Chromehounds
Jul 14, 2006
If there's one thing cooler than an orc, a soldier, or a superhero, it's a giant robot. Stomping around in a giant robot, breaking things and blowing up stuff is a near universal fantasy among anyone who's ever deigned to play a video game. Whether you're 13 or 30 (the fact that a Transformers movie is in production pretty much proves giant robots are cross-generational), you know you want to do it. Chromehounds is here to satisfy your wildest giant robot fantasies. Assuming you're willing to do it with other people, that is.
Chromehounds isn't exactly a name best suited to a game about giant robots. "Chromehounds" sounds like something sleek and fast and low to the ground. It's a silly word for what you actually get, which tends to be slow and powerful, often towering ungracefully, stacked with modules, bristling with guns, and with plates of armor stuck on the sides. Frankly, we would have gone with "Steel Dogs".
The first thing you need to know about these giant robots is that you're going to be building them. This is a game to satisfy the model-builder in you. You assemble your Hound from a chassis that determines its weight capacity and speed, a cockpit that can hold computer upgrades to its stats, and a generator that provides power to its weapons. Then comes the fun part: guns. Lots and lots of guns. Cannons and howitzers and mortars and machine guns and rifles and mine-layers and homing missiles and rockets, in what seems like 100 different flavors.
And you're not just slapping them together in prearranged templates. You're connecting nodes and rotating the pieces. You've got to make sure the tail end of that giant howitzer doesn't bump into the wide back of that generator. Maybe if you twist it just right. You can put in spacers, or try to swap out for a cockpit with nodes in different places. Or you could stick the generator on top of the cockpit. It's a tinker's paradise. And then there are all the options for color schemes and decals. Customization, thy name is Chromehounds.
Chromehounds is very much a team-based multiplayer game. You can play a handful of unimpressive single-player missions to bide your time, but the point is to go on Xbox Live and play team games, in which different Hounds serve very different and distinct roles. In addition to the basic fighting Hounds, there are scouts on wheels, command units who can see enemies on radar, and long distance gunners who can shell bases from across the map, and hybrids of any of the above.
And because there are so many different roles, there are plenty of different toys besides the guns, including smoke bombs, thermal vision, base-killing rams, jammers, missile countermeasures, mine-layers, and mine detectors. The combat feeds perfectly into the Hound building, which feeds perfectly back into the combat, which creates a swirling vortex of addicting gameplay that can suck you in with the sheer force of so many possibilities.
The battles are short enough to keep you coming back for more, but long enough that they aren't over before they've begun. There's a lot of luck, and team coordination, and just plain chaos that determines who wins a match. The actual controls are very simple for a game with so much detail. You're moving with one stick, and looking with the other. A third-person view makes situational awareness easy, but clicking in on the stick gives you a first-person weapon camera that makes aiming easier. The right button toggles weapon groups, and the right trigger fires. Press Y to bring up your map. That's pretty much it. It's arguably even more simple than Microsoft's faster paced and far sloppier MechAssault games for the Xbox.
It's also a lot more strategic. A standard multiplayer match has control towers on the map. If you capture these towers, you unfog the map for anyone with a Commander Hound. This lets him see enemies within the tower's radius and pass along the information to the rest of the team. But you can't participate in chat unless you're within the radius of a tower. As it's designed to be played, Chromehounds is a game about a team working its way across the map, one tower at a time, until it butts heads with the other teams.
At this point, Chromehounds becomes a glorious display of firepower. There are a variety of different maps, many with distinct visual styles and all with destructible features. They range from open deserts to Middle Eastern villages (giant robots in Baghdad!), from snowy forests to the narrow streets of Old World cities (just blow a building up if you want to get to the next street over), from the far view across a quiet village nestled in a valley to eerie flashes of gunfire and explosions during nighttime battles. The graphics engine could have used a little touching up, but for the most part, it accomplishes admirably the job of showing off your custom-built Hound.
In the first week of the game, many players seem to approach Chromehounds as if it were Halo. Stomping-and-gunning works reasonably well, but to really appreciate this game, you have to understand that it's not a solitary pursuit and it's not about just pouring on the firepower. A good team needs a Commander, which isn't a very glorious role. Similarly, the Heavy Gunners and Scouts are pretty much supposed to avoid direct confrontations. If you're the type of gamer who just wants to jump into Chromehounds and blow stuff up, it's not going to appeal to you in the long run. But if you're the type of gamer who, for instance, really enjoyed playing a support role or flexing the new commander abilities in Battlefield 2, then Chromehounds is going to be a long-term delight.
There's a persistent online campaign with three factions, each with their own basic style and unique equipment. As you win missions, either against other players or CPU Hounds, you'll earn money to buy more parts. There's a lottery to bid on rare parts, and you'll be able to raid the other factions for some of their parts. You can choose where to fight your battles, or search for battles already set up. This is actually one of the biggest problems with Chromehounds: there's a rich and complex system built into the online campaign, but it's so poorly documented that many will just find it frustrating.
The interface also needs more streamlining when it comes to building your Hound. There needs to be a better way to tracks the stats on different parts, so you can make informed decisions when you're deciding whether this gun is better or worse than the one you've already got. Right now, your best bet is a legal pad and a pencil.
It's about time someone made a game like this. We've been too long with giant robot games that were little more than thinly disguised shooters. Then there was the stately Steel Battalion, which was a rip-off not for its price (you had to pay for a humongous, cool controller), but for how poorly the multiplayer worked up until Capcom just abandoned it. So for those of you looking for a giant robot game that's distinct, exciting, deep, and eminently customizable, as long as you're willing to play with others, Chromehounds is what you've been waiting for.