The Anthem alpha test that ran in December was pretty good stuff, I thought. Very Destiny-like, which may or may not be a selling feature in your eyes, but it looked great, ran well (aside from a spot of network wonkiness on the first day), and the Javelin's flight ability was a lot of fun: The controls aren't the best, but that's life when you're flying with a mouse, and I really liked the heightened sense of mobility and map scale that aerial movement provided.
If you didn't get a chance to play the alpha yourself, you can now see what you missed thanks to a 15-minute "Lost Arcanist" gameplay video, courtesy of IGN.
The video covers the full mission that was available in the test, a search for a guy who went missing and... well, I don't recall and quite honestly probably didn't really know at the time anyway. (Bad people were shot, things blew up in a satisfying fashion, and the disembodied voice—not a Ghost, but a ground support operator guy back at base—kept me pointed in more or less the right direction throughout the adventure.) It also showcases the three specialized Javelin classes: The heavy, lumbering Colossus, the quick, cutting Interceptor, and the mage-like Storm.
Anthem is slated to come out on February 22, and we'll all have at least one more chance to try it before then. A "VIP demo" for preorders and Origin Access subscribers will run January 25-27, followed by an open demo on February 1-3.
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