Chromehounds [X360]

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.