BioWare has shown a whole heck of a lot of Anthem gameplay in the last few months. We’ve had massive IGN First features on it (all of which you can find here) and the developer has done its own weekly livestreams showing off combat, customization, and more. But through all of that, there have still been persistent questions about how putting a BioWare story into a living, shared-world shooter will play out. Most importantly, will Anthem feel like a BioWare game, or is it something entirely new?

This week I got a chance to play through the first few hours of Anthem, try its upcoming public demo set in the middle of the story, dip into a high-level character late in the campaign, and I finally have a better sense of the answer to that question. As strange as this might sound, Anthem doesn’t feel like a BioWare game, but it does feel like a game made by BioWare.

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Anthem is not Mass Effect, and it doesn’t try to be Mass Effect. While you have often amusing dialogue choices, they don’t seem to impact much more than the voice lines that immediately follow them. You don’t have a good and evil alignment system, and you aren’t fostering highly-datable relationships with the conveniently good looking characters around you.

“ Anthem doesn’t feel like a BioWare game, but it does feel like a game made by BioWare.

But even without all that, the heart of what makes BioWare games so special shines through here. While some of the less important NPC dialogue can be stiff, Anthem has already shown me some of the most charming, charismatic video game characters I’ve seen in years. Their dialogue is witty and natural, the animations that accompany them in cutscenes offer as much personality as their words, and they prove this studio can still be trusted when it comes to storytelling.

One of the standout characters you meet early on is Owen, your Cypher who psychically links to you to help you pilot your Javelin suit. Owen is quirky and funny and would fit right in on the Normandy. He’s not the only character I quickly fell in love with either, as Anthem seems to have a knack for amazing introductions that immediately getting me invested in some of the new faces I met.

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After seeing what it entails, Anthem’s story itself is actually what I am most excited about, rocket-powered robot suits be damned. Avoiding spoilers, there’s a rich world on display here with lots of history behind it. But more importantly, it’s a story that isn’t afraid to take absurd risks with its “anything is possible” Shaper relics – abandoned devices that ancient god-like creatures used to literally create the world around you – as the upcoming demo proved in a seriously funny surprise I won’t spoil here.

“ Anthem may not be a game I'm interested in grinding endlessly, but I am now extremely interested in playing through its campaign.

The biggest sticking point for me right now is how Anthem’s story feels at odds with its online world. In the Fort Tarsis hub where all of your conversations and quest-getting plays out, it’s frequently remarked that both Freelancers and work for Freelancers has dwindled, and you are often referred to as “The” Freelancer who survived a great battle years ago. That lore clashes with the other people in your party who are also “The“ Freelancer, but are seemingly non-existent in every NPC conversation and cutscene – not to mention the fact that every time you fly out into the open world alone you’ll run into an endless supply of other player-controlled Freelancers to find.

I didn’t play enough to get a good sense of how much that will really matter, and it’s hardly the first online game to make you the “lone hero” in a world full of them, but it’s still an example of a more traditional single-player story being at ends with what Anthem functionally is. Still, I was happy to see that cutscenes featuring your character could occur in the middle of missions out in the field because the compartmentalized, first-person view of Tarsis makes the story otherwise feel walled off (quite literally) from the action at hand.

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And while the combat, flying, and jaw-droppingly in-depth cosmetic customization were a ton of fun, the fighting left me just a hair apprehensive in the long run. Every fight was fun, especially at the higher difficulty levels where the real challenge kicked in, but environments and enemies were often so indistinguishable that you could take nearly any combat encounter I had and swap it with another without me noticing.

After playing Anthem for as long as I did, I’m not comparing it to Destiny anymore. It’s probably not a game that I’ll personally be interested in grinding endlessly for years, but it’s now one I am extremely interested in playing through the campaign for. The story at large starts off as a compelling one, and Fort Tarsis is filled with distinctly BioWare personalities that I can’t wait to see more of, romance or not.

Tom Marks is IGN's PC Editor and pie maker. You can follow him on Twitter