Anthem Hands-On Beta Review: 5 Ups & 5 Downs

2. Story & World Design Shows Promise

Back to the story, and it's definitely an onslaught of nouns flying left, right and centre ("We must stop the Capital Letter, otherwise This Thing could stop This Other Thing, and we don't want another One Of These!") - a formula that felt more like someone read Destiny's copy of "Instant Sci-Fi: Just add terminology!", but a prominent Bioware spark comes through in the character of Matthias.

As this game's eventual Mordin Solus, Matthias accidentally splits his body into three replicas of himself using an alien artefact, but with three distinct parts of his psyche then inhabiting each one. Just the voice acting and concept here is neat as you're watching three "parts" of a person converse and argue with one another, and this leads to the revelation that one of the game's factions is also a smaller amount of individuals, split into a small army.

So far, so conceptually cool.

A wider ramification is reality itself struggling to deal with what's happening, and therein lies at least one idea that ties in with the level of scriptwriting we used to associate with the studio.

Who knows how many other examples of this there'll be - or even if the whole story will be anywhere near as well thought out - but as an opening gambit, at least in theory, there's something more than just "good vs evil".