When it was first announced, the chorus aroused my interest, and then-silence. Once we finally got the media preview (including some content of the game itself), I felt very cold. Maybe I should listen to those memories, not even memories from a few months ago, rather than stand up and review them. The complete chorus experience hardly warmed me up.

The story of the game revolves around a girl and her spaceship. Nara is an elder and a top magic fighter pilot of the space sect Circle. She and her artificial intelligence warrior, the Forsaken, won a huge victory for this. However, when Nara opened a bleeding gap in reality on Nimika Prime as punishment and left a billion souls forgotten, she had a short "Are we the bad guys?" moment and ran away. Seven years later, as a scavenger for the independent Enclave, she saw Circle attack her new home. Nara must fight back, and to do this, she needs her mysterious ritual and the return of the forsaken.

There, I save you from having to watch the long introduction of Chorus. The game lacks elegance in terms of rhythm and storytelling, just lack of scroll control-this is a strange choice for space fighter games. However, the narrative is not complicated, nor is it wrapped in suffocating deep knowledge. It is actually very basic and provided in the least interesting way.

98% of games are there

But when talking about space fighter games, this neither exists nor exists, because its main driving force will be fighting in the interstellar void, right? In most cases, despite how strange it is to have no scroll control in a fighting game built around flying. At least, you can easily roll the barrel by simply pressing A or D.

The reason for this lack of control fidelity can be explained by the existence of etiquette. In addition to the basic senses, Nara began to use one of them after burning other senses, and they were all related to fighter movements. Drift is the first she relearned, and it allows you to do just that. There is no air or friction in the space to prevent drifting, only your physical body and metal parts can withstand how much gravity. Most games give up this and use approximate aerial duels, so drifting is the closest approach to more realistic vacuum fighting art.

Chorus mainly wants you to use it for passing puzzles, because it allows the forgotten to turn in place without changing the course. There is even an enemy battleship with a very fragile radiator at the bottom, and you are likely to drift and shoot. But they left the end of the radiator groove open, so I chose regular blasting.

The cutscene version uses a radiator in exchange for the ability to launch Soviet terrorist drones

So you can say that drift can be activated immediately, without any energy or cooling costs, and is a partial replacement for rolling. However, a larger argument against this aerial maneuver is the existence of hunting rituals, which are essentially jump buttons. Although it is used for some puzzles in the game, in battle, it will teleport you behind the enemy closest to the line of sight. Smash that LMB and blow them out of the sky, no skill is required.

However, jumping consumes energy, and at the end of the game, the combat encounter will become so annoying that you will either use some later rituals to deal with their peculiarities, or end up with a battleship that only hangs in one place. fighting.

As you progress in the game and explore the open map, you will have the opportunity to improve your abilities by finding ritual aspects in the wild. They can be quite important and transformative, for example, the storm ritual turns into a chain of lightning, or the amount stripped from the enemy makes your shield overcharge.

There are two modes of ritual. A simple push to scan the area for loot, enemies, and things directly related to your mission. Press and release it to scan the area for new tasks and points of interest.

But before we discuss our enemies, let us first turn our attention to our weapons. Forsaken can instantly switch between Gatling gun, laser and missile launcher. Technically, they are suitable for different situations. Gatling guns are good for health, but bad for shields and armor (aka other health). The lasers peel off the shields imposingly, but their rate of fire is very poor, and you need to aim carefully. In theory, missiles are good for health and armor, but their slow speed and lack of lock mean they only pose a threat to targets large enough to have armor and fixed turrets.

In practice, the more rituals you get, the less likely you are to use guns other than Gatling, especially in the storm ritual-more like a ritual to kill them with lightning-immediately strip off the shield And send the enemy ship to roll over uncontrollably, which may cause interesting fatal crashes.

Nara left the ship just to get the cutscenes for Rite.

Oh. Unlike mysterious ritual upgrades, weapons and modifications (you can equip three at the same time) usually follow the "newer the better" model. Through modification, it is mainly boring things, such as increasing the damage to the shield by a percentage, speed or Gatling damage. Something close to a transformative upgrade comes in the form of a suit, in which you can use two or four pieces of equipment with the same label. But even so, those people are so weak that they are not worth the effort.

So, all in all, Chorus is a magical space game with fewer actual magical miracles than Destiny, which is the defending champion of "a magical space game with gameplay that can never cash the legendary check".

This applies very well to the enemies you encounter. Basically, there are three types, and they may be updated as the game progresses. First of all, you have some clumsy little warriors, just Gatlin Chow Chow. Then you will get a warrior with a shield, which reminds you that lasers also exist. The last category is the annoying armor block, which can obtain an invincible directional shield when stationary. Fight with them only when they are moving to save your energy.

Visually, these enemies showcase Chorus' most creative bankruptcy. Not only are they boring, they are also visually terrible. Their models and skins feel like things that would appear in the moving bullet hell game-bright yellow cockpit flat glass, a few polygons provide a shape similar to a space fighter, and two colors: black represents metal, which is about rare The bigger ones are reminiscent of the RTS game faction colors in the early 2000s. Chorus developers must think that putting them in the same close-up in the cutscenes with the fully fleshed PC game protagonist Forsaken is not at all harsh.

This photo is brought to you by the magic of the in-game photo booth. Look at that ridiculous thing.

So those are Circle’s ships. Where's the pirate? Oh, they got the same boat, but they used neon green instead of red, and maybe some spikes were added to avoid standing out in the cybergoth carnival. At least when the Faceless (Void Demon worshiped by Circle) entities appear, they politely use some of their expertise to spread some nonsense of crystal mashups.

But what about your allies and civilians? Well, these prove that the Chorus developers read the Standard Human Spaceship TV Tropes article and said "I don't understand." Allies fly various Star Trek Federation rejections and counterfeit products, all colors are gray and light green. The fighting may have a toothpaste green style to show the faction color. Any ally who should be fast and dangerous will drive a Streamline Moderne RV equipped with a jet engine-every one of them.

They can at least give different names to the largest civilized ships, instead of having two freighters named "Nejet" at once.

By the way, in a side mission, you will find a ship corroded by Faceless energy. It has a history of hundreds of years and is earlier than Yuan. It is still the same RV.

But the design of "We didn't try anything, we all had no choice" did not end there. Are you familiar with the work of a Dahir Insaat? This is an engineering company founded by a Russian engineer, inspired by his own engineering wisdom, completely divorced from reality. One of his suggestions is to open a drive-through supermarket; that is, you drive around the aisle and dangle outside the window to pick up groceries.

This idea is 100% accepted by Chorus World, but it applies to spaceships. It creates an environment where people rarely get out of the damn thing. All meetings are conducted by everyone flying to one place. The interior of any important space station can be accessed by spacecraft. The huge round battleship is also strangely filled with space for fighter jets to fly around. There are some terminals where you can invade by flying at close range.

Personally, I question the wisdom of having a discrete terminal, you have to drive your boat next to it, just like you order burgers and fries while driving

I think this helps to save the animation budget, because only Nara and the Great Prophet have real bodies, and Nara only appears outside the ship in the dream cutscene, where she overcomes some inner weaknesses to request a ritual.

Apart from this crazy idea, the Chorus space station is the most boring thing that humans can still place in a space game. There are some attempts to make the space look habitable, some civilian ships fly back and forth, but you can’t interact with them other than crashing into them. Even the station and the installation itself are just a mixture of gray and sometimes yellow rectangles and some holographic advertisements to decorate them.

This is a game about fighting a real magic cult as a space fighter pilot who is guided by magic. Why doesn't it look like it?

The Circle religiously insists on the necessity of restricting holographic banner ads

Genesis Rising has a completely strange pseudo-Christian worship, with a living spaceship and a body station with a face, and the enemy in the game is just a standard human spaceship, which exhibits a weirdness and originality that Chorus can't match. Instead, there is a huge hologram at the entrance to the spacecraft of the cult's holiest site where the Great Prophet used space fighter jets to perform rituals, with the words "Attention! Forbidden Zone" written on it as if I entered a warehouse.

I expect something more like Warhammer 40,000, which tends to be weird and really crazy about the concept of the magical future space worship. Of course, some people would say "Oh, the cathedral and the fabric flags are trite", but they were immediately wrong because Chorus did not try to do anything original. This is a game that reminds me of freelancers in 2021, but in all respects it is not as good as a game of decades ago.

The most frustrating thing is not that I have to invest more than ten hours in this stinking story, but that this story has some potential. Of course, it is influenced by rhythm, lack of character, clumsy writing, and possibly only four unique portraits of people. But there is a core of the idea. In Nara's struggle to face and accept her path in order to reach the choir, Maru and the Great Prophet sought a mysterious and harmonious state that they failed to grasp because of their own failure.

You didn’t quote anyone, you didn’t feel funny about it, why did you use quotation marks, those are literal faceless energy aaaaaaaaaargh

Then you will notice the quotation marks around words and terms, something English speakers would never do, and then the clumsiness of all this immediately becomes more meaningful.

In the end, Chorus was not a complete failure, mainly because it was a relatively stable game, but got stuck in some dramatic magnifications. It is a mixture of bizarre game design choices, lack of imagination, and people not realizing that spaceship models that can be used in games are spending a lot of money on CGTrader. This is like anti-echo, a game about a girl and her AI. It is built entirely around a single character model and some endlessly re-skinned terrain tiles. I wrote five review articles just to tell the world to enter It is made by pure craftsmanship. It was a ruthless display of pure creativity and motivation. Chorus is closer to publishing guess_ill_die.jpg without even cropping the iFunny column.

Chorus is a game, it won't crash your desktop, but it's just a mobile shell with only traces of soul left.