E3 06: Chrome 2 Impressions

LOS ANGELES--2003's Chrome was a futuristic first-person shooter starring a character with the best hero name in human history, Bolt Logan. Logan adventured as a mercenary in a universe where corporations vied for control of an element known only as "chrome." Developer Techland's follow-up, Chrome 2, seems to be heading in a slightly different direction with its mythos. While Chrome 2 still takes place in a similarly futuristic era, you don't play as Logan again. Rather, you're a solider in the military of the future--but not just any soldier. See, in this era, the dead aren't necessarily dead. When you die, a procedure can be performed to take your consciousness and transfer it into a new body. Sound familiar? Maybe that's because it's basically the plot to the 1992 sci-fi campfest Freejack, although here, you don't get to play as Emilio Estevez, and Mick Jagger isn't trying to kill you. Here, once the procedure is done to you, you're forced to pay off the cost with five years of military service. And if the demo of the game we saw at E3 2006 is any indication, perhaps death might be a more reasonable proposition, given what you'll be in for.

The core gameplay concept behind Chrome 2 (apart from the fact that it is a first-person shooter, first and foremost) is that your soldier can upgrade his body in a whole host of ways. The game aims to include around 200 types of weapons, but even outside of standard upgrades, you'll actually be able to straight-up steal other people's bodies when required. One scenario we saw during our demo was a situation where a specific NPC had access to something we needed. After blasting our way through a group of other enemies in an archetypal first-person-shooter scenario, we happened upon the target NPC. After hitting him with a stunning weapon of some kind, we were then able to walk up to him and transfer ourselves into his body. Doing this gave us access to everything of his, including his weapons and abilities.

You won't just be shooting scads of grunt enemies in Chrome 2. One example we saw of the larger-scale enemies in the game was a giant walker creature that towered hundreds of meters in the air. This walker could create a lot of destruction in the environment, and not even just with its various gun turrets attached to its assorted parts. Wherever the walker stepped, it would completely obliterate any trees or other objects in the path of its foot. According to Techland, none of this is scripted, and all this environmental damage will happen in real time.

Not much has been said about Chrome 2's additional features beyond its single-player campaign, except that it will include multiplayer for up to 64 players in multiple modes. Techland very much wants Chrome 2 be a big game, both in gameplay scope and in feature set, so if they make good on that aim, Chrome 2 could be a good one to look out for when it is released. The game is currently without a US publisher, but with the last two Chrome games finding their way to North American shelves, it seems like a good bet that this one will make it out here, too. We'll be sure to bring you more on Chrome 2 as it becomes available.