Concord review – a hero shooter that nails the shooting, but fumbles the heroes

I’ve always thought there was something presumptuous about hero shooters. Building an entire game around a bunch of characters I’m expected to like purely on vibes is a big ask. Even BioWare, with its decades-long legacy of character-driven storytelling, recently got dinged for assuming players would immediately buy into Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s new party in the game’s misguided initial trailer.

Concord reviewDeveloper: Firewalk StudiosPublisher: Sony Interactive EntertainmentPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam, Epic), PS5

Sure, Blizzard got away with it back in 2016. But putting aside the fact Blizzard gets away with a lot of things it probably shouldn’t, the developer had two big advantages with Overwatch. First, the hero shooter was a new and shiny concept following a decade of playing with toy guns as faceless military men (with the exception of Team Fortress 2, although that’s a slightly different kettle of fish). Second, Overwatch was a masterclass in mascot manufacture.

Sadly, neither of these things are the case with Concord. Firewalk Studios’ hero shooter arrives several years after the bandwagon departed, boasting a roster of characters that, while not entirely without their charms, certainly wouldn’t be Nick Fury’s first choice when assembling the Avengers. Which is a shame, because there’s a decent multiplayer shooter here, one that’s lithe and snappy and highly rewarding of teamwork. But that doesn’t change the fact that it misses its own brief, leaving it struggling to stand out elsewhere.

Concord is a collection of largely familiar 5v5 multiplayer shooter modes, wrapped in a colourful retro sci-fi universe that, at the time of writing, mostly exists in a big black lore hole. Your heroes are collectively known as ‘freegunners’, a loose consortium of mercenary teams that flit around the galaxy doing jobs that form vague premises for your multiplayer shenanigans. A straightforward Team Deathmatch, for example, is framed as a rival team issuing a challenge to yours, with the match introduced via a lavish cutscene of a spacecraft dropping your team off.

In its broad strokes, Concord is a thoroughly adequate multiplayer shooter. Its combat is poised between the highly accessible gunplay of Overwatch, and something snappier and more demanding like Valorant. Movement speed and agility varies between characters, but most of them are fairly swift on their feet, equipped with some amount of aerial acrobatics and capable of performing nippy dodges for which the camera briefly zooms out to third person. Likewise, while weapons differ in how easy and immediately satisfying they are to wield, I don’t think there’s a firearm I’d say was an outright dud.