On Friday, EA and Bioware gave everyone who pre-ordered the online shooter Anthem access to a "VIP demo," complete with missions and combat-filled zones from the upcoming game. The result may very well be the most cruel definition of "VIP" ever sold by a video game company.

And it comes with a serious case of déjà vú. A longtime game maker known for sprawling, choice-filled adventures has thrown its hat into the "shared online shooter" ring, and the public's first taste is a buggy, uneven mess that lands somewhere shy of a beta. Months after Fallout 76's wonky pre-release demo, here we are again with a disconnect-ridden taste of Anthem.

In this week's case, there's something worse going on than unoptimized netcode. Anthem has arrived with some beautiful imagery, lush worlds, and intriguing, jetpack-fueled blasts into the sky. At its best, Bioware's latest game feels like dreamy, action-gaming catnip. But a few immediately apparent problems, including inelegant combat, stilted world-building, and confusing systems, make one thing clear: Destiny 2 already seems like a better game, and that's not a good starting point for a latecomer.

Sometimes beautiful, sometimes buggy, sometimes Superman 64















Let's start with the laundry list of bugs I encountered while playing the demo's PC version:

In the demo's first six hours of going live, I only successfully logged into the game once, then was immediately punted. Connectivity eventually became more stable on PC by the demo's second day.

Through the entire demo weekend, I'd try to boot into a live mission, only to have the "loading bar" reach roughly 95 percent and freeze. The only way out was to hard-quit via an Alt+F4 command, then quit out of the Origin game launcher, then kill the Anthem.exe that suddenly reappeared in my Windows 10 task manager upon quitting Origin. If I did not follow these steps, I would be unable to boot back into the game.

The above bug would happen whenever I tried to play a second mission during a session. Meaning that once I beat one mission, I was better served immediately quitting out than rolling the dice on that 95-percent bug coming back. (It also sometimes happened when waiting on a mid-mission loading screen.)

Multiple "tutorial" prompts gave me the wrong instructions. In one case, I was told to tap my mouse-wheel button to switch weapons (when the default for that action is the Tab key), and in another, I was told to drop an object I'd just picked up (an object that wasn't clarified and had no actions attached to it) by pressing a gamepad's d-pad.

I witnessed frequent and surprising pop-in of geometry and objects, even in the game's first-person, slow-walking hubzone.





On more than one occasion, I entered a new zone that was stuck on placeholder geometry, as if Anthem was waiting for textures and higher-density meshes to load. In one case, trying to fly through this incomplete load would hurt my character.

A pivotal NPC conversation froze as soon as it was loaded into memory, but pixel shimmering indicated that the game client was still live. I had to hold the Escape key to skip the dialogue and get back to the game—and thus was unable to watch the demo's mission-plot conclusion.

Whenever a mission would restart at a checkpoint, its difficulty would be scaled to however many squad-mates had participated in the mission's outset, even if any players later disconnected or rage quit and left me as a solo battler.

Any temporary disconnections during a mission would bring up a "press enter to continue" prompt, which left attacking enemies and WASD movement live but wrested mouse control and attack abilities away.

Notice that I still haven't started talking about how it feels to play Anthem. There's a lot of buggy detritus in the way of the game's first impression, and while Bioware took to its official blog over the weekend to explain away the biggest networking bugs, the studio hasn't been as transparent about others.

How to balance a javelin

Anthem's gameplay will look very familiar to anyone who has played Destiny. Equip some guns and special attacks; pick a "class" with its own special attributes; aim guns and magic to blast through open-world missions; follow a compass to various points, take out waves of enemies, and solve a few rudimentary puzzles; and collect and manage loot along the way.

The demo's four missions mostly revolve around reaching a position, killing all enemies, then running to the next marked spot on the map and repeating. In a few cases, additional objectives pop up, but the game's current build doesn't do a great job making them clear to new players. One mission asks players to pick up "souls" and deposit them somewhere, but it never marks these items (which you've never seen before), beyond a bit of dialogue saying "pick up the shiny things." Worse, the place they're supposed to be deposited isn't marked or described in any way.

Another mission ends with a puzzle that requires players to change the colors of doors so that they all match in some fashion. I still don't know how it was meant to be beaten. Four strangers, matched together via automatic matchmaking, flew around slapping the door-color buttons wildly until we brute-forced it. There was no option to replay the mission (unless I joined a "help another team" queue and stumbled upon someone else's attempt). And with no text-chat option (no text-chat? are you kidding me?), our ragtag squad had no way to communicate cardinal directions or color suggestions. We tried the game's severely lacking emotes with no success.

Anyway. The first big differentiating point from Destiny in particular is the class system, which is split into super-powered suits of armor known as javelins. The idea: Instead of creating multiple characters to sample the game's range of javelin-specific powers, you can unify your gameplay experience as one soldier (here, known as a "freelancer"), then mix and match your loot with whichever javelins you've unlocked over time.



















The catch with this weekend's demo was that testers didn't get to sample all four javelins shipping in the retail product. Instead, they all unlocked the balanced, gun-focused Ranger by default, then got to pick from one of the other three (the tanky Colossus, the magic-and-flighty Storm, and the melee-minded Interceptor). The retail game will have a similar lockdown on access, with second-, third-, and fourth-suit unlocks happening at levels 12, 20, and 28 (out of 30). Bioware hasn't yet confirmed whether the final game will let players spin up multiple characters to dabble before investing in one type.

We sure hope they will, because javelin balancing currently seems like a mixed bag, and the retail game's day-one players may rest easier with more javelin access (even if it's kind of artificial in the form of various "toons"). For now, without comprehensive access to all the classes, we're limited to Internet hearsay, but one point we keep seeing is that the Colossus is currently borked. In particular, that javelin reportedly has issues with his "tank" shield powers being easily interruptible by basic enemy attacks.

A “whoooooosh,” and a mouse complaint

Moving on: the other major differentiating feature for Anthem is its jetpacks, which let players zip up, down, and all around in the air. When this works, hoo boy, does it feel cool. Every battle arena is scaled to afford a lot of sweeping movement, whether to reach a waypoint super-high in the sky or to escape a crowd of robo-baddies, and if you're using a controller, figuring this out requires very little learning curve. The intangible "whoooooosh" that Bioware has pulled off here, at its best, is pretty remarkable stuff.

The biggest problem I had with jetpack flight came because I played with a keyboard and mouse. Bioware has clearly tuned this control method for joysticks—meaning, its movement and sensitivity relies on a joystick's neutral-point return. And without a nimble return-to-neutral option, I suffered from a lot of mid-flight collisions. And these suck in Anthem. When players fly into walls, even at a glancing, sideways angle, the result is an instant stop-and-drop.

I eventually got a handle on finding and returning to a neutral aiming position with my mouse, but it feels incredibly inelegant, and I'm not interested in giving up the comfort of mouse aiming for gun-loaded combat. Also, in my case, my preference for inverted flight controls is saved by a flight-specific inversion option (I can mouse-aim my guns like in most PC shooters, then enjoy a down-is-up tweak to flight), but, in the demo version, toggling this option inverts the mouse-look in the game's hub world. For now, I have to constantly flip this option back and forth while switching between zones. Yikes, Bioware.

Maybe there's a more elegant tutorial for mouse-flight players coming to the retail version, but I was instantly surprised at how bumbling and stupid I felt while trying to fly. Isn't that a big reason I'm supposed to care about Anthem? Because I can rev this gorgeous game on an expensive PC and feel like Iron Man? For now, the flight-with-mouse experience feels more like Talc Man.