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

1. Combat Is Tactile, Responsive And Visually Engaging

The flip-side to narrative is what you're doing in Anthem for 90% of the time, and though it might be streamlined to be as much a "Third-Person Sci-Fi Shooter" as possible, Bioware pull from their Mass Effect days to give you quick access to three additional powers, and a melee attack.

It means you're not only flying above or through enemy platoons, firing off machine gun rounds or shotgun blasts, but also letting fly a special area-of-effect grenade, flurry of shurikens or force blast-style launcher. Each Javelin has a multitude of ultimate abilities you can let fly when you're meter's full too - the two I tried being an auto-targeting rocket flurry and invulnerable state were your melee swipes were overpowered.

All of this plays as well as it sounds, and you'll have dispatched a good few hundred enemies before you can say "Why am I doing this?", but it's here we were must delve below the surface, as Anthem's long term appeal is where things start to stumble...