Concord is one of those ‘just one more match’ video games that has you checking the time at 9pm, and when you check back it’s suddenly 2am – and you have work in the morning!
I love the attitude it brings, the cool Guardians of the Galaxy, rag-tag space crew vibes, and the variety of characters and abilities it offers. There’s sixteen playable crew members, twelve unique maps, and six different game modes to play with at launch; there’s plenty of content to sink your teeth into.
I won’t go as far as to say it reaches the lofty heights of my favourite arena shooter Halo Reach but it’s just as addicting. I haven’t had this much fun with a shooter in a long time. I even felt inspired to cut together a little hype reel!
What is Concord?
Developed by Firewalk Studios, Concord is a 5v5 PvP arena-shooter that combines fast-paced gunplay with unique characters and flashy abilities. You’re dropped into an arena with your squad 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. The matches are quick enough that, even if you just had a shocker, you can quickly shake off the bad juju and regain your mojo.
The game looks and plays fantastic; with high fidelity graphics, smooth animations, and particularly detailed character designs. The music and sound effects are also excellent, adding to the high polish of the game.
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What’s New?
It’s only been around a month since the beta period, so aside from the new maps, there aren’t any major changes to the core game. There are, however, a host of quality of life improvements that’ve been added.
The most notable addition is the single-player training modes to help you sharpen your skills for the arena. This is especially important for new players as they can explore and learn each crew members unique abilities and weapons without the stress of letting your team down in PvP.
There are also unlockable speed-run challenges to help you master the traversal abilities of select characters and, of course, get your name on the leaderboard for bragging rights.
My favourite new feature is a UI element, which makes it easy to see what class you’re selecting and what crew bonuses you’ll be triggering when selecting a new character. It also keeps track of which bonuses you’ve already activated, so you can collect all six bonuses – like Thanos collecting the infinity stones.
A much needed feature missing from the beta was back-filling crew members, which fills in any empty spots left by players that’ve quit the match. During the beta, it could be pretty disheartening to be running a crew of three against a crew of five.
Building on that, there are now penalties for players who quit mid-match. Serial offenders will have their ability to queue for games put on cooldown; the more penalties the player incurs, the longer they’ll have to wait.
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The new Galactic Guide is Concord’s version of an in-game encyclopedia, with plenty of lore to read up on and deepen your knowledge of the galaxy. As you play, you’ll unlock more entries and details, expanding the guide.
That’s all the major changes so far, but Firewalk has expressed their commitment to working with the community and constantly improving the game. Continued constructive feedback is essential to the life of the game.
Freegunners
Concord’s biggest strength is its large and diverse character roster. Each crew mate falls into one of six classes and has their own unique weapon and skills.
Haymar throws out fistfuls of flames that burn a line through the battlefield and wields a single-handed crossbow that fires exploding projectiles. Duchess can basically metal-bend, forming walls from nothing and creating AOE shrapnel attacks. Teo is more of your classic soldier character, with frag and smoke grenades, and a scoped rifle that can see through that smoke to pick off unsuspecting players.
Because of his portrayal in the reveal trailer and in-game cinematics, 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.
There are so many heroes to try out that it takes a good while to experience their abilities and quirks to figure out your favourites. During the beta period, I was drawn mainly to Teo, Duchess, Lennox, and Roka, and while I still enjoy those characters, I’m now enjoying Haymar and Daw a lot more as well. The big tanky characters like 1-Off and Starchild aren’t for me. They feel much too slow and sluggish for my tastes.
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All crew members can be customised with different outfits and weapon skins, charms, accessories, drop-in animations as well as defeat and victory poses.
Slice of Space-life
A welcome point of difference for Concord is its character vignettes and the promise of more to release every week. The cinematics are beautifully designed and rendered, well written and performed, and contain a healthy dose of that Guardians of the Galaxy style humour. Each one offers insight into the crew of the Northstar, showing off their quirks and personalities, which helps to endear you to them.
As more of a single player gamer, I appreciate the time being taken to showcase the character designs, animation, and voice acting outside of combat. It also made it a little less daunting choosing a character from the massive roster for the first time!
So far they’ve been pretty simple slice-of-life moments, but I would love to see an action-packed mission play out, perhaps in pieces over the course of a season. The cinematic reveal trailer is a good example of what I would love to see more of.
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Game Modes
There are six game modes in the game at launch, some of which require you to hit a certain level before they unlock.
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 variations. Takedown is a straight up team deathmatch 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.
‘Overrun’ contains two more PvP respawn modes, Area Control, where your team must capture and hold two or more zones at once to earn points, and Signal Chase, where the zone to be captured moves every few minutes.
‘Rivalry‘ is a PvP mode with no respawns, and again it’s split into two types, 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, similar to 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.
The different modes bring the need to change up your play-style a bit, as certain 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 trying to capture the zone. In Area Control, you might want to run with Daw, whose force field shield and healing pads can help massively in holding captured zones.
Of all the modes, I enjoy 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 teammate’s card before your opponent can.
Many of the other modes feel like slight variations on the same type, capturing a specific zone. I’d like to see a bit more variety in the future. I’d love them to lean into the mission side of things a bit more: grand heists, ship stealing, escorting a VIP, that sort of thing. Also, I can never say no to capture the flag!
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Game Maps
There are twelve maps available to play in Concord, each with their own vibes and aesthetics that are teased in short sweeping cinematics as your crew lands planetside to start the match.
Train Trouble pops with its bright sun, dusty orange rock, and vivid blue flora above ground, contrasted by the dark, steel-filled construction zone below ground. There’s good verticality on the map and plenty of tight corners, forcing close quarters firefights.
Star Chamber made the biggest impression on me during the beta and still remains my favourite to play. I just love the vibe of the alien city, built around giant purple crystals, and the imposing meteorite glowing orange in the center of the map that acts as both a focal point, and point of reference.
While I wouldn’t say there are any bad maps, some are a bit bland in their design; I want them to lean into the weird alien vibes more.
I’d love to see more environmental elements, like low gravity and wild weather. How cool would it be to have an acid rain level where your health ticks down if you aren’t under cover? Map features such as launch points, teleporters, and ziplines could help to make maps a bit more dynamic.
Deck Building Elements
Concord also offers a deck-builder type element in the Crew Builder system. You can customise your crew of twelve, adding in your favourties and ordering them however you want. You can also hone in your selection even more by adding variants of the same character.
Variants are almost identical to their dopplegangers but have different combat traits. For example, the original Lennox has a combat trait that causes his gun to reload when dodging, but a second variant of Lennox has a combat trait that gives both of his revolvers extra bullets.
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It’s a unique concept in first-person shooters, but also an area that needs work. Currently, there are only three variants available to unlock at launch, Lark, Lennox, and Teo. So, if you don’t use those characters, then the variant system is currently pretty useless to you.
With one new variant added to the job board weekly, you could be waiting months to unlock a single variant of your favourite character. With this snail pace rollout, it seems more like a gimmick than a feature of the game.
I’m not sure why Firewalk are drip feeding the variants like this, especially considering that they don’t drastically change the character, just swap out their combat trait.
Crew Bonuses
Perhaps the most overlooked and under-explained part of Concord is the Crew Bonus system.
There are six roles that characters fall under that, when selected, grant a specific stat bonus to all subsequent characters that match.
- Anchor – Increased healing received
- Tactician – Faster reload speed
- Breacher – Faster dodge cooldown
- Warden – Longer weapon range
- Haunt – Improved mobility
- Ranger – Improved weapon recoil
For example, you first pick Roka, who wouldn’t have any crew bonuses applied to her. After dying, you next pick Kyps, who would have the increased mobility bonus from Roka’s Haunt class. As Kyps is a Tactician class, when you die, your next character will receive faster reload speeds but also still keep the improved mobility from Roka. Continuing this way, by the time you’re onto your seventh character, you could have collected all six crew bonuses.
It’s a fascinating system that encourages you to switch characters upon death instead of hogging your favourite the whole match. It’s also where the Crew Builder system works best, as you can plan and arrange your crew in the order you want your bonuses to activate.
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Does Concord Have a Future?
We don’t have stats on the numbers of people playing Concord on PlayStation, but going off Steam charts, an all-time peak of 697 concurrent players (at the time of writing) is pretty low for a brand new multiplayer game.
Why does this matter? Why can’t we just play and enjoy the game regardless of the size of its player base? Well, live-service games usually live or die on the number of people playing them. It dictates how much money is generated to fund the development of future content, which keeps the game fresh and engaging.
But why isn’t Concord resonating with gamers? Is it a bad game? I don’t think so, I love what Firewalk has built. In my opinion, there are a few things working against the game.
Price
Over the last few years, PvP shooters have mostly moved to a free-to-play model, with battle passes, loot-boxes, and store-fronts being the new methods of raking in the cash. Games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Warzone have seen great success with this model. Add in subscription services like Gamepass, and it might just be that the public don’t want to pay upfront for online shooters anymore.
A Crowded Market
The shooter market is a pretty tough nut to crack into. It’s proven difficult to draw players away from established games like Counter Strike and PUBG. It’s the same for hero shooters, with Overwatch 2 and Valorant dominating the genre.
Being sandwiched between smash hit Black Myth: Wukong and the upcoming Star Wars Outlaws doesn’t make it easy to get people to open their wallets for Concord right now, either.
Trolls
If you’ve read the comments on any social media post relating to Concord, you would’ve seen the shameful amount of vitriol directed towards the game, for no good reason. Being called ‘woke garbage’ for having characters with pronouns and designs that aren’t ‘mainstream’ is pretty pathetic. It was happening during the Beta period as well, and it was obvious most of them hadn’t actually played the game for themselves and were just parroting the same shallow attacks.
While comments like these can and should just be ignored, I can see how the numerous ‘Dead game’ and ‘DOA’ comments might discourage people from buying the game for themselves. The fear that Concord might not have a large enough player base to sustain itself long-term may have turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We have seen multiple examples of developers pushing through rough launches and low initial player-bases to eventually build a community that love and support their games. Fallout 76, Sea of Thieves, Final Fantasy 14, Cyberpunk 2077, and No Man’s Sky were all once considered ‘dead games’ but have shown with dedication and hard work, public perception can be turned around. I can only hope that if the overall player base is low, PlayStation is willing to give Concord the same time to shine.
It’s also important to note that I haven’t had any issues finding matches so far, so the number of people playing across both platforms might not be as dire as it seems.
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Should I Buy Concord?
Concord is a really solid and fun team-based arena-shooter that brings sixteen playable characters, twelve maps, and six game modes to start with at launch; there’s a lot of value there for its $59.95 price tag. That value only builds as additional characters, maps, game modes, and cinematics are added at no additional charge.
There is still some work to be done tweaking some of the systems, and there is a cloud hanging over the game as to whether it can build and maintain a large enough playerbase in today’s free-to-play shooter market. But Concord brings style, flair, and some interesting ideas to the genre.
I’m normally a single-player gamer and am not often attracted to ongoing live-service games, but the more I play Concord, the more I enjoy it — this shooter has firmly lodged itself into my gaming rotation. I’ll be lacing up my space boots and unholstering my blaster for as long as the game has an active user base.
Quest Daily Scores Concord:
8/10
A review copy of Concord on PlayStation was supplied to Quest Daily for the purpose of this review.
