Products Description
In ANTHEM, you play as a nameless Freelancer -- a mercenary of sorts -- who takes up contracts put forth by the inhabitants of a fortified base situated in a dense jungle. That jungle functions as the game's sole open world map, where all of your missions take place. It's big and often beautiful, but aside from a few key landmarks and some impressive ruins, each region is just... Jungle. After a few hours of exploration, it all starts to feel very samey.
And yes, you read that right: all of your missions take place on or within this one map. Almost every quest, whether it's an optional contract or a main story mission, sees you plopped into the wilderness before flying off to the nearest objective marker. If the open world was way more dynamic, full of random events and weird wildlife, returning to it over and over again wouldn't be so bad, but it's just so empty and boring. Aside from some fantastic weather effects, it's static and lifeless.
It certainly doesn't help that the majority of missions are mind-numbingly uninteresting. At least in games like Destiny you're always in the action -- there's always something to shoot. In ANTHEM, there are entire sections of missions that have you do nothing but follow a radar to objects that you hold down square to interact with -- and that's literally it. No combat, no danger, just you, clumsily wandering around a barren area looking for a number of sci-fi doohickeys. These missions are so unbelievably bad that they make Destiny's "shoot the enemies while I hack the thing" objectives seem masterfully designed.
