Anthem is a shared-world shooter that asks you to fly. For a while, that is enough.
BioWare’s online action role-playing game launched February 22, 2019, for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One, published by Electronic Arts. You play a Freelancer in a customizable exosuit called a Javelin, defending humanity from the threats beyond the walls of Fort Tarsis. The title refers to the Anthem of Creation, the force behind most of the world’s extraordinary technology and its worst disasters.
The flight is the best thing Anthem does. Hovering above a ridge, dropping into a canyon, and firing off elemental blasts on the way down feels like the reason the game exists. The combat that follows is thinner. Enemies absorb damage, numbers float, and the loop settles into repetition long before the story is finished.
That gap — between how good it feels to move and how little there is to do once you land — is the whole review.
Trailer, via IGN.
Four Javelins, Four Jobs
Anthem gives you four Javelin variants, unlocked as you progress. Each one has distinct attributes and abilities meant to evoke classic role-playing archetypes.
- The Ranger is the starting suit, an all-around master of combat.
- The Colossus is the largest and slowest, but the most resilient, with a large shield to absorb attacks or hit enemies.
- The Interceptor is the fastest and most agile, built for quick close-quarters melee strikes.
- The Storm carries the least armor but stays airborne the longest, attacking from a distance with blasts of elemental energies.
That is a real spread of play styles, and the game deserves credit for it. The problem is that all four suits feed into the same grind. You unlock the Javelins, you learn their tricks, and then you repeat content to make them stronger. The variety is in the tools, not in what you point them at.
The world is a contiguous open space shared with up to three other players. It is built for cooperation, and cooperation is where Anthem is most comfortable. Flying with a squad, splitting targets, reviving a teammate under fire — these are the moments that hold up.
Haluk, Faye, and the Heart of Rage
The story opens with a disaster. A famed Freelancer named Haluk rallies an army to enter the Heart of Rage and deactivate the Cenotaph. Your character is a rookie on a first mission. Faye, Haluk’s wife and a Cypher, runs support.
Shortly in, the other Freelancers are killed. Faye calls a retreat. You evacuate a wounded Haluk. The failure is total, and public faith in the Freelancers collapses with it.
Two years later you live in Fort Tarsis, a frontier city between the Heart of Rage and Antium, Bastion’s capital. You work modest contracts with a young Cypher named Owen, who wants to be a Freelancer despite psychic abilities that hinder piloting a Javelin.
An agent of Corvus named Tassyn hires you to find a spy who went missing undercover with a smuggling gang called the Regulators. At a ruined Regulator hideout you meet The Monitor, a Dominion leader, powerful Cypher and skilled pilot who took part in the assault on Freemark that created the Heart of Rage. He executes Tassyn’s spy and takes a Shaper relic.
Tassyn concludes the Dominion is gathering relics for another run at the Cenotaph and rehires you to get there first. She brings in Haluk and Faye, who have spent two years on a new plan.
The Javelin of Dawn
Faye and Haluk decide the only suit that can survive the Heart of Rage is General Tarsis’s legendary Javelin of Dawn. Clues in the tombs of Tarsis’s Legionnaires lead to her secret tomb, where you claim Tarsis’s signet — the key to the Fortress of Dawn, site of her last stand and the Javelin’s resting place.
At the Temple of Dawn you face trials of skill and resolve. After reenacting Tarsis’s last stand, an apparition of the General declares you fit to be a Legionnaire of Dawn and grants access to her Javelin.
Then your own suit freezes. Owen appears and takes credit for sabotaging it, announcing he will take the Javelin of Dawn for himself. He intends to accept The Monitor’s offer — spare Fort Tarsis in exchange for help with the Javelin — and accuses you of blocking his dream. Before he leaves, Faye scans the suit’s unique shielding module, the Shield of Dawn, hoping it can be duplicated so you can enter the Heart of Rage in your own Javelin.
Haluk and Faye build a copy. They cannot activate it. Tassyn arrives to report the Dominion is nearing the Heart of Rage, and reveals she hired you at Faye’s request to replace Haluk as pilot. Haluk flies off to the Fortress of Dawn in anger and is ambushed. You arrive to find Owen saved him — and Owen apologizes, hands over his own Shield of Dawn, and leaves.
With the Shield active, you return to the Heart of Rage with Faye and Haluk on remote support. The Monitor has merged with the Anthem through the conduit. You kill him. Faye deactivates the Cenotaph and closes the Heart of Rage.
Back in Fort Tarsis, Tassyn pulls you away to see the corpse of an Urgoth found and killed inside Bastion’s borders. Another crisis may be coming. Be ready.
Owen Is the Only Character Who Moves
Owen is the one figure in Anthem who changes. He starts as your partner, resents his own limits, betrays you for a suit, then gives up the Shield of Dawn as a peace offering. That arc has actual shape, and it is the closest the game comes to drama.
Everyone else is fixed. Haluk is proud and wounded. Faye is steady and clever. Tassyn is an agent with a job. The Monitor is a villain who wants the powerful thing. The story moves them from place to place without moving them as people.
The ending arrives abruptly. You kill The Monitor, Faye closes the Cenotaph, and then a corpse in the borderlands teases another crisis. That is not a cliffhanger. It is a loose thread.
A Grind With Good Bones
Anthem’s weaknesses are structural, and they are the kind that do not patch out.
The loot loop is the core problem. You replay content to chase gear, and in this writer’s judgment the gear does not change how the game feels enough to justify the hours. Combat is shallow: enemies take damage, you take damage, and the outcome depends on numbers more than decisions. Technical problems were among the criticisms. The story, as noted, is thin.
What works, works well. The flight controls are excellent. The visuals are frequently beautiful. The Javelin roster is genuinely varied, and the Colossus, Interceptor and Storm each play like a different game for a while.
Then the repetition sets in, and the different games start to feel like the same one.
What Anthem Cost
Anthem reached over 5 million lifetime sales. It still failed to meet commercial expectations. That sentence is the whole story of the game’s afterlife.
BioWare said in February 2020 it would reinvent the core gameplay as part of a long-term plan. In February 2021, all future development ceased. The servers shut down on January 12, 2026, making Anthem unplayable.
Here is the order in which Anthem’s problems actually landed, from least to most damaging.
- Technical problems, which were fixable.
- A thin story, which was not fixed.
- A shallow combat loop, which the loot could not cover.
- A grind that made the repetition the point.
- A shutdown that erased all of it.
A live-service game that ends is a game that ends twice. Anthem’s flight was real, its world was handsome, and its four Javelins were a smart piece of design. None of that survives a server shutdown. What is left is a campaign you can no longer play, an ending that teased another crisis, and a reminder that a game built to run forever can be switched off.
The 5 million figure is the most interesting number here, and the least flattering. It marks a real commercial achievement. It also sits next to a game that failed to meet expectations, and the distance between those two facts is the whole story.
The Verdict on Anthem
Anthem is a 6 out of 10. It is not a disaster. The flying is superb, the Javelins are distinct, and the combat has moments. But the grind is punishing, the story is flat, and the only character with an arc is the one who betrays you.
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