Chromehound's is a strange beast of a game, in some ways good, in others, bad.
To start off, the models of the hounds (mechs) are of course amazingly detailed. There are many moving parts like pistons, joints, rotors and missile launchers that all make the hounds seem very realistic as if they could be made in real life. And finally this is a game that have explosions done right. No other game makes them look so real. I've been in some intense firefights at close range unleashing dozens of rockets, and machine gun fire while my opponent erupted into a blaze of ferocious and smoke that clogged up the whole screen. The combat visuals are such a tasty fiest for the eyes.
Night fighting is perhaps even more impressive as your hound's lights shine life-like onto other objects and flashes of tracer fire and explosions far away light up the sky. This really helps to make players feel that they are really in a real war zone.
The ugly side is that the environments are sparce and devoid of any life. I wouldn't say it's a big deal though since your attention is always focused on fighting other hounds.
Chromehound's tries to groom players for the online persistent war by providing a series of single player missions designed to train you in each of the different hound types (commander, soldier, scout, defender, sniper and heavy gunner). The characters and voice acting are pretty numb and the fake accents border on being racist they are so bad. The story elements are pretty weak but just enough to keep you mildly interested.
The really annoying part of single player though is how some of the missions are very poorly structured. Sometimes you are given almost no direction on what you are supposed to do. This usually results in you failing the mission for some specific reason that you won't know about until after many frustrating attempts. But all in all I faily enjoyed the single player missions because the action was pretty intense and there was a good variety of tasks to practice.
Before I talk about online I must mention that although the sound effects in the game are top notch, the music is absolutely putrid! I have no idea what the Japanese think is good music but the tunes in this game are horribly boring and depressing.
Now to the meat of this game, the online Neroimus war. This is a pretty cool concept but executed very poorly. The idea is that there is a persistent online world that you battle in. In order to play the game the way it was meant in a team based role, you are forced to join a squad (20 people max, 6 play at any one time). The leader picks an area of the map that is under attack and you may or may not end up fighting against other human opponents. Sometimes you're just fighting bots, other times humans and only 6 on each team. You need to be constantly communicating over the headset to co-ordinate your attacks and build hounds that compliment each other. If you don't play as a team, it's no fun and you will end up being someone else's b**** real fast.
But there are all sorts of annoying things in this game. For example, every time you go online you have to sit through a serious of info screens telling you what's going on in the war and who donated money. Surprisingly, every time someone donates money to their country, said country is surprised! Wow, you have to read this like 5 times every time you go online with no option to skip.
Starting up a game online especially outside of a squad can be pretty glitchy and time consuming and there have been a fair amount of server problems.
There is also this strange oversight of not having a quit button during SP missions. You have to actually self destruct by holding down the back button a few seconds to quit a mission. Stupid. And another stupid thing is that there is no crosshair in the 3rd person perspective making aiming extremely difficult when you don't want to use the weapon cam which often zooms in too much when you are fighting up close and personal.
The ability to create your own custom hound's is possibly the game's greatest strength. There are hundreds of parts to buy online and depending on how well you do in the squad missions determins how much money you get to spend on parts. The hound creator is pretty robust and satisfying tool to use and you can easily spend an hour or more at a time just tinkering around.
Ultimately, Chromehounds will end up being one of the few games that makes heavy use of Xbox Live's features to bring people closer togther online and I'm glad that so much effort has gone into giving the game lasting value online. But there are enough flaws to get in the way of the enjoyment of the game so that it just isn't as fun as it could have been.