Concord review: An expedition to find the next big thing

Firewalk Studio’s Concord is the latest release in Sony’s concerted push to add more live service games to its software lineup. This hero shooter boasts a diverse cast of playable characters with unique weapons and abilities. It’s a competent and enjoyable multiplayer game that doesn’t do much to iterate or evolve the increasingly overcrowded genre.

Fight across the cosmos

Concord is an exclusively multiplayer shooter in which players partake in 5v5 battles across different maps and modes. These modes boil down to kill and objective-based modes where players either respawn after getting killed or are permanently dead until the round ends. If you’re familiar with first-person shooters, there’s nothing you haven’t seen before, and that’s a bummer. Instead, Concord’s modes all feel like remixes of existing ideas.

Concord does a decent job of incentivising players to stay engaged and try different characters through the Job Board, which breaks challenges down into daily, weekly, and seasonal sections. It’s clean and easy to read, and I always had something to work towards. These challenges are also tied to cosmetic unlocks so that you can customize your Freegunners’ outfits, weapon skins, accessories, and more.

The actual shooting in Concord is solid. Of the game’s 16 playable characters (referred to as Freegunners), only a portion of them shoot traditional firearms. The rest are equipped with unique weapons that can deal damage or disrupt enemies. I played a lot of Teo when first jumping in, as he’s more of a generic soldier build—equipped with an assault rifle, frag grenade, and a smoke bomb. After familiarizing myself with the controls, I became a Haymar main. The angsty sorceress fights with a crossbow and deploys magical fire to blind enemies and restrict areas.

There are also characters like 1-Off, whose primary weapon is a massive vacuum that absorbs enemy projectiles. Nothing’s more frustrating than being in an intense firefight and hearing that vacuum rev up on the other side of the battlefield. Firewalk does an excellent job at giving each character a distinct use in battle.

This individuality extends to the characters’ visual design, too. Concord has a beautifully diverse set of characters that not only represent an array of races, genders, and ages, but some fun sci-fi designs too. It contributes to the overall worldbuilding and the vibe that you’re all just a bunch of outcasts trying to navigate an unforgiving galaxy.

Meet the Freegunners

Overwatch taught us that a key ingredient to cooking up a hero shooter that people will love is to give them characters to fall in love with. Since there is no story mode, this has to be done through ancillary material that shows us where the characters come from, what their goals are, and how they interact with the rest of the roster. Concord does this through weekly cinematics that play every time you launch the game. They spotlight various Freegunners on the Northstar as they journey across the galaxy.

Concord’s CGI cinematics are gorgeously animated and do a lot to give the game that AAA feel. That said, there is a bit of cognitive dissonance when you see two characters bonding in a cutscene, only to be killing each other in your next match. It’s also a bit strange that you can’t rewatch old cinematics in-game, which will only make players care less about them. However, they can be sought out on the PlayStation YouTube channel.

Concord is currently in Season 0, and the small handful of cinematics we’ve gotten so far have worked to introduce the characters and establish their connections to each other. I hope that in the future, these cinematics can be woven into gameplay by introducing new maps or teeing up new game modes. There’s a good deal of potential here if PlayStation is willing to stick with it.

All too familiar

One feeling that I couldn’t shake during my entire time with Concord was the feeling that it desperately wanted to be something else. It’s no secret that Sony has seen the massive financial ceiling that live service games can have and wants a pie to itself, but Concord feels like the greatest hits of other beloved entertainment that’s released over the past decade.

In my preview, I called Concord “Guardians of the Galaxy meets Overwatch.” While that was initially meant to be a testament to the narratively and mechanically diverse characters I was checking out during the Beta, it’s disappointing that there isn’t a whole lot more beneath the surface. Concord so clearly exists as a product of Overwatch’s success, and only takes baby steps to build on Blizzard’s foundation. Its witty, MCU-inspired dialogue was apparent in the trailer that Sony debuted back in May, but too many characters’ personalities boil down to being sarcastic and quick-witted.

Follow the Northstar

I had a good time playing Concord. The gunplay feels good, and the match pacing made it easy to jump in and quickly play a couple of games before peacing out. That said, I’m not confident that “just fine” will be enough to survive in the brutal landscape of live-service games in 2024. Concord suffers from a lack of innovation and identity, and I’m curious to see how Firewalk Studios and PlayStation will navigate the path forward.

This review is based on a Steam code provided by PlayStation Studios. Concord is available now for PS5 and PC.

Donovan Erskine

News Editor

Donovan is a journalist from Maryland. His oldest gaming memory is playing Pajama Sam on his mom's desktop during weekends. Pokémon Emerald, Halo 2, and the original Star Wars Battlefront 2 were some of the most influential titles in awakening his love for video games. After interning for Shacknews throughout college, Donovan graduated from Bowie State University in 2020 with a major in broadcast journalism and joined the team full-time. He is a huge film fanatic and will talk with you about movies and games all day. You can follow him on twitter @Donimals_