Anthem Review: 4 Ups & 9 Downs

6. It's A Technical Mess

One of Anthem's most unpleasant surprises is just how technically rough it is. EA notoriously forces studios to use the Frostbite Engine to develop their games, and while it's perfect for first-person shooters like Battlefield, it's always been a rougher fit for third-person titles.

As such, Anthem is a bizarrely unpolished game performance-wise. Even if you've got a decent PC with an SSD, you can look forward to loading screens lasting 1-2 minutes, which may even result in you or other players missing the opening cut-scene of a mission.

Moreover, there are just too many of the damn loading screens. Between logging into Fort Tarsis, heading to the Forge to kit yourself out, entering the open world and heading to instanced dungeons, you'll be faced with loading screens for each transition.

Some don't last more than 15-or-so seconds, but some come dangerously close to two minutes (especially when starting a mission).

And if this isn't ridiculous enough, the game's also jam-packed full of bugs, from not getting credit for collecting objects and accomplishing mission tasks, to out-of-nowhere crashes and crucial mission steps not triggering.

In order to complete the game's final story mission, I had to restart it twice, after my first two attempts both trapped a single enemy behind an invisible wall, thereby preventing me from progressing.

There are also reports of low-level players getting randomly grouped into the game's final mission. There are no words.

And while some of these issues can indeed be fixed with patches, the game's technical infrastructure ultimately can't be re-shaped too much, and so outside of some bug-fixes, it's likely that the brutal load-times are here to say.