This is a great game that nobody played. Chrome is not flawless, but it’s just plain fun. There might be some pieces missing, but the most important stuff is done right. Chrome is a first-person shooter with a couple of important extra features. These features don’t sound like much until you actually get to play through them. You play as a mercenary/bounty hunter who travels across the galaxy rescuing hostages, recovering stolen equipment, and then getting in the middle of an intergalactic corporate struggle. The locales that you visit are not only beautiful, but they are huge and wide open. I can’t tell you how much I love those big open areas. You can easily spend an hour and a half or more on each mission, thanks to all the time that you spend creeping around in the forest, sneaking up on guard patrols or avoiding them altogether. Sometimes you find a sniper tower that you can use to snipe guys from half a mile away. The levels are very nonlinear and rarely seem like they are contrived or built just for you. Instead, it feels like you are actually infiltrating realistic bases and installations. It’s also great being able to play for an hour without seeing a loading screen. There are a lot of indoor areas too, but they aren’t as much fun to play in as the outdoor areas. Stealth ends up playing a big part in this game, and it ends up being surprisingly good. Even the pure stealth levels, which I normally hate in a non-stealth action game, are good. The outdoor areas have lots of trees and rocks to hide behind, and with the use of your binoculars or radar, you can avoid enemy patrols or pop them in the back of the head when you catch them by surprise. Once again, the big open areas are what allow you to do this. The weapons have a realistic feel to them. Automatic weapons can only be fired in bursts, since the kick to them will make them too inaccurate after a few bullets. Firefights can be pretty tough if you are in the view of more than a couple of enemies. That’s why cleverly taking on one at a time is necessary. That’s also where your cybernetic implants become a crucial part of the game. Chrome is not the first game to throw in special powers as a twist to the shooter aspect, but it succeeds where many others fail. They end up working like the force powers in the Jedi Knight games. All seven of your implants are useful, and they are well-balanced enough so that they don’t overpower you and make the game too easy. This is mostly due to your nervous system getting overloaded if you use them for too long. If you have three implants turned on, then you can only keep them on for a few seconds at a time. They all seem well thought out, instead of things that were just thrown in because they sounded kinda neat. The core gameplay is solid, so a lot of the other things that are good are bonuses. One of them is the storyline, which is a nice surprise (in spite of the bad voice acting). Another is the successfully implementation of rag-doll physics. This seems to be hit-and-miss in shooters lately, but here it’s great. Enemies seem to respond realistically, depending upon what weapon you shoot them with. A shotgun blast to the face produces a much more drastic rag-doll effect than a silenced pistol shot to the head. Bodies don’t dissolve away and disappear like they do in other shooters, and the bullet holes seem to hang around for a while. One great thing about Chrome is that in an era where action games seem to always end after 8 or 10 hours, it lasts more like 15-20. As I mentioned before, Chrome certainly has flaws. One of them is the enemy AI. It’s not bad but it’s unsophisticated. Enemies are too easy to kill with grenades, and they generally won’t use any advanced tactics to flush you out of hiding places. The worst part of the AI is when you throw a grenade and the guy yells “grenade!”, and then just stands there like an idiot until the grenade blows him across the screen. This ends up being the biggest problem in the indoor areas, since enemies kind of just stand there and won’t help out their comrades when you are killing them in the next room. The music for the game isn't very good either, and the voice acting can be really bad at times. Chrome has so many good parts that it’s easy to look past its bad parts. This is a very unique and high-quality shooter in its own right.
Gameplay: 6 (besides some annoying issues the game does display features that's rarely seen in other FPS like open world / multiple endings and great vehicular combat) Graphics: 10 Sounds: 7 Value: 8 (open world maps ... Read Full Review
Gameplay: I have a P4 2.8GHz, with 1mb ram and a 128mb NVIDIA graphics card. This game hardly ever lagged at all on me and when it id it was barley noticeable. The controls for the vehicles could have been improved a... Read Full Review
