Chorus is the true successor to the Factor 5 style of arcade space combat games that started with Rogue Squadron and ended with the tragically misunderstood Lair. It's fast, frantic and intense, with smooth controls and expansive open world asteroid sandboxes to zoom though at ludicrous speed and complete missions and side activities in.
Its densely told story follows Nara, a former high ranking member of a space cult bent on achieving the eponymous "Chorus", a forceful state of harmony among all sentient beings via the negation of free will, whose refusal spells doom for any apostate. When Nara is made to destroy a whole planet due to this policy, she starts questioning her indoctrination. Haunted by guilt, she embarks on a quest with her sentient ship Forsa (short for Forsaken, oof) to stop the Cult forever.
As you progress through the game, Nara unlocks a number of psionic abilities, which are really what sets the game apart from similar ones in this genre. These range from EMP bolts that disable starfighters to boosts to spear through enemies and even one to grab foes out of thin air (well, thin space) and throw them into objects. It's a cool gameplay twist, and it adds an extra layer of complexity to the starfighting genre, since each enemy requires a different weapon or power to effectively despatch.
The sense of speed is phenomenal as you turn on your afterburner and dart through asteroid caves and buzz a few inches from space stations with the precision the game controls allow. Fidelity isn't high if you stop and look closely, but the awesome vistas with their sense of gradeur and scale are breathtaking at times. It leaves you wishing that locations were a bit more diverse: if even just one of its sandboxes had been a planetary surface instead of just asteroid belts and space stations, it would have done a lot for its variety.
Combat is a lot of fun, proof be it that when the game's dynamic quest system decides to through an optional enemy encounter at you, you will go out of your way to engage in it more for fun than for the monetary rewards needed to upgrade your ship. Some of the large scale battles, especially the final one, are ridiculously epic in scope, and forgiving enough to be entertaining on top of that.
There are a ton of sidequests as well, many of which are narratively interesting and yield unique upgrades like weapons or efficiency modules you can juggle around to spec your fighter the way you like it.
The core issue with the game are the difficulty spikes: while the core loop of the game is fairly easy, considering how overpoweredd your ship will quickly become, the major set pieces against the occasional boss encounters and even some of the tutorials can become hair-pullingly hard.
Each of the three or four major boss fights can take upwards of 45 minutes to defeat (without retries that is), considering how insanely high their health pools are and how small and difficult to hit their weak spots. If that weren't enough, some of their attacks are borderline impossible to avoid while trying to also be on the offensive at the same time. They're just frustrating, but thankfully they offer mid-fight checkpoints to mitigate the aggravation.
It's also worth mentioning that this is a fairly buggy game: it won't affect most of your experience, but in my fifteen hours with it I ran into a handful of game-stopping bugs that forced a checkpoint restart: enemies didn't spawn a few times, preventing the mission from progressing, mission a couple missions wouldn't end despite completing the onjectives, one time the portal to go back from a side area disappeared, forcing me to fast travel from the map, and about halfway through the game the map itself bugged out, from then on showing my ship as the name of the location mentioned before. This fixed itself near the end of the game but was annoying all the while.
A flawed game for sure that needed a bit more balancing and polish, but definitely a must play for fans of this sparsely populated genre. If you were let down by Star Wars Squadrons you can safely gravitate towards this one.
Its densely told story follows Nara, a former high ranking member of a space cult bent on achieving the eponymous "Chorus", a forceful state of harmony among all sentient beings via the negation of free will, whose refusal spells doom for any apostate. When Nara is made to destroy a whole planet due to this policy, she starts questioning her indoctrination. Haunted by guilt, she embarks on a quest with her sentient ship Forsa (short for Forsaken, oof) to stop the Cult forever.
As you progress through the game, Nara unlocks a number of psionic abilities, which are really what sets the game apart from similar ones in this genre. These range from EMP bolts that disable starfighters to boosts to spear through enemies and even one to grab foes out of thin air (well, thin space) and throw them into objects. It's a cool gameplay twist, and it adds an extra layer of complexity to the starfighting genre, since each enemy requires a different weapon or power to effectively despatch.
The sense of speed is phenomenal as you turn on your afterburner and dart through asteroid caves and buzz a few inches from space stations with the precision the game controls allow. Fidelity isn't high if you stop and look closely, but the awesome vistas with their sense of gradeur and scale are breathtaking at times. It leaves you wishing that locations were a bit more diverse: if even just one of its sandboxes had been a planetary surface instead of just asteroid belts and space stations, it would have done a lot for its variety.
Combat is a lot of fun, proof be it that when the game's dynamic quest system decides to through an optional enemy encounter at you, you will go out of your way to engage in it more for fun than for the monetary rewards needed to upgrade your ship. Some of the large scale battles, especially the final one, are ridiculously epic in scope, and forgiving enough to be entertaining on top of that.
There are a ton of sidequests as well, many of which are narratively interesting and yield unique upgrades like weapons or efficiency modules you can juggle around to spec your fighter the way you like it.
The core issue with the game are the difficulty spikes: while the core loop of the game is fairly easy, considering how overpoweredd your ship will quickly become, the major set pieces against the occasional boss encounters and even some of the tutorials can become hair-pullingly hard.
Each of the three or four major boss fights can take upwards of 45 minutes to defeat (without retries that is), considering how insanely high their health pools are and how small and difficult to hit their weak spots. If that weren't enough, some of their attacks are borderline impossible to avoid while trying to also be on the offensive at the same time. They're just frustrating, but thankfully they offer mid-fight checkpoints to mitigate the aggravation.
It's also worth mentioning that this is a fairly buggy game: it won't affect most of your experience, but in my fifteen hours with it I ran into a handful of game-stopping bugs that forced a checkpoint restart: enemies didn't spawn a few times, preventing the mission from progressing, mission a couple missions wouldn't end despite completing the onjectives, one time the portal to go back from a side area disappeared, forcing me to fast travel from the map, and about halfway through the game the map itself bugged out, from then on showing my ship as the name of the location mentioned before. This fixed itself near the end of the game but was annoying all the while.
A flawed game for sure that needed a bit more balancing and polish, but definitely a must play for fans of this sparsely populated genre. If you were let down by Star Wars Squadrons you can safely gravitate towards this one.