BioWare, the studio behind the Mass Effect series, is releasing Anthem this week. It’s a beautiful, lavish sci-fi fantasy game that marks entirely new ground for a studio known for single player, role-playing adventures. Well away from the character driven plots of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, Anthem is an online-only co-operative shooter with a focus on slotting and looting alien enemy after alien enemy.

If it sounds familiar, it’s because it is. That's thanks to big names like Destiny and The Division, which have paved the way for these never-ending online games that suck you in and never let you go. But Anthem has proven to be perhaps even more derivative than expected. Boring guns, lacklustre mission design and really uninspired storytelling belie a team that we know can do much, much better. Here’s everything we’ve learned after around 12 hours with the game...

It looks great... when it works
Anthem’s set in a massive science fiction world and it looks absolutely beautiful. Bright, vivid colours make for stunning vistas that stretch off miles into the distance, and the ability to move pretty much freely around the map with your Iron Man-style jetpack suit makes for some wonderful sightseeing. However, the game has some glaring technical issues – regular crashes, incredibly long load screens and distracting geometry pop-ins hamper the beauty considerably. It’s at least playable, which is more than can be said for the VIP demo that launched a few weeks ago, but it still needs some work.

It's a lot like Destiny
As mentioned, there’s a lot that’s familiar about Anthem and that’s largely because it takes a fair bit from Destiny and repurposes the various ideas and concepts for its own benefit. From the names of the loot items you pick up during missions – Anthem calls them embers, while Destiny named them engrams – to the story setup and nature of its quests. That’s not to say there’s none of the BioWare charm coming through in this new effort, but we’re hoping that the studio gets the opportunity to build on the potentially strong foundations they’ve set out here with some more interesting stuff.

There's a lot of jargon

BioWare games are known for their fantasy jargon, whether that’s place names, characters, or the aforementioned embers stuff. Anthem is really no different, and it occasionally feels like a game that’s telling you that you should care about certain things, without ever really showing you why. You play as one of many hired guns called Freelancers, but for some reason Freelancers are looked down upon in this world. A lengthy cut scene sequence at the beginning of the game sets up the premise but fails to give you much to care about.

Flying is brilliant

Flying around in your Javelin suit is without a doubt the most addictive thing in Anthem. More and more, games are offering huge open worlds to explore, but rarely do they offer movement mechanics as liberating and free flowing as this. The game regularly places you on the edge of a massive cliff or cascading waterfall, and you’re entirely free to leap off the side and fly elsewhere. It’s a thrilling way to navigate the world. Your flight ability operates on a cool down, so you can’t fly freely forever, even though you can game the system a little bit and use downward flight as a way of cooling your jets while airborne, or using waterfalls to extend your range. The game also takes the zippy, punchy movement of Mass Effect: Andromeda and gives you a really satisfying set of jump and dodge abilities to combine with flight.

...But shooting is less so
While flying is incredible, the shooting in Anthem is less exciting. The game’s guns are downright forgettable. There’s something pretty uninspired about shooting the same regular sounding assault rifles and shotguns in such a lush and vivid futuristic world – one where one of the character classes commands elemental abilities to rain down vibrant havoc on your foes. While the punchy controls give decent weight to combat, the full game will hopefully offer more inventive guns, even if it means ripping off its contemporaries. One of the guns in Destiny 2 literally harnesses the power of black holes, for god’s sake. More of that, please.