Chrome Hounds

[Lighthawk]

I'm putting this out as a warning, don't bother with this game. It is bad in just about all possible ways, and is the quickest I've ever returned a game to gamefly. Problems with this game include but are not limited to...

1) The menu music, which might seem like an odd first complaint, but dear god in heaven it was annoying. High pitched, quasi latin chanting that raped my ear drums every damn time.

2) The radar display...oh no wait, I'm sorry, you don't have a radar, you have sonar. I guess WWIII destroyed all radars and no one remembered how to build them, so...sonar. It has a range probably about half as far as you can see, and only works on moving targets. Anything that doesn't move is effectively invisible. Wonderful system that.

3) Aiming. First off, you can't change the axis inversion during a mission, or hell even adjust any settings during play. Small annoyance in the long term, but still. Second you don't have a cross hair in front of you from the 3rd person view, instead there is a small 1st person view screen in the upper right corner of the screen that has your cross hairs. You can switch to 1st person view (and get the 3rd person in that small screen) to have the cross hairs front and center. This is such a bizarre and asinine set up.

4) Radio, just about as pathetic has your sonar as far as range goes. A given map might be some 5 square miles, and yet your multi-ton military mech somehow can't carry a radio powerful enough to cover this area, or even a tiny fraction of it. The only way to have radio cover over the map is to capture the COMBAS towers, which then extend radio contact to all friendly units in the area, or to other towers as long as they has a continuous path they can follow. And for a sense of the still pathetic ranges involved, a given map has about a dozen or so towers needed to cover it.

5) The plot. Takes place in Foreign Lands, involving some nonsense that lacks any clear motivation. Excuse plot all the way just to have you walk around blasting stuff.

6) The dialog. Ripped from the standard book of cheesy action movie lines. Often does not fit the context of what is going on.

7) The missions. Good luck figuring out what to do. If they intended this game to mimic the uncertainty of combat, they succeeded at something at least then. The only certain way to know if a unit is an enemy is if it shoots at you, your sonar is useless for IFF purposes, and the color schemes of the units often match way too closely for easy eyeballing, never mind when it's a night mission. Also you're often fighting the clock, trying to destroy something that has been poorly identified to you, usually by name only and never any useful description. One mission I had to chase down and destroy an enemy unit designated as Mouse. That was it, that was the entirety of the intel I got, and I had about 5 minutes to search the area and kill this bastard, while dodging enemy fire and navigating hills I could not climb. And you know what, I still don't know which unit was Mouse, I killed him I guess since the mission ended, but I was killing a lot of things at that moment. Had another mission to level an enemy base. Found it, blew it to hell...nothing. Spent another ten minutes wandering before I came across a little shack tucked away in a corner. Destroyed it and then the mission ended.

8) The mechs. I know mechs are not realistic military vehicles in any sense, but rule of cool usually gets them by. In this case though, it's just not enough because of how much they ignore common sense. The main body and legs are attached by the slimmest possible poll you could imagine, there is just no way it should be enough to support the upper body, and even a glancing hit there should cut the mech in half. Same goes for the way the weapons are attached, it's just absurd to look at.

9) And to close on one final point of annoyance, the sound the mechs make when rotating the upper body...sounds like a rusty nail on a chalkboard.

Over all, this game is just one big pile of fail. 1 out 10. Avoid like the plague.

[Mikey]

So, LH... stop holding back and tell us how you really feel about this game.

[Lighthawk]

I'll admit, I'm a bit bitter about this one. Part of it is the fact that it takes about 3 to 5 days to get a new game from gamefly after sending in the old one, so after waiting 4 days for this game (and it wasn't even the one at the top of my list to boot) to send it back the next day and have to wait again does rather annoy me.

[Tyyr]

I played this at my brother's house a while back. The whole time I was thinking, "ANY iteration of the Mechwarrior franchise is better than this."