending on the mode, you’ll be able to switch characters upon death or between rounds, bringing variety and strategy.
In a time where we seem to be flooded with first-person shooters with massive maps and battle royale modes, I appreciate the more simple arena-shooter approach. I was a big Halo Reach fan back in the day, and more recently Splitgate before that shut down, but had never really played a hero shooter like Overwatch, so I was very keen to try my hand at the sub-genre.
There’s no training mode in the beta, so you’re in the deep end from the get-go, stumbling through your first few matches as you grasp the controls. There are so many heroes to try out that it took me a good while to figure out my favourites and get used to their individual abilities. Though I did quickly realise that the tanky characters weren’t for me, they felt too slow and sluggish for my tastes.
The more I played the more I enjoyed of the game. The combat is fast and fun, with dozens of flashy abilities keeping the action interesting. The matches are quick enough that even if you’re having a shocker, you can quickly regroup and try again. The graphics and music are also excellent, adding to the polish of the game.
The beta has sixteen characters, four maps and a few different game modes playable.
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Game Modes
You start out playing ‘Brawl’, a PvP respawn mode, where each side is working to gain thirty points, and within that, there are Takedown and Trophy Hunt variants. Takedown is a straight up team death match mode where eliminations are equal to points, while Trophy Hunt requires you to grab the bounty cards of the opponent you eliminate, which adds a bit more chaos to the mix. Points aren’t counted until the bounty cards are picked up, so you and your opponent could kill each other at the same time, and whoever has a teammate closer to grab the cards would get the points.
There are various daily, weekly and seasonal tasks to complete as you play. Pinging 4 opponents, getting 60 headshots, or completing a certain number of matches for example. These tasks earn you extra experience points, and when you’ve earned enough to hit level 6, you’ll unlock more gameplay modes.
‘Rivalry‘ is a PvP mode with no respawns, again it’s split into two variants, Cargo Run and Clash Point. Cargo Run has you competing to grab a payload, then plant and defend it for a certain amount of time, sort of like Valorant. Clash Point is a king-of-the-hill type game where you need to capture the target zone before your opponents. Both modes can also be won by wiping the opposing squad.
Of all the modes, I enjoyed Trophy Hunt the most, needing to pick up bounty cards after eliminating opponents adds another element to straight death matches; you get the chance to stop the loss of a point by grabbing a dead team mates card before your opponent can.
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Character Roster
One of the big strengths of Concord is its large and diverse character roster. There are six different roles the heroes fall under; Anchor, Breacher, Haunt, Ranger, Tactician, and Warden… But it’s a bit easier to think of them as offensive, defensive and support characters.
Each character has their own unique weapon and skills. Robot 1-OFF has a giant vacuum gun that can suck up enemy projectiles, which can then be thrown back out as bouncing trash-bombs. Duchess can basically metal-bend, creating walls from nowhere and AOE shrapnel attacks. IT-Z throws out an orb of energy which bounces around the battlefield, she can teleport to this orb to escape, confuse and flank her enemies… Think Nightcrawler from X-Men!
Because of his portrayal in the cut-scenes, I was drawn to the wise-cracking, hot sauce-loving Lennox. Rocking dual revolvers for long and short range combat, an exploding knife, and the ability to self-heal, Lennox and I just clicked. It helps that his character design is badass too.
The different modes bring the need to change up your play-style a bit, specific characters are more suited to certain modes. In Clash Point for example, characters that can do AOE damage, like Daveers or Roka, are handy for dealing damage to multiple opponents capturing the zone.
That barely scratches the surface of what the crew can do, there’s sixteen characters and they all have unique personalities and play-styles. If that’s not enough, there’s also variants of each character that have different combat traits. For example, my original Lennox had a combat trait that caused his gun to reload when dodging, but when I acquired a second variant of Lennox, his combat trait instead gave both of his revolvers extra bullets.
I was really impressed by the variety on offer in the beta.
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Game Maps
There were four maps available to play in the beta; Freewater, Water Hazard, Star Chamber and Shock Risk. Each with their own vibes and aesthetics that are teased in a short sweeping cinematic as your crew lands on the planet at the start of the match.
Star Chamber made the biggest impression on me, with its alien city built around giant purple crystals, and the imposing meteorite glowing orange in the center of the map, acting as both a focal point, and point of reference.
The other three maps weren’t bad, but didn’t really have that same special sauce that Star Chamber offered.
Beta Impressions
With fun gameplay, a bunch of unique characters and play-styles to choose from, and highly polished cinematics to help you engage with those characters on a deeper level, Concord is ticking all the boxes for me so far. It felt very moreish and I just kept wanting to play ‘one-more-game’.
I’m normally a single-player gamer, I wasn’t looking to add an arena-shooter to my game rotation, but I’m already hanging out for my next fix of space-shooty goodness! I’ll be jumping back in next weekend for the open beta, where the new map Bone Mines and new mode Area Control will be playable!
The full Concord release drops on August 24th and is available to pre-order on PlayStation 5 and PC.
Access to the Concord beta on PS5 was supplied to Quest Daily for the purpose of this article.
