Criticisms

Good news, bad news

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? It is, though there are drawbacks to each of these good points, some fairly serious. Level design may force you to consider tactics, but the enemies often don’t play fair. Bad guys have incredible aim over long distances, along with either amazing natural eyesight or better implants than you can afford. At any rate, they picked me off in deep cover on many occasions. Snipers also tend to be positioned in hard-to-reach places on many outdoor levels. They strike almost at will, like a siphon of your health while you combat the immediate foes attacking on the ground. And as anyone who struggled through a certain level in the original Medal of Honor: Allied Assault knows, there is nothing more annoying than getting sniped in a shooter by an unseen enemy.


Even worse, you can’t snipe back. Backpack restrictions and the sheer size of the sniper rifle mean that you can’t fit it into your inventory unless you dump all the other rifles and submachine guns. And that’s not a good idea, since levels generally include a substantial indoor component where the slow-reloading sniper rifle is a serious liability. I get the feeling that Techland intends you to rely on weapons scavenged from slain enemies, though I found it tough to rely on this since it’s impossible to know what the bad guys will be carrying before starting a mission.

Of octopi and hand grenades

Artificial intelligence is spotty as well. Enemies often set up for long battles by taking cover behind crates and trees, though they also have regular brain cramps. Sometimes they don’t realize they’re being fired on, even when comrades drop dead right beside them. Other times they senselessly charge you. They never organize to attack, either. So when you’re outnumbered you can simply duck behind cover and creep out one side to blast a couple baddies, then creep out on the other to blast more. Adding more of a sense of hilarity to the proceedings is the rag doll animations. When bad guys die here, they typically throw themselves in the air, limbs flailing bonelessly like what you’d expect to see if you blew up an octopus with a hand grenade.

And multiplayer is pretty much a waste of time. Very few people are playing Chrome online at the moment, and the gameplay options are uninspired variants on done-to-death deathmatch and capture the flag. You can do better with about a dozen other multiplayer shooters out there, so there isn’t much point even going online with this one. Which is annoying, not so much because I really want yet another multiplayer shooter, but because the developers had to know that they couldn’t compete with the likes of Unreal Tournament online. So why not chuck all the effort needed to make the deathmatch mode and maps and do a cooperative mode instead? People are clamoring for more coop games these days, and you’d only need to find one other Chrome fan online to play the game this way.