Forty years after Space Invaders, video games are still coming up with new ways to shoot aliens. Anthem is a multiplayer game set on a planet whose gods abandoned it mid-creation, leaving a pantheon of mutated creatures to ravage the beautiful environment and threaten the humans who share it. Clad in a nimble mech-suit with flying jets and a portable arsenal of guns, you soar out over the gorgeous overgrown planet with three other players and hold off the aliens, discovering majestic ruins from the dawn of creation.

Anthem is one of many online games competing for players’ long-term attention, designed to be played every day or every week by groups of friends together. But it is made by BioWare, a developer known for role-playing games that immerse a lone player in a rich fantasy that they alone control. Why has the studio decided to make something so different? It is undeniably a risk: the strengths of good single-player games – an absorbing narrative, player choice, the ability to take your time and explore at your own place – do not transfer well to the shared world of multiplayer games.

I can put my finger on one probable motivation: Destiny, the game that popularised the sci-fi multiplayer shooter (along with slow-burn action-shooter Warframe). Playing Anthem’s opening hours, the echoes of Bungie’s space-opera shooter are at times deafening. The story strikes the same tone of jargon-laden sci-fi drama, and involves a couple of cities’ worth of humans holding out against a planet that has been devastated. Some of the enemy aliens are intimidating, spiky bipeds that bring to mind not just the Fallen and the Cabal, but also Halo’s Covenant creatures. One of the mech-suits, the Storm, is extraordinarily similar to Destiny’s Warlock class in its feel, animations and abilities, floaty jump and all. The capsule city to which you return between missions is a warren of corridors filled with ambient tinkerers and quest-givers. But in the hands, Anthem feels unique; after an hour or two, the obvious comparison recedes and Anthem’s own identity reveals itself.

Play revolves not around the guns and how exciting they feel to shoot but around the mechs’ exhilarating movement – particularly their power of flight. You begin every outing by leaping from the top of the city’s giant protective walls and soaring into the green. Flying in Anthem is brilliant, interwoven seamlessly with shooting so that you never have touch the ground if you’re good enough. You can hover in mid-air for better aim at a distance, or barrel towards a group of monsters, come crashing to the ground in the middle of them and whip out a sword. Flying is so fun that almost everything you do feels epic, whether it’s diving deep into a waterlogged cavern, hovering next to a titanic creature as you fire bullets and rockets at it, or swooping through a waterfall to cool your mech-suit’s jets. Honestly, I was expecting a science-fiction multiplayer game from BioWare to hook me with its story, but not with how immensely fun it feels to play.

The addition of flight was a watershed moment in Anthem’s development, says Ben Irving, a lead producer who has been working on it for two years. It created lots of problems for the developers, such as how to balance range and how to get creatures to follow players’ movements. But it was so fun they had to make it work. “Lots of shooters have flight, but usually you’ll get into a plane or something,” he says. “In that situation you can have a different control scheme, but the challenge for us was that if you you jump and start flying, the controls still have to function the same way. It took us a lot of time to try and get the controls to feel seamless between walk, run, sprint, jump, fly, hover, swim.”

That fluidity is what makes the game special. “It’s just so different – you can get lost in the sensation of flight, carving around corners and through water to cool your jets so you can keep going, seeing how far you can get before touching the ground,” says Thomas Singleton, a producer who joined Anthem last year, with whom I spent an enjoyable day exploring its early missions. “With this game it’s really important that we get people’s hands on the sticks and have them experience it for themselves. That’s where the game starts to sing and makes you smile.”

Out in the wilds, where you are always part of a group of four mech-suited players, Anthem is all about the action. Choosing a tank-like Colossus with big guns and a hefty shield, a zippy Interceptor, the all-rounder Ranger or the elemental Storm suit, you dive from the walls of the city and start looking for trouble. Whether you’re in free exploration mode or on a mission, the world is enticingly packed with things to find: loot-filled caves, hidden areas, unstable relics that need to be shut down, and always plenty of different creatures to shoot. I found the fights far from easy, and understanding each mech-suit’s strengths and working as a team with fellow pilots was the only way through tougher waves of aliens.

Flying high … the mech-suits in Anthem. Photograph: BioWare

In between missions, you return either to a social hub called the Launch Bay with other players, or alone to Fort Tarsis. It is here that BioWare has exercised its traditional storytelling strengths. Tarsis is full of characters to converse with and learn from, companions on your journey. By keeping the story personal and the action communal, Anthem hopes to offer the kind of narrative depth that is usually necessarily absent from multiplayer games.

“We learned from Star Wars: The Old Republic [BioWare’s Star Wars online RPG] that things like having a group conversation and rolling on who gets the choice isn’t satisfying,” says Ben. “When you’re making an online game with a narrative that lives for multiple years, it becomes impossible to have a story that involves individual choice, because you’d have to make 50 stories to account for all the branching. It’s fair to say the level of choice isn’t like a single-player BioWare game. It’s more about picking how you want to relate to our characters, how you reflect who you are.”

Over the course of a day’s play, the characters and storytelling weren’t what impressed me about Anthem; it is perhaps telling that, a week later, I couldn’t tell you a single individual’s name without referring to my notes. There is intrigue in the setup of a world abandoned while it was still being forged, and the mysterious powers of creation that are still shaping it. But it is the shared adventures, the flight and fighting, that I’m looking forward to revisiting next month when Anthem is released. As an online game, it will doubtless change rapidly over its first year of life, but already there is much of interest to find in its world – and I’ve rarely played a mech game that feels so freeing and exciting to control.