Chromehounds

For this issue, I really wanted to review the Xbox 360 game Chromehounds from boutique Japanese developer From Software. They've been around forever it seems, churning out sequels to the Armored Core series and throwing in a fondly-remembered gem like King's Field in here and there.

For Chromehounds, they're hitting the battlefields of the not-too-distant future. There's a border war going on in some god-forsaken armpit of the world over largely deserted chunks of dirt. Though the main countries involved are fictional, one of them is openly-backed by the United States of America (the U.S. of this fictional future; Bush hasn't picked sides in video game wars, yet). However, there are rumors and innuendo circulating that the U.S. is playing both sides in the matter, pitting countries against one another to destabilize the region and further its own interests. It's a pretty interesting plot for a game, and although players don't need to actually understand any of it to play the game, it's nice to have the potential for something as complex as a political statement in a game.

Unfortunately, I can't be sure Chromehounds ever realizes that potential. The meat of the game involves players building their own “Hounds,” huge mechanized war machines that act as front line troops in wars of the future, and jumping online as a soldier for one side of the conflict. Players join up with a squad of other players online and fight in tactical small-scale battles that add up to form one giant, persistent war. Over the course of a couple months, the war plays out, land is gained and lost, the battle lines are redrawn, capitols are taken, and a winner emerges.

The key to victory seems to be finding a squad that works together, each player assuming a role. You need recon scouts to ferret out the positions of enemy bases, shock troops to take them out, snipers to provide cover support, and nigh-immobile specters of death loaded down with downright pornographic assortments of firearms to make the other guy's chumps think twice about stepping on your turf.

The game is almost entirely dependent on its on-line game-play to provide a thrill, but the on-line interface is clunky, intimidating, and not terribly informative. The game has a nasty habit of dropping people out or freezing up on them when they try to perform routine actions like opening the Xbox 360 dashboard to check their messages, and the whole squad dynamic is so cumbersome as to be, well … less than dynamic.

While these problems were mostly minor in nature, each one was an enthusiasm-dampening speed bump. Eventually, there were enough hassles and irritants that I just couldn't bring myself to pick up the game again and suffer the little things in order to get to the very interesting, quite possibly addictive game-play that could keep a person coming back night after night to fight the war. What could have been a great gaming experience that added something new to the medium will have to go unheralded, at least by me.