Chorus

[Maryokutai]

I thought this was intriguing since its initial reveal (back when we all thought it was called Chorvs) so I picked it up recently and played through most of it during my holiday break. I'm one and a half steps away from finishing it, so this might be as good a time as any to make a topic about it. Haven't seen anyone mention it here so it'll probably be a dead topic, but I absolutely love the game and feel like I owe it to the developers to at least put something about it on the web.

 

I'm not too experienced with this whole space opera genre and I think the last somewhat comparable game I played was Strike Suit Zero. But this genuinely feels like a bold new step for these kind of games. It's not a linear, mission-driven game, which is what I expected, but it's designed like an RPG almost. You visit a certain amount of areas that function as hubs for main and sidequests, three of them medium-sized, the rest a bit smaller. Because space is large and dark exploration is very streamlined: a button press reveals items and money pickups scattered across the world and holding the button unlocks points of interests on your map, i.e. the aforementioned sidequests, for example. Completing those usually rewards you with new weapons and equipment, hence why I say this very much feels like an RPG. But just like the size of its world, the stuff you find doesn't overwhelm you. I completed every sidequests I came across and still only have six different laser weapons, for example. Rather, everything you have fulfills a certain function, so mix-and matching for the best combination is key here. While it does seem like putting on extra hull energy is a good thing, getting hit in Chorus usually means you already made a mistake. So I went to max out my energy meter and recovery instead, to be able to use more special moves.

 

And it's here where you can see just how forward-thinking this game is designed. Usually dogfighting games are 50% shooting at enemies and 50% turning your ship/plane around to find an enemy to shoot. Chorus just gives you all the power you need to reduce that downtime to almost zero and it's just wonderfully executed. Those special moves I mentioned (called Rites in the game) are the key here, particularly the first two: one allows you to instantly teleport behind and enemy in your line of sight to flank them but the most important tool is the so-called Drift. By holding a button, you can freely turn around your ship in any direction while maintaining your current trajectory. So instead of flying straight at a stationary target to destroy a turret and then rinse and repeat until all of them are gone, you can just plot a course alongside them, drift at 90° and shoot them all in one fell swoop. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I'll put a poorly played little clip at the end of this post just to show it off, but the feature is so flexible it's really the one thing that turned this game from a very good game into an excellent one.

 

Story-wise it's a modern take on the Dancing with the Wolves formula, but the lore is rather interesting and the two main characters - the pilot, who has a special gift (lore explanation for the usage of her "Rites") and her sentient ship. The ship in particular is really well realised, floating somewhat between the robotic AI of something like HAL and the basically human-like portrayal of the concept in Cortana. It's a very unorthodox pairing but really well realised. I particularly enjoyed how both characters responded to stuff happening during the action scenes, with the ship being surprisingly blood-thirsty or how both of them finish each other sentences the stronger their bond grows.

 

Definitely low-key blown away by this. The excellent gameplay, interesting lore and overall tone and atmosphere (somewhat channeling Remedy at times) just make for a superb combination. I'd probably have to nitpick to find stuff I didn't like, like dialogue being cut off way too often when random encounters spawn (should have looked into that Uncharted 4 tech) or how there can be a tad too much flying around in the beginning and towards the end (think Wind Waker, but at lightspeed) but other than that this is just great. Anyway, here's the simple drift clip to conclude:

 

 

And for the record, and despite being the only one here still playing on last-gen, this runs absolutely fine on Xbox One and probably on PS4 as well. But I'll definitely go back to it when I have a new system to see just how much it improves by running at 60fps.

[HandsomeDead]

It's definitely on my list, I like what I see of it.

[Maryokutai]

Bumping this a bit so everyone remembers to download it on the 7th.

 

I also had a chance to try out the current-gen version of it, so to speak. Ray-Tracing Mode seems unusable. It doesn't look noticeably better than Quality Mode but adds a significant input delay to the game which renders it unplayable in my opinion. My guess is that they just put it in for people who like Photo Mode, which is a good enough reason I suppose.

 

Quality Mode is essentially a prettier version of what I experienced on Xbox One, with a stable 30fps that's not optimal but good enough to play through.

 

Performance Mode is where it's at though. For me that almost feels like a new game so it's a genuinely good reason to play through it again on that setting at some point. I'd definitely reccomend picking that one, the quick turns during drifting and teleporting just feel a lot better at 60fps and the improved responsiveness is also very noticeable.

[HandsomeDead]

I'm towards the end of this now since I played it a lot over last week.

 

I agree with what's already said about the dogfighting, it's so much more swift due to the drift and all the very powerful abilities you have.  They do try to make enemies more dangerous and give them a variety of attacks that stop you from easily owning everything but it still makes it a little on the easy side and while I haven't tried to harder difficulties I don't think just boosting the damage enemies do to you would make it harder in an interesting way.  But credit where it's due there is a strong attempt at making the combat scenarios different and interesting as the game goes on, especially when the large enemy ships come into it.

In fact playing this currently made me really underwhelmed with what was shown on Starfield recently because it seems to be doing all the stuff that Chorvs really goes out of its way to avoid.

 

I'm not sure how I feel about the structure of the game being more open world and flying around doing missions and occasionally simple random events happen.  Maybe a different approach to the progression would have been preferable because it feels pretty basic for the first couple of hours but the areas aren't that big and can be travelled fairly quickly so I can't say I'm too bothered by it.

 

The story has been okay.  It's fairly typical sci-fi / fantasy in that you have these two groups at war who are ideologically apposed and it does get to exploring it all a little as well as personal and ethical stories that are sometimes blunt but other times better.  I think the personal stuff is a hard sell due to the nature of the game where you're always in a ship and these events are told through telecommunications and it's not the best delivery method but it's there.

 

Overall I like the game quite a lot though.  It does give this genre of game a kick up the arse and is successful with most of it so it's nice to see when a largely ignored genre gets a good dose of innovation.

[Maf]

I tried the demo a few months ago but couldn’t work the drift mechanic out. Since it’s ‘free’ now I’ll give it another go. Maybe I understand it if I play it more