Concord is a good shooter divorced from the reality of its genre

Concord has been dealt a terrible hand.

It’s hard enough to convince players in 2024 to try an entirely new live service game when the cost of entry is simply the time it takes to download the game, but trying to get someone to pay $40 before they know if they even like the game or not seems like an impossibility.

Not only that, but Concord’s community sentiment has been deeply toxic from the minute it was properly unveiled. The game has (unfairly) become a poster child for Sony‘s perceived pivot away from prestige single-player titles to live service trends, something the loyal PlayStation audience, loudly, vocally despises.

Concord is a good shooter built on a release strategy and price point that would have been far more at home in 2017, and feels laughably dated today. The game – which is a multiplayer-only, live-service hero shooter – does provide fun, but even at its best, we never felt strongly enough about it that we’d tell someone with three or four other live-service games on the go to drop what they’re doing, pay $40 and jump on.

At launch, the game has 16 characters and 6 modes. The modes are split up into three playlists, and it’s currently not possible to queue for all of the modes at once, or a particular favourite. These are takes on classics like Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed, Domination, and other shooter staples.

The matches themselves are very short, with a game of Takedown (TDM) only requiring a team to rack up 30 kills, meaning you’re given very little time to experiment with the game’s large roster in a real, in-game situation (though there are some training modes).

Concord’s gunplay is punchy, and feels akin to Destiny‘s The Crucible. There are few overlapping mechanics across the 16 characters, meaning that each fight presents a unique challenge.

The game’s rather poor at flagging what your team, or opponent’s abilities actually do, however. This means that there have been firefights where we’ve died out of nowhere, with little explanation, or