Category: PC Gaming

Completed Chorus.
It’s quite a spectacular game, in the most direct sense. You’d rarely see more magnificent space battles as the backdrop of your exploits.
The final battle with “the Dragon” can get overwhelming a bit: swarms of nanomachines, space rays, and meteorites (what?) flying at you from all directions, while you need to chase the ever-rotating serpent. But thanks to checkpoints, it never gets to the point of being truly annoying.

The story is exactly what you’d expect: a Mass Effect, gather everyone together the beat the Cosmic Evil kind of story. But it’s well executed, in a classic sense.
Funny that although at the beginning, the game tried to force you to switch between weapons, by the end you can do fine with just the minigun.
And the final episode where you just spear through frigates is again, just spectacular.

The soundtrack of this game is just amazing.

As you get more skills, the game becomes more fluent and less annoying. The enemies that have impenetrable shields and set dozens of mines around them fall prey to the Jedi-lightning.
Despite the game having only three types of weapons, they still managed to have some variety with them. Miniguns can be replaces with slug throwers, which are slower, but pack more punch. And there’s an entire quest line dedicated to getting the Werewolf missile launcher and its upgrades, which, unlike other missile launchers, allows to ready a salvo of hard-hitting missiles.
There are a few annoying episodes. First is when you need to fight Faceless Swarms in a tight cave. You are expect to do so by spearing through them, but doing so in a cave is not the best of ideas.
Then when you replay Rasar’s memory, but without Rites. Dogfights without Jedi tricks in this game can be though.

Piloting is quite tricky, as enemy ships are very agile, frustratingly so. Luckily, since we play as Sith turned Jedi, we have an ability to teleport behind an enemy, alighting the reticle while doing so. Helps a lot during fights with the smaller enemies.
Speaking of bigger enemies, Wraiths started to appear during missions, which I guess are frigates or maybe corvettes, the game doesn’t specify, I think. The game also only half explains how to defeat those. First you hit the thrusters to disable other shields. Then you fly inside wrecking everything. That disabled the shields around the tractor. Then you destroy the reactor and fly out as quickly as you can, since it is hinted that the explosion can take you out, although I haven’t stayed yet to validated. All that while invincible until the end turrets are hitting you.

The game world is divided into half a dozen zones, each an asteroid field, basically. The zones are quite wide, but not very deep, although there’s still some verticality. The main missions usually have multiple objectives, which you can do in any order. Then there are sidequests and even some random encounters. Can this be called a space-sim-RPG mix?
To add to the metaphor, equipment comes in “sets”, like the “green” items in some Diablo games. If you install 2 or 4 items, you’ll get bonuses. Quite significant, I must say: seeping enemy shields, for example.

That’s the game I was always confusing EverSpace with. And there are some good reasons for that. It’s also a modern arcade space-sim, for one.
But it’s very narrative driven, unexpectedly so. Nara, the protagonist, served the Cult, and even destroyed a planet with all its population once, which torments her. She has a sentient ship, Forsaken, which she calls Forsa, and the ship has a score to settle with the Cult too.

As I mentioned, I respect space sims that don’t just threat all spaceships as fighters. Here you’re quickly given a capital ship to pilot for a short while, and it’s interesting. It does have turrets, although not autonomous ones. But you can fire them in any direction, not just the direction the ship is facing, which makes a lot of sense.

Like in many other games, there’s the shields-and-hull mechanic. Some weapons are better against shields, some are better against hull, so you need to switch all the time. But here they changed the role of missiles a bit. Missiles are used against armoured enemies.
The mechanic Chorus leans heavily into is drift. And I’m not a fan. In some games, you have the inertia system, where you can gain velocity then spin in any direction and still follow your path. Here, by default there is no inertia, you fly where you point your nose. Unless you enable drift. This is a nice system, and in other circumstances I may have even liked it. But the beginning of the game is full of ancient temples with narrow corridors and regenerating locks, that you need to hit in a short period of time while drifting. And this isn’t fun at all.