The honeymoon phase of the game was fine. I was learning the game. Bioware’s claim to fame has been crafting complicated character dramas such as the beloved “Mass Effect” series, and I was getting to know the quirky new characters they wrote for “Anthem.”

But after several weeks of good-faith effort in trying to enjoy it, I almost hate this game. “Hate” might be a strong word, because the flying and art style are still great. But I definitely resent this game because it actually prevents players from enjoying it. Here are seven ways “Anthem” is trying the patience of everyone still giving the loot-shooter a shot.

1) Players are fearing for the safety of their expensive consoles.

This is the most severe issue. “Anthem” is in such a messy state, it’s caused PlayStation 4 consoles to shut down improperly. The game crashes so hard, your PlayStation 4 will interpret it as you ripping the cord out of its socket.

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And it’s gotten so bad that Sony is now offering refunds to some (but not all) affected players. Publisher EA issued a statement on Monday saying they’re hoping to fix the game. The longer Bioware takes to fix it, the higher the risk of more PlayStation players simply walking away from something the developers hoped would be played for years.

2) The characters are terrible.

In between each mission for the main story line, the player is forced to talk to citizens of Fort Tarsis, the game’s gathering hub for players to equip and craft items. Each of these characters are scripted to act a certain role. One woman is socially awkward and has nervous tics. A shopkeeper is literally comedian Kristen Schaal telling me about the alien animals she likes. Another guy obsessively cleans the town. And that guy? He once ended a conversation, “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a fountain to fix.” But he won’t. He won’t do anything, because none of the characters do anything, to anyone or to one another. They’ll just stand in the same spot, unmoving, and tell you their life stories.

The game’s armored heroes are called “Freelancers," meant to be dynamic forces of righteous destruction and justice, not therapists.

3) A ‘quickplay’ mode that isn’t quick, and you can’t play

I was just trying to gain more experience points via a “quickplay” session when the following happened:

Quickplay is a misnomer, because it is neither quick to boot up, nor can you even play. This seems problematic.

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Easily more than half the games you try to boot up in “quickplay” are bugged. To be honest, I’ve only ever successfully connected to a “quickplay” session once. And it was during the last 30 seconds of a mission in progress, for which I got full credit for doing essentially nothing.

4) The game wants to sell you things, but the things on sale are embarrassing.

I mentioned the Iron Man-like armor sets are cool, right? They’re meant to look cool. They do look cool. But if you want to change how you look, your options are limited to up to four things that all kind of look the same as one another.

So far the game does not allow “vanity” items such as armor as treasure drops. Bioware said it’s working on it. In the meantime, the only way to get new armor is to spend real-world money in the game’s online store. These “microtransaction” stores have been widely criticized as a predatory practice, but even when it comes to being predatory, “Anthem” fails.

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There’s almost nothing to buy. This is what was on sale Sunday: a few stickers, “fabric” for your armor, and an emote to do the robot. For the ability to “do the robot” in a 2019 video game, you need to spend 23,000 gold (in-game currency) or just under $5 in real-world money.

As of this writing, there are a grand total of two (2) emotes: “talk to the hand” and “heavy air guitar.” You don’t even shred your air guitar. You just sort of do an awkward strumming action, as though it were animated by people who only know about guitars as a concept.

5) You can die for reasons you won’t understand.

Look at the last five seconds of this clip and tell me what happened.

If you couldn’t tell, the player was taking cover behind a whole tower, and yet the monster’s fireball still connected and grounded our hero. This happens all the time.

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It’s uncertain whether it’s due to server issues or connection issues, but this “hit detection” issue has been prevalent. Players will go down for no reason. And sometimes they might even suddenly die, because users are reporting a widespread “health bug” that makes it impossible to know how close you are to death. Which leads me to another point ...

6) The numbers mean nothing.

It’s a role-playing game. These games usually have numbers that pile up to make players feel good about the time they invested. But this game has no numbers. At least none with any meaning.

Did you get a new legendary gun with a certain damage boost to marksman rifles? Cool. Is it any better than a default rifle? Well, there’s no empirical way to see whether it’s stronger, which has led to players spending more time testing things out in the field. Hilariously, this has only led to people finding more potential issues, including how a Level 1 gun (the first gun you get) might be stronger than a Level 45 legendary gun. Nothing seems to work as it should, and there’s no way to tell how it’s supposed to work in the first place. Everyone is confused and angry.

7) This is no Iron Man simulator. It’s a simulator that helps you feel yourself physically age.

Loading screens were a scourge upon early disc-based games during the 1990s, and “Anthem” brings them back in a big way. Want to equip that new gun? Load. Need to talk to someone to get a mission? Load back into town. Want to do a mission? You’re going to stare at a static loading screen for minutes of almost complete silence. The amount of time doing literally nothing in this game except “exist” edges dangerously close to most of your time with this game.

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It’s during these moments when, sitting alone in my gamer chair, that I start to have an existential gamer crisis. Why am I even a gamer? Is there anything else I could be doing? Sometimes I fall asleep, Xbox controller in one hand, phone open to the Anthem subreddit in another, like an Egyptian pharaoh buried with history’s most useless treasure.

The game feels tragic, because Bioware has been such a celebrated name in gaming. Imagine music fans shunning Rihanna. That’s how shocking this Bioware backlash is.

The most upsetting thing is that the core gameplay is still fun. It’s fun to fly. The armor sets are still great to control, and all four classes of armor are unique and play off each other well. It’s fun to go “pew” to the aliens and monsters, and the world Bioware built is a high mark in fantasy design. But never before have I played such an expensive game that seems engineered to make players actively despise it. And considering how “Anthem” is only the latest in such disappointing games, players are getting sick of it fast.

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“I’m tired of being a beta tester,” wrote one Reddit user. “Just about every AAA game that has come out in the last few years has just been a total slap to the face. The gaming industry, at least for larger companies, has taken a turn for the worst.”