Having a major soft-spot for anything space-related, I got the chance to review Chorus over the last week or so. In Chorus you play the role of Nara, who is a former warrior and defector of the evil cult of The Circle. Together with her sentient spaceship Forsaken you seek to rid the galaxy of The Circle.
Okay, let us start off with the core mechanics. The game entirely revolves around you flying and fighting in a spaceship. It feels sort of like a clone of any Star Wars related spaceship game, which is not a bad thing. The battles are fun and thrilling and Chorus’ drifting mechanic, although difficult to nail at first, is a great mechanic that makes for a lot of maneuverability in battles. From swarms of Faceless and space pirates in small ships, to massive cult-ships you need to destroy from the inside out, the game has a lot of baddies you and Forsa can blow into the deep void of space. Nara’s special abilities called Rites make for an interesting factor in the game as well and give you the ability to blow enemies to smithereens as you see fit. Customization options for Forsaken are limited to purely functional upgrades, ranging from different weapons to speed boosts and recharging your Rites faster.
The visual information is sometimes very annoying, with markers being barely visible, and the choice to only include very small, white triangles being a bit strange. Hell, I’ve also had things bug out and not show up at all if I initially pressed the scanning rite too early.
The story itself is nothing too special, but captivating enough to keep playing. Although characters, including Nara, feel somewhat two-dimensional often and “Nara out” gets so annoying. The conversations between Nara and Forsaken make for some interesting interactions whilst flying through the endless void of space; it’s a shame that every so often the conversations get interrupted, never to be heard again. The game lacks some variety, considering everything is a space battle, and it is a shame we don’t get to play as Nara on the ground. However, if you know how to do one thing well, it’s sometimes best to just focus on that, right? And they really know how to do space-battles well. Except for one boss-battle in which you had to do too many things with your right hand (Rite, boost and steer at once, I have five fingers…), for which I temporarily had to remap the controls, the battles are awesome. Somehow in the beginning there were slightly too few checkpoints, and later on they were just right. The game crashed on me once for some reason, and I lost well over twenty minutes of gameplay. Later on there was a checkpoint after every major step.
The game is basically an open world (open space?) game, in which you can freely fly around the maps and explore the vast nothingness that is space. The map is very large, and often feels even slightly too large, since even in sub-lightdrive it takes quite a while to go from A to B. There are quests and collectibles here and there, but maps often feel rather empty. But we’re talking space here. Space should be represented as large and empty without too much to do in asteroid fields, it’s not like there’s a pub around every asteroid in the Kuiper-belt either. What was slightly disappointing is the lack of variety in maps. Basically every area is another asteroid-field, and that gets somewhat monotonous from time to time. The views are stunning, and there are views of planets everywhere, yet no way to reach them. Some low-orbit or battles within the atmosphere of some planet would have been great.
In conclusion, aside from the few grievances, Chorus is a great game if you love the genre. The story is decent, the graphics stunning and the battles are amazing. Sadly the variety within battles, missions and especially the maps is a bit lackluster; which hurts the game somewhat. The controls are good and the mechanics with their Rites and drifting are a lot of fun. All in all this game just feels like one giant Star Wars space battle, and that’s not a bad thing at all.
