Chrome

Chrome is a first-person shooter with a couple of important extra features. These features don't sound like much until you actually get to play through them. You play as a mercenary/bounty hunter who travels across the galaxy rescuing hostages, recovering stolen equipment, and then getting in the middle of an intergalactic corporate struggle. The locales that you visit are not only beautiful, but they are huge and wide open. I can't tell you how much I love those big open areas. You can easily spend an hour and a half or more on each mission, thanks to all the time that you spend creeping around in the forest, sneaking up on guard patrols or avoiding them altogether. Sometimes you find a sniper tower that you can use to snipe guys from half a mile away. The levels are very nonlinear and rarely seem like they are contrived or built just for you. Instead, it feels like you are actually infiltrating realistic bases and installations. It's also great being able to play for an hour without seeing a loading screen. There are a lot of indoor areas too, but they aren't as much fun to play in as the outdoor areas.

Stealth ends up playing a big part in this game, and it ends up being surprisingly good. Even the pure stealth levels, which I normally hate in a non-stealth action game, are good. The outdoor areas have lots of trees and rocks to hide behind, and with the use of your binoculars or radar, you can avoid enemy patrols or pop them in the back of the head when you catch them by surprise. Once again, the big open areas are what allow you to do this.

The weapons have a realistic feel to them. Automatic weapons can only be fired in bursts, since the kick to them will make them too inaccurate after a few bullets. Firefights can be pretty tough if you are in the view of more than a couple of enemies. That's why cleverly taking on one at a time is necessary. That's also where your cybernetic implants become a crucial part of the game.

Chrome is not the first game to throw in special powers as a twist to the shooter aspect, but it succeeds where many others fail. They end up working like the force powers in the Jedi Knight games. All seven of your implants are useful, and they are well-balanced enough so that they don't overpower you and make the game too easy. This is mostly due to your nervous system getting overloaded if you use them for too long. If you have three implants turned on, then you can only keep them on for a few seconds at a time. They all seem well thought out, instead of things that were just thrown in because they sounded kinda neat.

The core gameplay is solid, so a lot of the other things that are good are bonuses. The most obvious are the game's gorgeous graphics. Everything looks top-notch. Another is the storyline, which is a nice surprise (in spite of the bad voice acting). Another is the successfully implementation of rag-doll physics. This seems to be hit-and-miss in shooters lately, but here it's great. Enemies seem to respond realistically, depending upon what weapon you shoot them with. A shotgun blast to the face produces a much more drastic rag-doll effect than a silenced pistol shot to the head. Bodies don't dissolve away and disappear like they do in other shooters, and the bullet holes seem to hang around for a while. One great thing about Chrome is that in an era where action games seem to always end after 8 or 10 hours, it lasts more like 15-20.

As I mentioned before, Chrome certainly has flaws. One of them is the enemy AI. It's not bad but it's unsophisticated. Enemies are too easy to kill with grenades, and they generally won't use any advanced tactics to flush you out of hiding places. The worst part of the AI is when you throw a grenade and the guy yells "grenade!", and then just stands there like an idiot until the grenade blows him across the screen. This ends up being the biggest problem in the indoor areas, since enemies kind of just stand there and won't help out their comrades when you are killing them in the next room.

Chrome has so many good parts that it's easy to look past its bad parts. This is a very unique and high-quality shooter in its own right.


demo GOOD FUN   February 22, 2004
4 out of 7 found this review helpful

haven't bought game, im cautious about adding more disks to my collection, but playing demo for two days now and its like Halo but with other people online. the weapons are much more accurate and the graphics aren't as "blobby" as Halos'. good deal i guess


Chrome Maybe, But Does it Shine?   February 6, 2004
J. JAGELLA (Williamsport, PA United States)
0 out of 6 found this review helpful

I seem to be getting frustrated with PC games lately--well, I suppose I've been frustrated with computer games for years, but lately I seem to be going through turmoil. You hear so much about the newer games and how great they're supposed to be, but they often disappoint. I've got a list of my favorite games, but not too many of them have been released in the last two years. Where's the holy grail of gaming--that ultimate game that takes me away into a world in which I don't want to come back to answer the phone?

I looked for such an experience in Chrome, and not surprisingly I didn't get it. Don't get me wrong; Chrome has some very good traits. It renders some amazingly realistic tall grass and bushes. Take it from me, if you're a nature lover, then Chrome might be your game. It even includes some cool butterflies that flutter so realistically that you'll want to swat them! However, as we all know, great graphics alone won't cut it.

I guess my biggest beef with Chrome is the gameplay. You do a LOT of exploring in this game, and end up wondering the huge levels looking for your objective. You've got a map, but it isn't always clear where you're supposed to go because the objective might be on a different floor of a building. The goals are marked by red rectangles that are often not very conspicuous, and you can easily miss them. Even worse, you need to "hack" computers by pressing the use key, and clicking your mouse on grey rectangles to match up hidden symbols. Such a task is fun when you know what to do, but the skimpy manual doesn't explain how to hack the computers! Worst of all, the drivable vehicles are steered using the strafe keys which is awkward as you might imagine. Why not allow the player to steer the vehicles using the mouse? The vehicles could have been ten times as fun if only the developers had implemented such controls.

Chrome is a decent shooter, but sadly its imperfections really drag it down. My guess is that the developer tried to be innovative without adequately thinking through the best way to implement those new features. I say let's return to the great shooters like Quake II and Unreal. Give me games like those with graphics like Chrome's, and you'll finally be getting it right!