August 9, 2006 - Even as a reviewer, I have become jaded, desensitized and doubting of everything I read nowadays, regardless of the source. It’s not an X-File worthy conspiracy, but simply the fact that in a day and age when anyone can say anything on a forum as big as the internet, without any proof or supporting arguments at all, it becomes harder and harder to see through motives and find the truth behind any given thing. One will claim that a certain cell phone is a good buy with solid quality and excellent reception and audio. Someone else will claim that the same phone “blows” and broke into a million little pieces when a small breeze hit it. One will enjoy the new summer blockbuster movie claiming it brings back humanity to a season of movie-going that was completely void of substance and personality only to run into someone who’s same opinion amounts to “meh!”

The point is that it’s impossible to tell what’s what anymore because the internet has made everyone opinionated and anonymous. Well, great! What progress we’ve made! And the sad thing is, we believe everything we read, or at the very least, we let it (in that tiny little part of our minds that we don’t talk about at parties) influence our own opinions slightly. I won’t lie; when I’m not given a game to review myself, I’ll read others’ reviews of it before picking it up. And when I read a review, good or bad, I’m influenced by it. And if left to those reviews alone, I wouldn’t have bought Monster Hunter Freedom for the PSP (which is one of my favorite titles for the system) and I probably wouldn’t have been holding my breath for Chromehounds either. The initial buzz for Chromehounds was poor and the initial reviews for it were somewhere between bad and not-so-good. Well, for me anyway, it turns into another case of “what do they know?” While I understand the constant harping on the single player portion of the game, I truly feel most reviewers never experienced what Chromehounds really has to offer. Yes, it’s a slow, simple game with a host of small nagging issues, but it’s also one of those games that tries something different, takes a chance, and manages to please those that really count; the gamers.

The story of Chromehounds is an overly complex one which features many Super-Powers, an alternate reality in which the quasi-Third World War took place in the 80’s and bulleted timeline that do nothing but set up the simple fact that there are now three nations in the Neroimus conflict; The Democratic of Tarakia, The Republic of Morskoj and the Kingdom of Sal Kar. Oh yeah, and the world was introduced to a new way to wage war; large mechs called “Hounds”. There are six types of hounds (soldier, sniper, defender, scout, heavy gunner and tactics commander) which the single player portion of the game will basically introduce and give you a six-mission tutorial on each. While this feels very tacked on and weakly fleshed out, the single player game is good to get a feel for the various role types and unlocking parts. It also helps that there is a story to the single player game, but the dialog is so cliché and the voice-acting so uneven that you’ll basically trudge through it (and later perfect it) simply to get the parts, the achievements and the stat boosts. Yes, it’s dry and if the single player portion is your only reason for purchasing Chromehounds, you might want to rent it or skip it altogether unless you are a big mech fan and must simply own anything even remotely Optimus Prime related.

Where Chromehounds truly shines is in its multiplayer portion. Where From Software and Sega could’ve easily gone with traditional deathmatching and team-based “capture the rally point” variations, Chromehounds surprisingly feels more like a cross between an MMORPG and a clan-based shooter like Rainbow Six. With a persistent world that allows you to fight in the Neroimus War campaign as part of either Tarakia, Morskoj or Sal Kar while part of a clan, Chromehounds fosters team-work, communication and strategy and really shines as an example of what next-generation gaming should be.

While the main lobby screen is unintuitive and more cumbersome than can be imagined (the single player portion similarly suffers from a poor menu scheme), the wealth of options and information available on your squad (if you have no friends, it’s easy to search for a like-minded squad or you can always create your own), the war in general and other Hound pilots is staggering.