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4.18 out of 5 Jaded Reviews: Chromehounds Epic Note: FROM Software has shut down Chromehounds' multiplayer game server. This constitutes as approximately 98% of the game and as such the sole reason to have purchased it is no longer playable. It is highly advised that you avoid this title where possible. If you were once a rabid fan of Chromehounds and played it regularly, the hearts and minds of EvilEye Games goes out to you. <3Chromehounds attempts to fill the void between MechAssault and Steel Battalion. It is an arcade style third person mech simulator featuring the ability to customize your HOUND and work in a specific role for your team. Overall this was an amazing game where the only problems it suffered was lack of real developer support and rampant exploits. But it was a worthy gem in my opinion. It deserves a full fledged review despite being officially dead. So let's start off with the universe. Chromehounds follows an alternate timeline where Solar Flare activity has increased since the Cold War. This disrupted global communication and made ground vehicles and communication trouble key. An experimental type of vehicle from the time all that started has developed into the most lethal piece of military hardware on the planet. And the lack of air power has only fast tracked the evolution of it. Called HOUNDS, these mechs are the latest generation of war machine. Successors to the Advanced Combat Vehicle simple walking tanks, these things can take tramendous damage and dish it out. Highly versatile. Highly effective. They operate commonly in teams of 6 HOUNDs, each possessing unique traits to help the squad survive and achieve victory. One very nice universe, isn't it? So let's start with the communication problem. Due to the Solar Flare activity, short range radio has become the only way to talk to each other. Using massive COMBAS towers that connect to each other using a Network Area allows people within that NA to talk to each other. This is so vital that even HOUNDs possess the ability to carry small COMBAS towers on them. Any unit outside of a friendly NA is cut off from communication. Any unit within it is able to communicate with friendlies and, more importantly, be directed by his Commander who is able to identify friendly and enemy movement within the NA. Say hello to Chromehounds game breaking problem. Party Chat. It is quite unfortunate but Chromehounds was not designed with party chat in mind and when Xbox LIVE introduced that feature with the NXE, it destroyed the most tactically unique aspect the game had, fully breaking it. COMBAS and Network Area played such a pivitol role in turning Chromehounds into a tactical and strategy game that the ability to completely bypass that altogether was an unfortunate killing blow. Now that you have some backstory, let's kick this review off in my typical fashion. The cutscenes are pretty beautiful as you see with the introduction video when you play the game. At the title screen you have Story Mode, Xbox Live, and Options. Options is simple in that it allows you to adjust your brightness, background music, sound effects, invert your Y and X axises, choose a language, and choose controller vibration. Very basic stuff. The Story Mode is all that's left of this once fun game. It is essentially a glorified tutorial trying to pass off as a campaign. But FROM tried hard with the character development and filling you in on the universe this game takes place in. It leads up to the Multiplayer conflict and tries its best to immerse you. It succeeds. When you select either a new game or a saved game, you're taken to the Story Menu where you can select a story to play (there are six stories with seven missions each, a general tutorial that tells you how to move and shoot, and a final mission after you play through the other six stories), allow you to play any mission you want after you unlock them all, view a very long and elaborate timeline that goes all the way back to the Cold War, a Garage where you can customize your Story Mode's HOUND with parts you unlock by playing through it, view your player details, and view Military Files which gives you more detailed information on the people you meet in the story, as well as the options menu and Xbox Live menu that connects to the server. The Player Details keep track of your public gamerpicture, gamertag, story mode percentage completed, parts you've acquired in the story mode, camo patterns you've acquired, and how much of the six missions you've completed, and even the medals you've gained from multiplayer. Pretty generic for the campaign's stats. The missions themselves try to be very true to the universe, teaching you how to pilot your HOUND and introducing you to the factions and conflicts of Neroimus, the land where the nations of Tarakia, Morskoj, and Sal Kar reside and eventually fight over. You belong to Rafzakael. A Mercenary unit established around the Cold War and deal in HOUNDs. They have a large force of war orphans who have become the greatest HOUND pilots in Neroimus and fight for the highest bidder. This way you can be within all sides of the conflict for the campaign as it tells the story of people just trying to be patriotic and the eventual breakout of the war by yet another secret party. Overall, the Campaign gets props for having so much presentation and realistically teaching you how to pilot the different HOUND roles but it falls short in that it's basically a huge tutorial mission and not something worth owning the game for. There are six HOUND roles but they can be hybridized. Tactics Commander, Scout, Soldier, Defender, Heavy Gunner, and Sniper. The customization of them is almost 100% up to the player. Sure, you have only the chassis types and weapons the game gives you. But you can combine them in some truly funky ways. It's a real shame I only got around to writing this review after the server was taken down. Having all the parts and mutliplayer components right at my fingertips would make researching for this review easy. But I have to go from memory. There's so much that has been wasted by taking that server down. In the Garage you're able to name your HOUND, assemble it, simply view it's statistics, add custom decals you make within the game, add emblems, and change the color. There's so many color choices and camo patterns you can choose from to make your HOUND 100% your HOUND. Of course, most people just go with the cheapest builds for the easiest victory. There's always a lot of that in online games. You can save your assembly data to load pre-made HOUNDs on the fly as well as the ability to run a very basic trial with the HOUND you currently have created just to see how it handles. The customization of your HOUND in mutliplayer truly was half of this game. HOUNDs are broken into many parts. Cockpit, Chassis, Generator, Heavy Weapon, Weapons, Special Equipment, and I can't remember the rest. There were a lot of variants for each of these, though. Several different cockpits of varying size, shape, and armor, etc. Morskoj tended to be heavily armed, Sal Kar tended to be very fast, and Tarakia tended to be in the middle. So Morkoj has the heavies cockpit designs while Sal Kar had the weakest. Mixing and matching all the parts you collect is key to finding the best HOUND for you. A role is typically chosen by the chassic. Either a Bipedal, Reverse Joint Bipedal, Quadraped, Tank Threaded, Wheeled, or Hovercraft chassis. First is soldier, sniper, gunner, defender, and scout. But you can hybridize and mix as you like. So a Defender could also be a Tactics Commander or a Scout could also be a Sniper. But the chassis that suits the role's specifications the best should be used. Like the stability of the inverse biped for sniping or speed of the wheeled chassis for a scout and each chassis has a different weight maximum it will allow. Every HOUND needs a cockpit and chassis. The cockpit even has internal components you can adjust to optimize it's performance to suit what you want it to do. Like rotation speed, movement speed, that sort of thing. Generators provide power and those too have many different types. The amount of power depends on the size of the Generator. A small HOUND might not even need a generator and have sufficient cockpit power to operate. But the heavier and more armed a HOUND is the more generators are needed to power it. And the way you can place these is up to you as long as parts don't merge into each other or are blocked behind another. So, let's talk weapons. Weapons are either within a hexagonal shell that allows them to be mounted and rotated any number of ways with other parts. While some weapons, especially heavy ones, can only be mounted a certain way and cannot have weapons mounted onto them. So the options are virtually limitless. You have machine guns, assault rifles, mortars, flare guns, rocket launchers, huge cannons, sniper rifles, sniper cannons, howitzers, thermal sights, extra armor plates, night vision, mine layers, bomb dispensers, NA jammers, even spikes you can stab with at point blank range. Just a wide variety of weapons and equipment to choose from. And the amount and placement of which is up to you. But knowing how to place things is the key to not only having a big, powerful HOUND that can fulfill its role but also to having perform the best it can. A top heavy hound will have a lot more recoil when it fires and moves than a HOUND with the weapons placed as low as possible. Snipers use precision weapons such as high powered sniper cannons. Gunners use heavy ordinance like cannons or, preferably, howitzers as you can lob those across the map. Defenders also like the direct fire cannons but also rapid firing rockets and homing missiles. Scouts prefer lighter weapons that allow them to harass, or just defend themselves from light NPCs on the map, and take up the least amount of weight. Soldiers tend to be very versatile, front-line based HOUNDs that favor shotguns, rockets, that sort of thing for personal combat. While Commanders can be a hybrid but have to carry around an NA Maker to act as a mobile command center and keep his or her forces within communication and informed with their intelligence gathering ability. The way HOUNDs played into each others strengths and weaknesses is what makes Chromehounds such a great tactical game. As for that gameplay. Two teams of up to six HOUNDs each face off in a battle. Each side has a base and the game ends when one side loses their base or all their HOUNDs. Maps are typically huge, simplistic or very complex, but surprisingly beautiful without ever being excessive eye candy. Each side has a number of bases and only one can be selected as their main base at the start of a match. COMBAS towers littered the maps. And when a side took a tower, that nation's flag was on it. So it was a real strategy based game to control the map and kill the enemy. When a match starts, sides rally their forces in a hosted lobby on the map they chose and wait for the host to begin when everyone is ready. The team leaders can post markers on an overview map and players can choose what HOUNDs they want to use here. There are NPC forces on either side but they are largely worthless. ACVs are the main threat. Being like mini HOUNDs. They are fairly weak but do contain the same type of weapons that HOUNDs get. Just in groups of one or two of that weapon. Snipers have a sniper cannon and a couple sniper rifles as opposed to a HOUND which has several sniper cannons, for instance. There are also tanks for each faction and infantry. They're scattered throughout the map and are tasked with defending their territory from enemy incursion. Largely worthless but very much adds to the immersion the game provides. And still, ambushing an enemy HOUND and taking their full attention means that when one rocket from the soldier ACV managed to finish them off is just plain funny. Maps do vary depending on location. There's a large amount of maps but the multiplayer component is truly interesting. It's a persistent battle with territories being fought for by the three nations. You choose a nation but can switch relatively at any time. You get to purchase parts from that nation and can fight on their behalf. The name of this game is to be in a Squad. A squad is like a clan or team from any other game. You have a leader and other members that you can fight join and fight along side with. Each side has their capitol and then territories. Each territory usually has some smaller areas to fight over. Enough victories in those areas allows your side to take them and you gain enough you gain the territory and can advance in a connect the dots fashion. If no players are found you can verse some CPU HOUNDs and I'll hit on that later. But the goal is to win the war. Each war could last for weeks if not months and you either gained or lost ground and either defeated a side or lost. When you lose your capital, you can change to another nation or try to reclaim yours from the ashes by fighting for your capital. There were also certain special events that produced HUGE ACV like bosses with immense combat ability for your side to go up against. Usually the nation that is losing but managed to reclaim a certain territory they lost would gain this to help them defend and give out medals to the enemies that defeated them. Squads that did a lot also got special recognition in the news feed. The more you play the more medals you unlocked. It's just a collection ingame of your achievements. Like use this chassis in 50 engagements or won a war and that sort of thing. There were some money making missions that your Squad could take on. These were like mini-campaign missions that involved you clearing out NPC units for some money. But they were nothing compared to the war. You could also do more traditional, non war related matches like just hosting a match on any map with FFA rules and that sort of thing. But the persistent war was the real draw. There were many NPC HOUND units to fight in the war. Either of the nation you were attacking or of Rafzakael. Each with very unique styles and looks. The one I remember the most was Rafzakael Squad 44 who were clad in all white HOUNDs and, to me at least, had good team play. But some involved heavy HOUNDs, and some favored snipers, or fast units. I enjoyed versing these NPCs because you could build more traditional HOUNDs instead of having to play the cheap game. So what is the cheap game? Well. This is where the developer support failed. There were some balancing problems and glitches that made certain HOUNDs too effective. First it was the DLC based Huge Howitzer Cannon. You placed two of these on the side of your HOUND's Cockpit while using the Reverse Joint Chassis and you can act like a Soldier with a BFG 9000. Then they found out how to use connecting parts to put armor over the front of the cockpit, to make sniping the most vital part of the HOUND a challenge. With all that defense, armor, and maneuverability the “Double Double” build became standard. Soon FROM tried to fix this by changing the statistics of all the parts. But this made armor flimsy, made cannons, snipers, and howitzers so powerful and the added recoil didn't change anything and they made the other parts even weaker. I have no idea why they did this but they were breaking the game more. Soon glitches HOUNDs like modded ones or overweight ones came out and the leaderboards were full of illegitimate Squads that boosted. The game was a mess. But eventually an okay balanced was figured out and some things were being dealt with. The game was once again playable if still a little bias in the parts balance department. But hidden cockpit designs really kicked off before the end. HOUNDs with Cockpits hiding behind Generators using connectors, using threaded chassises to sit low, and having sniper cannons and howitzers was the fad. Sitting this way they essentially combined the best qualities of Gunners, Double Doubles, and Snipers. Add party chat onto that and who needs tactics when you can steamroll anything? The DLC itself consisted of many things you could pay MS Points for. From that huge double barreled howitzer that became standard for DD builds to a 3 round burst Assault Rifle, to a heart camo pattern and far more equipment like that. It's just like the Horse Armor that everyone made a fuss over only it did empower the people that purchased it a little. I had it all but never once used any of it. Those howitzers, cannons, and sniper cannons were the mainstay for most everyone. As for the Squads themselves. There was a lot that could be done. They were limited to 20 members. But there were several squads. Like, for an example, EvilEye Wolverines. EvilEye Brigadiers. EvilEye Vanguard. All apart of EvilEye. That is unless I went over the character limit the game had. But you could customize the Squad's camo pattern, Squad's emblem, Squad's motto, what kind of roles the Squad was looking to recruit, etc. A Squad's recruitment can have a password attached to it to keep people who don't know it out. But recruitment worked by someone finding a Squad in the directory, sending in an application, and if anyone in the Squad was online, they could accept or reject it. It was more of a democracy than a real hierarchy, though. As anyone could change the Squad's description, region, gamer zone, emblem, etc. And I think it required at least 3 non staff to accept an invitation. So the system was flawed but it worked. And it was absolutely fun to play with your friends even with all the horrible problems the developer and other players created. Chromehounds was truly just a fun and original game. Arcade style mech action with high customization, a focus on teamwork and roles, unique tactical concerns and strategy, and a beautiful, immersive universe. Truly one of a kind on the Xbox 360 that sadly was killed when FROM took the server down. The Server went down often for maintenance and updates but they closed the doors years ago and completely ruined the value of the game. Rest in peace, Chromehounds. You were remarkable at the time and had an under appreciated run. |