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The most extensive part of the game, the actual building of the mechs could be where you spend most of your time besides online play. You can literally build your mech, or “hound” from the ground up with any kind of rifle, rocket, machine gun, missle launcher, and even melee weapons. You can make them standing mechs, tank mechs, you could probably make a mech that resembles a monkey if you really wanted to. Every mech you need to follow three basic elements, a cockpit, base of mech, and generator, and make sure you stay within the guides of building a mech. I spent a good portion of my time in here creating all kinds of crazy contraptions, but the one let down about it that I could find, is the fact that it does limit you to balance things out. It is all find and good to limit the person for balance, but it feels like you ran out of “Legos” when building that “Super Duper Monster” as a kid.
The Xbox Live portion of the game is setup in a interesting way that people who played Mech Assault 2 may be familiar with. You have to join one of the three nations found in the campaign, and be part of the Neroimus War. Then you must take over land, cities, etc, until your faction has the most. That is the main part of the game however, the annoying part of it is what was annoying about MA2 though—people switching out of factions just to be part of the winning team, making it quite annoying. It would have been far better had you been able to simply create a clan and try and take over land that way, or at least more interesting.
There is of course a free battle mode which just lets you test your might against other players, and has no outcome on how the war between nations is going. You can of course also check to see how you compare to other friend and foe, along with how each individual nation is doing. The weird thing is, you have to go through a special process for anything, and because of this process being directly connected to the main online mode of the warring factions, the game’s server can go down from time to time so it may tally up which faction won the war overall. It can be very annoying, and while it seems like a lot more went into the online mode, hopefully the developers make some sort of update that makes it more useable. All in all though, online play isn’t to bad, if just a bit slow at times, still it can be interesting to see what “Hounds” people create, and the experience has virtually no lag.
To help foster teamwork (if not force it), one interesting aspect of how Chromehounds missions are designed is that communication is limited to spherical areas surrounding radio towers spread out across the land. Your team gains control of these towers automatically if one of you stands near one for a while, but the enemy can take it just as easily, silencing all of you in one swoop. Furthermore, commander-type hounds--which forgo large weapons for large radar arrays--act as portable communications stations and may even see nearby enemy units on their tactical maps. But it's then the commander's responsibility to relay enemy movements to the rest of the team. This is an elegant system that comes into play during most Chromehounds missions, although there are a variety of different match types you can engage in, including ones in which communication isn't really an issue. Capture-the-flag missions, survival missions that reward the last hound standing, and missions that task you with blowing up everything in sight faster than your opponent are among the variants to the standard team-based, destroy-the-HQ mission type.
Visually the game is somewhat of a dud to say the least. The aforementioned zooming in and out of your scope is actually fantastic, but the sad fact is, it is the best part of the game visually. The visuals of the game are sparse, and sad to say will only shine on a HD set. The gun effects, as smoke bellows from the cannon, and hits ground or mech is great also, which is definitely worth mentioning, but these two great effects clash badly with what is nothing more than a polished, shined up mech simulator. The terrain, be it snowy, dark, light, grassy, or bare, is dull and repeating, getting muddled up with even more lifeless trees that instead of catching fire in a violent blaze sort of puff up with fire and then lifelessly fall over. The building collapses all seem uniform, and would have been impressive, had this game come out alongside Mech Assault in 2002 for the Xbox. The mechs which can vary in shapes, sizes, forms, and colors depending on if you decide to build one or not can look rather spectacularly modeled, but they lack any of the luster that next -generation graphics technology has afforded developers. The audio of the title is even worse, forcing you to filter out useful information from the ramblings of your squad, with the predictable thudding of the machines walking, the anticlimactic rumblings of cityscapes, and the strange muffle of destruction. The only significance the sound has, is when you hear the loud thumps of your weapons blaring off, and even that can be to little in immersing you in the experience.
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Chromehounds is a special case, as it is one of those games that scream “hardcore”. The game is hardcore in the sense that, only a gamer with far too much time on his or her hands would take the punishment of completing the dry campaign. The hardcore gamers out there are the only ones that could stand the drab visuals, and boringly done sound. Finally, after all the punishment they would find the chewy center of the game in the form of a engaging online multiplayer mode, but still may only appeal to even some of the hardcore gamers out there. Yes, you really won’t get any mileage out of this title unless you have Xbox Live, and even taking in account you do, your better off hoping someone else brings a more engaging mech-sim to the Xbox 360.
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