Concord developer Firewalk Studios is quite obviously stuffed to the gills with world-class talent. They have technical and conceptual sophistication "out the ass." And what they've chosen to do is fairly striking: offer a premium product in the land of the service shooter, and slow down the pace of kills until it's something like a turn-based tactics experience, and whose characters chart a new form of -punk that we may not have the prefix for yet. I don't mean that as a joke! I'm honor-bound to support anyone who engages in dangerous heresies. Obviously, here are very mean ways to say all of the things I just said. For example, Gabriel says the game feels like you're trudging through molasses and that the faces are scary, at once living and dead, like animated corpses. He says he has been robbed of sleep! I don't know about all that.
They're super, super smart. Smart enough to drop a demo on Sony that made them immediately get down on one knee, and plump with Bungie talent. It has a really interesting concept for a roster shooter like this called Crew Builder that essentially gamifies character selection. Right? Smart.
It didn't debut well; debuting is hard. It had a Guardians Of The Galaxy But Not sort of energy in the vein of Kroger's Avengers. Like I said before, it's trying to carve out its own pace but I think it's reading as heavy and slow. It's scary how fast games blow up and then recede, now. Discoverability is a hard enough problem, but even megahits have to contend with unprecedented churn in a world where freemium looks and plays like quadruple A. I hope it's a slow burn thing. They clearly have a voice, and I hope the right people hear it.
(CW)TB out.
