Working in games press, I see a lot of gaming trailers. There’s not a super secret club with its own handshake, I just watch most trade shows and follow every publisher I can think of on Twitter, so I see a lot of the same bang bang run boom videos. Because of that, things generally start to feel a bit oversaturated, and it&rsquoꩵ;s hard for me to be impressed. During last year’s Xbox showcase, Chorus was one of very few rare games to get me to sit up and pay attention. Granted, the font made me think it was called Chorvus, but it seemed like the breakout game of the event to me. In the aftermath of the show, it was clear no one felt the same. After
p✅laying a few hours of Chorus during🤪 a preview event, I am sad to report that everyone else was right.
Chorus is fine. You pilot a ship around space, shooting at other ships. It’s a triple-A version of Galaga. I liked it well enough, but it did🌄n’t do anythingꦆ to inspire me to keep an eye on it for the full release, which is still slated for the vague window of 2021. With no firm date at the time of writing, there’s always a chance this gets pushed back.
There are a couple of things to note before diving in. First off, this is Chorus. It is not Chorus: An Adventure Musical✅. It’s probably not great that we have two very different games with very exactly the same names launching at a similar 🌺time, but until I become Queen of the Universe, I suppose I’ll have to live with it. If you’re wondering ‘which one is the David Gaider one?’, that would be the other one. The second thing to note is thanks to technical difficulties on my end, I did not reach the end of the preview. I played for four hours, completing five missions and just drifting through space, so that feels like enough time for me to offer my impressions, although there may admittedly be a bit more of the preview build I’m yet to see. Considering all five missions were the same ‘Galaga but 2021’ though, I doubt they were anything to write home about.
If you don’t know what Galaga is, you’re too young and I hate you. It’s an arcade game kind of like Space Invaders (I will assume you at least know that), but instead of y♔ou being on Earth as aliens descend to wreck the planet, both you and your foes are in spaceships, shooting at each other. There was a bit more to it, but that’s all you really need to know. Chorus is Galaga. It looks much nicer, but you begin in your ship, and are asked to fly to three different points in space. At two of these locations, you need to fight off other, smaller ships. These ships move faster and are more numerous, but are significantly weaker than you. It’s a bit chaotic and random, but eventually you kill them and the missions are done. The third location gives you the choice to fight or have the ship ❀join your crew - given that I was already a bit bored of just flying around and holding down shoot, I recruited them.
At this point, I started exploring. The universe was vast and empty - explorati🙈on is not particularly encouraged - but the dogfights were dull, while zipping around trying out the controls felt much more freeing. Strangely, despite the fact the human protagonist has a glossy, triple-A look that can be seen in the pause menu, the entire time I played was spent controlling the ship itself. I expect either that will change or we’ll at least see our hero - Nara, but so little is made of her I’d already forgotten her name - in cutscenes, but for a game with fairly rudimentary gameplay cycled through repetitive missions, the decision to cut back on galactic exploration in favour of character models doesn’t appear to be a smart one. It looks beautiful. I don’t think that’s enough.
Enough exploration, what little there was to be had. It’s time for another mission. Can you guess what happens in it? That’s right - dogfigꩲht city, baby. This one was a little different though. Rather than just firing potshots at tiny ships, two new enemies joined the fray - massive cruisers and shielded jets. At this point, Chorus went from repetitive to knuckle-poppingly difficult and chaotically irritating.
It wasn’t that the game was getting too hard. There was a difficulty spike, sure, but the worst part was the way the game presented it. In order to take out the huge cruisers, you have to ghost inside of them - think of Dishonored’s Blink, except spaceships - and shoot their control centres. To do this, you hold the B button. To skip the tutorial on this, you also hold the B button. Unfortunately, the mission starts with you heading directly for the cruiser with the tutorial prompt still playing on the screen. You need unnecessarily precise timing to cancel the tutorial and hold B for long enough to ghost inside, otherwise you crash into the cruiser and take a massive amount of damage. You can always fly away rather than try the hold B gauntlet, but it obviously♈ starts deliberately with you lined up precisely in front of the cruiser. Finding the right angle after that is tricky, because it often ghosts you behind a nearby ship instead of doing what you want it to.
Also, the cruisers need to be taken out first, otherwise you dead. You big dead. After that, ghosting behind the smaller ships works effectively, taking away the confusion of everyone zipping every which way. Ghost behind a shielded ship, however, and you just crash into the shield, doing massive damage to yourself and minimal damage to them. Once mor✱e, you big dead. If you laser away the shield, this is reversed and you can kamikaze them, but it’s difficult to tell where the ghosting is going to go.
The other missions after that followed a similar pattern, where taking out small ships was fine and taking out ships that required anything more complicated than shooting was held back by controls that do more harm than good. This preview was more mechanical than I would have liked it to be, but that’s because Chorus left me feeling nothing. There’s not much else I can do but describe the events as they h🌌appened, and explain why I didn’t like it. It’s not terrible. I can’t be mean about it. It’s triple-A Galaga, even if the studio itself is a relative indie, and it’s exactly what you might expect from that. You shoot things in a spaceship. That’s 𒁃kind of it. Unfortunately, it’s not even that fun. At least I can still play the real Galaga.