well fam here we are the beta for Concord PlayStation's latest live service 5v5 hero shooter game that they're selling for 40 bucks and that they hope takes the World by storm this was the game they announced a while back but they did a whole like gameplay reveal recently where they spent like 15 minutes talking about it they showed a long cinematic trailer building up characters all sorts of stuff like that and while some people have just immediately dismissed it as an OverWatch clone that will be dead on arrival others have been cautiously optimistic hoping maybe they're on to something they did just recently have hell divers 2 which popped off maybe they're going to be cooking with this game too so today I decided we would actually try the game ourselves instead of just taking other people's word for it and see what it plays like which is what we're going to do here today so as you can see when you load in there are cinematics that play this is one of the things they're going to be doing weekly where they'll have new cutscenes to build relationships between players and characters and stuff and so far what we've seen are two cutscenes one at the very very top when you first boot the game and then this one which seems to be the weekly cut scene which you can skip if you want to if you've already seen it before now I played this for a couple of hours earlier today on stream go over to my second Channel Luke Stevens live if you are not already subscribed somehow and there you can watch us play games like this live and in person it's always a really good time but with this I've already seen these cutscenes and frankly I just don't find them particularly compelling it's one of those things where they just assume that you're already invested in the world and characters so unless you just start with that you're just kind of left wondering what the hell they're talking about and what's going on I don't know it didn't really connect with me some of the performances are a little stilted specifically this guy on the far left who's like the generic uh like Soldier 76 type character he talks incursive and I can barely understand anything he says much paid now let's establish root glance now let's establish root glance what is that dude talk like a normal person it's like when somebody's pretending to be a rock star and so they're like yeah or like uh what What's his name Austin Butler I think is what it is is that his name the guy that played Elvis Yeah Austin Butler that guy after he played Elvis then all of the interviews after that he starts talking like like trying to talk like Elvis That's basically what just happened anywh who here we are in the actual game as you can see I've gotten myself to the little reputation level eight all that means is that I have played a handful of matches and it lets me get access to a couple of things that you wouldn't have access to before such as a secondary play mode rivalry and then also things like this within the free Gunners tab the crew Builder now if you look past the blueberry that's on the center of this Frame and you go inside this this is one of the unique things that the game is doing basically they allow you to build out a crew and that crew is effectively a roster of different Heroes that you can bring to matches and then you select from that crew instead of just it being a total free for all of getting to pick whoever you want to pick it's a somewhat novel idea basically the idea is unlike OverWatch where you can just play and then hot swap to any hero in the roster in the middle of a match if you die they wanted to counter that and make it so you're only able to pull from a very specific roster so that you don't get the hard counters that you often get in hero Shooters where one character is weak to this character in this particular way so the moment that player sees that happen they just swap to the other character and then it just goes round and round in a circle of everybody hard countering each other at least with this you don't have the option to do that you can also see that we can customize the appearances of different Heroes and stuff that are currently in the roster and you also see over here we have two different types of lenux this is uh differentiated for one by the outfit but two by this little Mark and badge in the bottom left those are the traits that can be unlocked for each of these characters in this case the level one or type one in this case the variant one combat trait for lenux is Dodge reload reloads equipped weapon during Dodge but if we go back and we look at the level or the rather variant 2 option it's extended mag so instead of reloading when he Dodges we now have extra ammo for both weapons which is a different thing that's at least cool it doesn't seem like one is particularly better than the other it just depends on how you play them so there's a little bit of variability there and each of these characters should have different variants available for you to choose from but that's enough of that let's just get into it I'll start with brawl cuz it's the sort of default starter mode that is more casual we'll go into the Rivalry mode here in a few minutes and I'll show you that because it's pretty infuriating if in multiple ways but again we'll talk about that and here we are loaded in and then we're going to get a series of establishing shots as we load in one of the frustrations that I have is that these are pretty lengthy like the matchmaking time goes from being 2 to 3 minutes down to 25 seconds it's all over the place it is a beta so we need to be cognizant of that that could be part of the reason why it's so inconsistent but as you can see from the moment the match is connected we all have to sit through this cutscene of the ship Landing you can't skip it there's no way to do that you just have to sit through it every single match and it gets a little annoying you know it's not quite on the cool level of something like you know the the drop ships in Hell divers 2 or something it's just a little bit less interesting than that to me cuz it's just a ship Landing you know but okay we've selected our characters and now we are going to actually get into the game let's see what we're dealing with now elephants in the room I think the game actually looks pretty graphically impressive I like the visual presentation and I also like the movement there's cool things you can do like this ability for her where you toss a little orb up warp to it um you'll also see that the ttk is ooh a good bit longer than you may be used to for games like this now the Dead have a history of working at Bungie they've worked on games like Destiny they know what they're doing when it comes to building a shooter like this but if people were coming into it like expecting a on toone like OverWatch clone you'll either be disappointed or pleased to see that it's different because it is quite different it does not play quite like OverWatch it plays a good bit differently which I can appreciate because it would have been really easy for them to just do a one to one copy but actually feels somewhat novel and I can appreciate that what a time to reload oh God I'm going to try to get away throw the orb snap to it booah I need health so bad okay a little bit better now like I was saying one of the things that takes a little bit of time getting used to is the longer ttk and all that stands for in case you're not familiar as time to kill um it basically means that like player health will either be higher or lower or damage outputs will be be altered to make it higher or lower and it it has a pretty significant impact on the feel of the game at the end of the day like cuz there's times where you feel like I should have killed that guy I got the jump on him and everything but I just didn't get the full wipe because the ttk is too long you know I they were able to just barely sneak away just like that I probably should have died in that moment but I got away and I'm going to recover get this health and get back into it simply because the ttk is a little bit longer it rewards better play by focusing on head shot and high damage play and it also encourages more tactical play cuz you can't just Sprint in there kill someone with a couple of shots to the body or something it requires a little bit more finesse unlike what I just did now like I said I've liked this character because she's very agile and I like her movement she's a very fast character she plays very fast-paced and I just enjoy that style of play it's it's how I tend to play games like this um oh what a what a time to reload there we go we got the melee though the tracking on the melee kills is pretty aggressive I'll tell you what oh that feels bad that feels real bad throw this over there warp to it oh yeah oh I warped right into one okay but like I said I like that character because of the movement however if I swap to like a tank I'll just show you how slow the tank movement is like you saw how fast I was zipping around before the tanks in this game are like walking underwater this is him at full walk speed this is him sprinting barely barely moves at [Music] all I don't like him he I I don't like him I'm bad with him now this guy is the standard like assault character my favorite thing with him is that he's got this smoke screen so he can throw this out it pops it but I can still see through it using this thermal so I can still deal damage even after popping the smoke grenade which leads to some interesting like tactical situations where you can pop the smoke and prep for the push from the other team if you need to which is always kind of cool when you can shake it up make it a little bit more Dynamic oh we've almost won there's the blueberry oh what a Time the pistols sort of get the job done sometimes honestly the pistols suck way more than I would have thought they barely do any damage you can see like plinking maybe four damage a pop off the health bars like like so 9 10 11 like it just depends they're really not very consistent and uh normally you'd hope to like get the enemy down low on health and then swap to the pistol quickly to finish them off but the pistols are so inconsistent in terms of damage output I think it just just needs a little balancing specifically for the sniper character right there she'll like chest shot somebody with a flick real quickly when she's jumped by somebody you know coming in on her her nest wherever she's sniping from and then you'll swap to your pistol to try and wipe somebody with her but it does so little damage you can't actually do it so instead you just start beating the crap out of them and I would just prefer if the pistols were a little bit more effective but okay we tried that mode now let me show you rivalry this is one of the more competitive modes you have to be level I think six to unlock it so you kind of have to prove yourself before they give you access to this mode because it's more competitive it's more difficult and there's no respawn or anything it's it's much more like your traditional valerant or CSO type game mode we just match made and so now we sit through the ship Landing sequence again just waiting for it to happen you see we need to secure strategic zones capture the zone and defend it from the Rival crew okay Landing still Landing almost landed almost there we're close there's the ship then we land and then we're going to select our our characters whatever we want to do I'm going to play my favorite Zippy Zippy or actually you know what I'm going to play him let's let's go range you know what no we're shaking up we'll do we'll do this guy um whatever his name is uh Lennox that's right I almost forgot Star-Lord basically Star-Lord they do have a character named Starchild though which is the Drax guy you might recognize from that trailer so that's a thing and okay 3 2 1 now the reason that I have a problem with this game mode is because right now it could just be a beta thing it might be a permanent thing there is no way for for the game to fill in empty slots if you have a player drop or go AFK or whatever you are just at a loss you're just screwed for the rest of the match they can't fill it in there's just nothing that can happen you're just left down until uh the the next match and that means that everybody ends up leaving very quickly oh God everybody ends up leaving very very quickly cuz they just don't want to deal with it they're like no I'm I'm not putting up with this I'm I'm out and earlier on stream we had this very thing happen where I had one player in our team of five drop early on in the match and after that like there was just no way for us to win because if the match is Match Made competitively as it should be you're just not going to win if you're going 4v5 in a match like this it's just not going to happen so it caused a lot of frustration because then another player left cuz they were pissed off and then two other players left So eventually I was just doing a 1v5 matchup and of course it didn't end up going well I will say graphically the game looks really good though I mean these character models are good the animations are really good this is also built around the PlayStation 5 so as a console game it looks really good uh I I don't think anybody's going to doubt the art direction or the graphics or anything like that they've done a really good job here with that central question with Concord is just whether or not it's good enough to justify its $40 price tag because here's the thing it's going head to-head with games like OverWatch or valorant or any other hero shooter or 5v5 shooter of any type like they're going head-to-head with those guys and basically every single one of its peers are free to play they don't charge 40 bucks up front that's some weird like 2015 multiplayer crap like this is not evolved from whatever that was 2014 I think this is 2024 a decade later and when you charge 40 bucks for your game it better be worth it oh I got her but she got me bummer it also doesn't seem to have a replay mode at all for watching back the kill cam which is just something I like in games like this I don't know again if that's just a beta thing or if they're going to add that later or if it's just not something they're doing in this game I don't really know yeah we we blew that one my bad fam now the other elephant in the room and that's not a pun is um the character just design like a lot of the characters here are a little funky looking I'm going be real like there's just some bold choices with some of the layouts and and Designs like they're not the worst I've ever seen by any stretch of the imagination but they're definitely not good and I've seen a lot of people complain about how pretty much all of the characters in this roster are just one to one let's just say similes of the like OverWatch lineup or the lineup of a lot of other hero Shooters and that's definitely fair like they are very very similar but to a certain extent I think I'll defend the game on this point because if you give like a character in your hero shooter a sniper rifle it is natural to want to give them like say a grapple hook to get up to a vantage point to actually snipe that to just makes sense I think that that's fair to do or like if you have a character that has a revolver type weapon it makes sense to probably give them like a smoke grenade or a grenade of some sort that just lines up but by doing both of those you just made basically Widowmaker and Cassidy SL McCree so I get where people are coming from like it certainly looks like it's just a one toone copy but there's only so many archetypes you can have in a game like this like that doesn't necessarily excuse it like they still are very very similar to each other but I think it's more because OverWatch has been around for a decade now and so they've had the chance to do pretty much everything before anybody else had a chance to do it but again that doesn't necessarily excuse it because they still are very very similar and if people are frustrated by that then that's just what they're frustrated by but still at the end of the day it doesn't really matter because if people have the impression and perception that this is just a clone of OverWatch whether or not that is factually true that's the perception you have to deal with and that's something that they're going to need to try really hard to either differentiate themselves from or they're going to have to try and really just own it and embrace it I don't really know as of right now it seems like they're not really doing much of anything in response to it they're just kind of going along with it so we'll see if that affects the game cuz other games like law Breakers have come out years and years ago and they were compared to OverWatch and those games died very very quick so I'm wondering how this game handles the same potential difficulties it'll be interesting to see oh yeah okay we won fam we did it now at the the end of this like I want to share My overall thoughts on this stuff because I think that this is a fine game I think Concord is fine even pretty good as a firsters shooter 5v5 hero shooter whatever category you want to toss it into I think it's pretty pretty good does that mean that therefore it's worth $40 in this case I'm not so sure just because all of its peers all of the competition that is in the same category and genre they're all free to play like this is $40 and has like all sorts of battle pass stuff it has what they call jobs which are like weekly challenges as you can see so they have seasonal stuff and challenges they're going to do they have the free Gunners they have reputation systems um they're going to have microtransactions in this game and it's $40 and that is one where I really struggle justifying when everybody else on the market is doing it free to playay I just don't know how to justify spending 40 and then dealing with all of that stuff when it's not that unique of a game naturally people want to bring up games like hell diverse 2 and point to that as an example of PlayStation charging $40 for an online game that also had microtransactions and stuff within it and it worked out great for them but here's the deal hell divers was no doubt exceptional but it was just that exception all it was an exception to the general rule which is what made it so extraordinary cuz it wasn't ordinary what is ordinary and what is the general rule is that if you're going to go head-to-head in some genre in this case the hero shooter genre genre you need to meet those competitors where they're at in terms of value proposition in terms of gameplay modes gameplay quality graphical Fidelity long-term support all of that stuff if you want to go head-to-head and actually stand a chance of long-term success and in this case everybody else in this category is free to play and you can just download it and try it but for Concord they're charging 40 bucks and that to me is just it's pretty bold cuz listen I haven't had a bad time playing this game I've actually had a pretty good time today playing it and I'll probably play it more this afternoon and just see if there's anything else I discover that's of interest to me but is it so good that I'm going to tell my friends and family to spend 40 bucks on it so we can play over the weekend personally I don't think so like if we're all sitting down tonight to play games I think we're still booting up OverWatch I think we're still booting up something else that we've already been playing for months and months that we know that we're familiar with instead of spending 40 bucks a pop like the economy is garbage right now like 40 bucks is a good chunk of change and to just throw that out there hoping that the game ends up being okay is just it's a big ask it's a big damn ask and that's why it's nice that they're doing a series of betas for people to try the game this right now is the closed like whatever premium beta that you get if you're either a PlayStation Plus subscriber or if you pre-ordered whatever version of the game you get access to this beta other than that there will be a free-to-play like open beta for people next week is my understanding but that is just about it as far as trying the game and giving it a shot so I guess to wrap all this up I feel like Concord is a very competent hero shooter I'm having a good time with it it's remarkably polished runs great on PC and uh reportedly console as well so I'm pretty pleased with it but this game didn't need to just be good it needed to be phenomenal to justify being 40 bucks when all of its competitors are significantly less than that in other words free I mean technically speaking those other games are so much cheaper they are undefined cuz you can't really divide anything by zero or fre so they're just like un find in terms of how much cheaper they are or rather you can't divide Zero by any you get what I mean it it's an attempt at a smart joke that I screwed up so just ignore me I'll just be here playing video games like an idiot bounce the ball warp to the ball booya wasn't that cool like there are some cool things you can do in this game but are they $40 cool you know oh I took a ball right in the face it's like college all over again what not like this woo warp around we can't lose we're totally going to lose just one more kill and they get us oh and it's going to be me of course of course go team you're welcome you're welcome so all of this to say this is not like a dumpster fire or anything it's not on the level of something like you know a a suicide squad or something like that it is a solid game and if it were free to playay I think this would be a resounding yeah check it out it's actually pretty good the character designs are a little dum dum and weird and like try hard in my opinion but that's fine that like a great game can have stupid character designs and still be a great game but the fact that it's pretty good but also $40 in a market surrounded by other competitors that are free to play I just don't know how I could justify spending 40 bucks on it but that's just me maybe as I play more I'll fall in love with it even more and it'll hook me Hook Line and Sinker and I will become a major stand for this I'm I'm honestly not sure but I'm going to keep giving you a shot see if it has any cool later game stuff in the beta that they have but I will keep checking it out let me know are you playing it this week weekend are you going to try the open Beta next week let me know with all that said thanks for watching hanging out with me make sure to like the video If you enjoyed it that actually does go a long way and really helps the channel subscribe if you haven't already and like I said go over to Luke Stevens live my second channel uh And subscribe over there because we have a great time and we do stuff like trying this game live uh regularly so head over there check it out it's a great time with all that said thank you for watching I love you all desperately I'll see you in the next one hugs and kisses bye-bye