It is symptomatic for the whole of Anthem. The game has no continuity, no immersion. Anthem does not want you to do a whole lot in one go, but to break everything into pieces that are behind a loading screen. Take as an example the equipment and weapons to be found: this is hidden in a kind of box that only when you stop your playing session shows what is in it. Stopping playing is rewarded in a certain sense, which is a bizarre and unfortunate design choice.

You always have to return to the Forge, the place where you can customize your Javelin with your finds and change the looks. There’s nothing wrong with the Forge itself: it’s a handy screen in which you quickly switch between your  weapons and equipment in the form of icons. In an instant you have changed your Javelin in terms of color and cosmetic parts. You can buy cosmetic parts with real money, but also for a reasonable sum of the ingame currency. The problem of the Forge is that this part is behind a loading screen and cannot be accessed while playing. Adjusting your weapons or equipment to a situation that you had not anticipated is not possible while playing. The result is that you sometimes feel Javelin useless, while you have the right equipment in your possession.

Fortunately there are still the challenges. These challenges, ranging from killing a certain number of monsters with only a specific weapon to completing a certain amount of events, do not offer really exciting rewards, but they do give you a lot to do. There are also daily, weekly and monthly goals to complete.

You can only start the endgame yourself when you are level 30, and then it is about content that you already know, but that can then be played at a higher level of difficulty. Anthem then scatters with a good loot and that is of course great, but it also ensures that players of level 30 have quickly brought in the best loot so that there is really little left to do, apart from the challenges.

Anthem’s biggest problem, however, is that it was developed by BioWare. You can expect more from BioWare than what Anthem is at the moment. That is not entirely fair. Because when you look objectively at the game itself, it is scanty, but certainly playable. If you are only looking for simple fun shooting in a beautiful world while you fly through the air like a bird, Anthem may be something for you, because the game is really excellent. But this will be the minority. Everyone who likes to play BioWare games expects more from the story and the world. This developer invariably offers the highlights of his games there.

In addition, Anthem is not really what it promises to be. Anyone who likes to play looter shooters will notice that Anthem is actually not with the strange loot system. Anyone who likes to play co-op in a close team can do this in Anthem, but then via a Discord server, because the game itself offers a kind of pseudo team game without functional means of communication. But even the people who only come for flying and shooting will be bothered by all the loading screens and the huge amounts of bugs that the game still knows.

Of course Anthem is not the first game of the last years that has been launched with many start-up problems. Many people make the comparison with Destiny 2 and The Division and rightly claim that those games got a lot better with a lot of attention and updates after they were released. The big difference is that Destiny 2 and The Division were already great games at that time. Both had too little content and were judged on that, but the developers were able to work on it: they could immediately start expanding the game.

Anthem not only has too few exciting endgame content, but is also a much lesser game. The game gets in the way of players, and that is difficult to correct with a few patches. BioWare not only has the task to add more content, but must first make the game more playable if it is to attract and retain players. That does not mean that it is impossible for Anthem to ever become very cool, but it does not happen quickly.