I COULD HAVE SWORN I TURNED ON MY PC
A Review of The Chaos Engine
by Michael Allen
It's been a long time since I played any Nintendo. I remember fondly the misspent days of my youth, plopped in front of my brother's TV (he had the Nintendo), my thumbs completely numb from repetitive strain injuries, and my eyes full of mushrooms and fireballs and walking turtles. Of course, I was playing "Top Gun" at the time; the hallucinations were always part of the fun.
Playing The Chaos Engine, written by the Bitmap Brothers and published
by WarnerActive, was so much like a Nintendo flashback that I kept
glancing down at my joystick wondering, "Where the heck are my Select
and Start buttons?" And it is, unfortunately, a bad flashback. I
have nothing against Nintendo or Sega games per-se; for what they
are, they can be enjoyable. Unfortunately, they are not what I expect
or desire on my PC.
The premise behind the Chaos Engine sets the player in the next
century. A mad scientist creates a huge machine, the Chaos Engine,
and predictably enough it gets out of control and starts to mutate
all the humans and animals around it. The player gets to pick from six mercenaries
(why mercenaries? I don't know, and the game fails to elaborate) to go
and try and blow up the mad device.
Along the way,
they pick up treasure (of course, all big bad mutants carry silver and
gold on their person, why wouldn't they?), get power-ups for their
various weapons, and generally blow up a lot of stuff.
The gameplay itself consists of one of the standard overhead Nintendo
views of your characters, sort of a simplified Ultima VII. You walk
around, shooting anything that is not your partner, trying to reach
the exit to the next level. One nice touch about the game is that you
do get a partner, even in one-player mode, and the computer is pretty
smart about attacking and defending itself.
After five minutes or so,
though, the game's weaknesses begin to point themselves out. For
instance, there seem to be only a set number of "columns" and "rows"
on the screen where the characters and monsters can move. This can be
particularly annoying if you are trying to dodge a monster's shot and
find that you can't wiggle out of the way. The graphics are another
disappointment: nothing new, and even the VGA seems poor.
There are technical problems with the Chaos Engine as well. The game
has an infuriating habit of only letting you use the joystick to move
and select items in menus.
I expect that games will let me use arrow
keys and return to select and choose options if I so desire. The
sound tends to come in and out during gameplay with my SB 32 AWE;
while the music kept on going, my explosions were silent.
Finally, I guess my biggest gripe about the Chaos Engine is that there is nothing new or exciting in it. There have been better games of this type in the past; the Chaos Engine adds nothing to the genre. Only if you are a die hard fan of these Nintendo-type games would I recommend plunking down your bucks.
Gamer's Zone Scorecard
| Product: |
The Chaos Engine |
| Company: |
WarnerActive
|
| Cost: |
n/a |
System Requirements:
IBM PC-Compatible 386/25 or better
At least 2MB of RAM, 600K Conventional
1.5MB Hard Drive Space
2x CD-ROM drive (for CD-ROM only, of course)
MS-DOS 5.0 or higher
VGA Graphics card
Sound Blaster, Roland, Ad-lib supported
Breakdown:
Fun Factor 2
Graphics 2
Sound 2
Interface 1
Replayability 2
Overall Score:
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