Uh-oh, uh-oh
By strawdonkey

Prior to actually getting hold of Chromehounds, I wasn't particularly bothered about getting a copy - the demo, available through XBox Live, is a bit of an abomination and slow-paced tactical warfare has never really been my cup of tea. That said - when a friend sent me a copy I figured that I may as well give it a try.

The basic premise is thus: The Eastern Bloc is divided into three nations, whose international relationships are patchy at best. You come in here as a mercenary - not affiliated with any particular nation, you're just there to be hired and do your job, that is to say, killing people in your big robot.

OOoh. Big robots.

The singleplayer game is divided into six stages - or, as they are called, RTs - Role Types. Each RT deals with a different discipline on the battlefield - close-range destruction, sniping, base defence, and so on. To start you off, the game loans you a suitable Robot (Hound) suited to the RT you choose to pursue, and you set on your way to discover what treats the storylines have to offer.

Each RT involves a different nation and a different squad - the highlight without a doubt being the chummy Brit who commands the squad you join as a Sniper, who refers to any enemy as "blokes"; with his tactics commander, "Wat Mayer". It is therefore a crying shame that at no point in the game does he say "What, Wat?". After finishing each mission you are awarded a part, vaguely relevant to the mission you have just performed; getting a good rank will see another bonus part bestowed upon you.

To begin with, I personally just blundered through each mission with the borrowed Hound. It was only upon reaching a mission I just couldn't finish - either due to a difficulty spike or my tactical ineptitude - that I had a poke around the customisation options that the game presents you with.

This is where things get good. To a certain degree, the game allows you to take a rather open-ended approach to each mission - for instance, one of the later sniping missions sees you trying to defend two squads who are heavily outnumbered by trying to make the most of high ground at two different vantage points.

This is very difficult. However, a much more gratifying method is to stick wheels on your Hound as opposed to the legs (making it go quicker), remove one of your sniper cannons and strap a big fat rocket launcher to the top. Take the high ground to clear out as much as you can with the sniper and then kamikaze down a sheer cliff to start mixing it up how you're not supposed to? Don't mind if I do.

The mission structure gets pretty varied in style, though the objective is mostly the same - travel to x, destroy y, protect z. Instructions are mainly drip-fed to you by your commander, though (presumably to simulate 'real' giant robot war conditions) they are sometimes caught unawares leaving you scrambling to make up ground to aid your squadmates. This is sometimes engrossing, but more often than not, just a bit annoying.

The last RT sees you taking the place of the Commander and ordering your squad around in a miniature-RTS style. Ordering your squad is quite easy, and so long as it's "move to x" they don't have a problem with doing so. Unfortunately, your squadmates are generally fast-but-weak or slow-but strong, meaning that quite often your squad will get to their destination far too late, or just get killed in the process. Again, this may well be down to my ineptitude, but the missions feel a little badly-designed to me.

OOoh. Big robots. Again.

However, all this pales when you realise that the entire single-player campaign has been merely a training ground for the online mode - The Neroimus War. This war appears to be fought entirely by mercenaries, who ally themselves to a nation, form a squad with other mercenaries, and either fight CPU players or fight other squads of mercenaries for control of about 20 regions on an area map.

There's so much potential here... but unfortunately the game fails to deliver for a few niggly reasons. Firstly, it's a complete pain in the arse to assemble a squad - your squad leader has to be in the XBox Live main lobby and doing nothing before they can receive applications to the squad. Once you have finally got around to assembling a squad, you then select the region you wish to fight in, and wait for another squad to fight against in your chosen custom Hounds. Invariably, somebody who has not set their game up properly will appear in your lobby as the opposition, start the game, realise he is fighting six people alone, and quit.

When you eventually do get into a relatively even fight, you may find that at least half of the opposition consist of Heavy Gunners - basically big, clunky robots that fire four or five huge, devastating rockets in one go. Being a Soldier or a Sniper against opponents like this is generally innefective, and whilst you can create a hybrid robot to meet your needs, the battlefields are often dominated by these Heavy Gunners.

So... a great game let down by bad settings enforcement and an unfortunate weapon balance.

OR

I'm rubbish at it.

I'm still looking for more squadmates to prove me wrong. My gamertag is strawd0nkey.

November 2006

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