June 18, 2018 by Paul Curtin
EA kicked off E3 this year with a second look at their highly anticipated new shooter from BioWare, Anthem.
The latest from the creators of Mass Effect and Dragon Age looks to be EA’s take on the online co-op RPG/shooter genre similar to Activision’s Destiny and Ubisoft’s The Division.
On location at EA Play, we got a chance to see a 20-minute extended gameplay demo of what was teased during EA’s presser earlier in the day. In the demo, BioWare revealed what you can expect in big boss fightshow and how opposite of Destiny, combat will be in third-person while interactions with NPCs in towns will be in first-person — the infamous storytelling dev’s goal is to allow each player to have their own unique story-telling experience as is usually the case with BioWare games.
In Anthem, players will collect mech suits, called Javelins, that allow the player to swap between classes four unique classes (Ranger, Colossus, Interceptor, and Storm) just like in Warframe. However, despite sharing a lot in common with both Destiny and Warframe, Anthem seems most like Capcom’s highly underrated Lost Planet 2.
Unlike other recent sci-fi games with clean synthetic styles, Anthem’s maps and enemies seem much more organic with alien eggs and giant spider bosses that you would find in more traditional sci-fi/horror lore. And players will be equipped with jetpacks that will allow them to quickly fly through maps in Iron Man-style and even swim underwater to find secret dungeons and other quest markers on the map.
Again, similar to Lost Planet 2 and as with any good RPG, large bosses have weak spots that players can target for bonus damage and BioWare is teasing plenty of big guns and upgrades for players to hunt down and collect. In the extended demo we saw, each of the four classes worked together like in an MMO to chain together their unique abilities and ultimates to deal massive damage to the giant spider boss that frantically ran around the dungeon trying to devour the team.
The demo ended before the team slayed the spider boss and collected their loot, but there’s sure to be tons of new details on what goodies you can expect to collect with Anthem so close to release on February 22, 2019 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
